Ding dong, after binging some threads here, I found the environment and discussion up my alley, so I wanted to share some things that I’ve been playing or put on some lists that fit in here.
For now I’m bringing up House of the Dying Sun:
It is an excellent, extremely focused dogfighting game that I found so insanely competent at what it wants and does. It somehow is simultaneously well known and somewhat forgotten when space dogfighters come up and it’s even missing in this years old thread.
I’ve picked the game up after revisiting a bit Freespace 1/2 (and ports and mission packs and all) and just felt immediately comfortable with House of the Dying Sun. The sound design is staggeringly good, the design and UI is great and the game feel is just so very good. If you want to feel like a predatorial special ops pilot to zip in for an ambush, nuke the traitors out of existence and jump out for a quick getaway before the artillery arrives, then this is the game to play. I personally enjoyed that the engagements were very quick and the difficulty is well adjustable to feel comfortable and engaging at the same time.
The game ain’t long, but it ain’t expensive either. Supposedly works alright with HOTAS and VR and TrackIR and what not. I’ve played M+KB so ymmv.
Welcome MioMoto! Also we did discuss the game here several times (it’s in my backlog), and here’s a good defense of the game here by tomchick against a lot of the people in this thread who didn’t like it.
Turns out searching and flying over the last 2000-or-so replies didn’t help.
Thanks for the welcome everyone! I’ve stumbled upon here when looking for more recent Wizardry 8 clones that isn’t a certain kind of big booba anime.
On matters of personal opinion, I’m feeling for years now not really spoken to with all the events and game shows and trailer releases and so on. Either I’m passing the age of the target audience of my interest in releases is waning (or both, or what have you). I resonante with your linked post and partially because I’ve stopped interacting in any means (be it talking about or watching videos/reviews/streams) of Games that I intend to play eventually. I think a reinforcing factor for that behaviour came from just going entirely blind into Outer Wilds.
Anyway, my current plan is to build up a proper modular (hotas/dual-) flight stick setup and once I feel it’s comfortable for me, lease out a VR headset (I mean, getting a headset for a month with shipping costs factored in is a tenth or so of what a new device costs that I would use barely.) For example am I looking to finish Star Wars Squadrons that I bought not long after it came out and realized that I just save it for doing it in VR eventually.
You’re the Space Game Junkie with the extensive Steam Curator list, right? Thanks for all the effort!
I’ve recently found your list a good orientation for less mainstream-y sci-fi games. On the same note, I’ve recently found out that the “what your steam friends reviewed” very helpful in finding good rarely discussed games with virtually no marketing budgets.
If you’re looking for a high adrenaline, high speed game with good dogfighting and kind of military porn then it’s a good contender. It has very short engagements, which remind me so much of Freespace. You get a short outline, you’re part of a war effort, you get mid-band radio distortion of other engaged pilots, the ship beeps and bloops to let you know of important events in the cockpit and the UI elements go mostly out of your way to keep you focused on piloting.
I’d like to reiterate how this game makes you feel like a predator. In and out most missions won’t last longer than 5 minutes but that makes it just so competent in my eyes.
I enjoyed what I played of Chorus before it left game pass. It just left recently but it’s on sale for $10 this week, and you get the PC and Xbox versions for that. I think I’ll bite.
I’ve heard that later in the game the ship talks to you, but I haven’t gotten that far, I think I only got about 5 hours into it.
I thought Chorus was a lot of fun, I didn’t expect a whole lot and it exceeded those expectations. It’s not a huge game and is fairly linear in its progression - the “levels” or I guess solar systems are fairly large, but you’ll progress through them basically one at a time until the final boss. But I do think it’s a fun ride and worth checking out.
I was talking with a dear friend who is into a FMV streaming kick recently, and I brought up some games, amongst which Terminus which had just popped from my memory. I said I remember FMV cutscenes although I didn’t trust my memory.
He was looking for videos and he found eventually one (remarkably few of them), which he linked me, and upon clicking it, I was blessed by the familiar voice of our own Brian XD Of course, why didn’t I guess it even before clicking it.
Thanks for your archiving efforts, Brian: I then wished some other genres had been blessed with people as dedicated as you.
With Final Upgrade have engaged in combat yet with other factions? Are they passive until you do something to them, or do they start to engage once you reach a certain level? I am close to running out of systems I can take without going into their territory. I guess I should try flying through their system and see how f I can bypass.
I wish you could rotate blueprints/modules/buildings instead of just mirroring vertically or horizontally. Instead you have to make your own blueprint if you want to build something out horizontally from the station (unless I completely missed it). I need to spend more time figuring out the blueprints because apparently you can modify them.
Overall, it has been entertaining. I imagine it is going to get a lot more complicated coming up with production lines for some of the higher tier techs, especially with the 2000 tile limit for a station.
I’m not really good at the game yet. I have a 75M population roughly, but my machine energy consumption like 300% because of a lot of idle production. I’ll set up a dedicated production chain to satisfy some colony order, and then it will be idle once that is satisfied. Instead I should probably look at some generalized fabrication setup where resources get transported there, and things made as needed. I haven’t tried the sorters in the game which would probably be needed for that kind of setup. I should probably make more use of the space teleporters as well.
I have uranium energy online for my power needs, which means I can cut back on my carbon energy production, and use that for something else. I should kill off the little oil energy production I had to start with as well. I figured out the blueprint modification. You can’t get there from the modules screen, but you can get to the modules to modify them from the blueprints screen. So that helped, plus now I’m using that to design a layout instead of doing it on the build screen. I built my first combat ship at a shipyard I built in a void last night, but still haven’t fought anyone. It is strange that you can build a station in a void, but apparently can’t in an asteroid sector.
I turned off machine energy consumption scaling pretty quickly. The game wants you to remove production capacity that you’re not actively using in order to remain below the threshold and I’m really not interested in doing that. I much prefer the factorio approach of “things taking too long? Build more capacity!”
It’s a fun game, although I quit after beating the green enemies. I couldn’t muster the energy to build up another thirty worlds worth of production chains. Custom blueprints helped somewhat and I probably should have used more of them.
This game just got full release. The demo is the full game. I played 3 minutes so far, but it seems like a really well polished and interesting hard sci-fi space game. I think I want to buy it just to support people making this kind of game.
Giving Science its Due
Tired of having more Fiction than Science? Here you will find lasers are not visible without a medium, sound does not move through the void of the empty space and every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Thrusters eject gas that heats up and pushes away objects, your reactor is cooled by propellant flowing through it and radiators glow when you pump heat into them.
There are no energy shields, teleporters and Heisenberg compensators. No lightspeed, no blasters, and no artificial gravity. Instead, we have fission reactors, thermal rockets, ion thrusters and centrifugal gravity. You’ll have hard decisions to make, with no “best” equipment to answer every need.
All technologies are real and there is no technobabble. But it’s still a game and one that is fun to play.
