kane_magus: (Default)


It's about time. X4 fans have been wanting the Boron expansion since before Cradle of Humanity and Tides of Avarice, hell, maybe even before Split Vendetta. (I didn't get X4 until after SV was out, so I don't know for sure if that was the case, but it wouldn't surprise me.)

The trailer music is, of course, based on one of the best tracks from the previous games.

Looks like they opted on just having the Boron wearing floaty suits and keeping everything else the same, which I guess makes way more sense than doing what would have been accurate lore-wise, i.e. having all the Boron ships/stations completely filled with water and making all the other races have to deal with that.
kane_magus: (Default)
In X4 Foundations, one of the mission givers, during a bit of random banter, talks about the "legend of the Space Duck of Namek." The Space Duck is totally a thing from Dragonball Z Abridged.
kane_magus: (Default)

"If you were forced, what video game world would you like to be trapped in?"



Well, if it depended on how I play the game, I would pick The Sims (probably The Sims 3). I would be able to garden and fish to make food that confers immortality. Or I could learn witchcraft and alchemy to make potions for the same (among many other things). Also, I could write a full novel in a day or two, and then have every one of them be published for guaranteed income (for the six weeks [The Sims 3] or 20 days [The Sims 4] or so that they bring in money before it goes away forever), making anywhere from like §15 at starting out to up to §13,000 per book per pay period ( depending on the game, daily [TS4] or weekly [TS3]). And that's just if I wanted to be a writer. I could also fairly easily try my hand at any of the other career paths, as well. Unlike in real life, getting a job in the world of The Sims is as simple as dialing a telephone or reading a newspaper, after all. And after half a year or so, if even that long, I'd have more money than I'd ever need.

However, if it was based on how other people play the games... eh... maybe The Sims wouldn't be such a great choice, after all... >_>;

Otherwise, I might say X3: Albion Prelude, given that it is the game in which I've spent by far the most time in real life. It's not necessarily safe, but it's probably the most profitable, especially for once I'd made enough to buy a big enough (and slow enough) personal ship that I didn't have to worry so much about dying due to the poor AI piloting (which, if I were there IRL I'd probably never use) crashing me into an asteroid or something. Also, if you avoid the big storylines, you can play this game entirely passively, without having to fire a single shot (or, later, if you have to because one of your factories is being attacked or something, you can just send in remotely controlled ships to blow up any aggressors while you, personally, sit completely safe a dozen sectors away).

Beyond that... I don't know. Stardew Valley maybe (and even though I haven't really played it myself, I'd figure that Harvest Moon would be similar)? Or perhaps Animal Crossing? In any case, I'd be looking for something casual, in which it's fairly easy to become rich (even without cheating), and without having to fight all the time (or at all), but still with plenty of interesting things to see and do.
kane_magus: (kanethumb1)
If you ever wanted to try the X series but didn't want to have to use Steam to do it, well now you can get it on GOG.com. And on top of that, it's even on sale for 75% off at the moment, which means that the entire series (minus X Rebirth, but that's no big loss[1]) is available on GOG.com right now for a little over $10 (or else it's 50% off each game individually, if you didn't get the entire series at once).

Just to note, I am still playing X3: Albion Prelude (with currently 988 hours into that game alone, according to Steam, not even including all the hours I'd previously put into the earlier games), to this very day in fact (meaning I literally just quit playing it only a few minutes ago, then opened Feedly to see this deal), so yeah, I can definitely recommend it, as I already have many times in the past.

[1] - With that said, however, I've been hearing that X Rebirth itself has been polished up into an actually halfway decent state nowadays as well, so whenever the next big 4.0 update comes along, I may give Rebirth another try. And, apparently, there's a whole new game coming at some point as well. Hopefully, this new game will be the true X4 that Rebirth definitely was not.
kane_magus: (The_Sims_Medieval)
For anyone who might have wanted to try the X series that I've talked about so much, but didn't want to pay for it, well, if you have Steam, then you can try it for free until tomorrow 1pm PST (4pm EST). Also, it's on sale at 66% off until Monday. If you end up wanting to buy them, I'd say get the SuperBox rather than getting them individually. While I can easily recommend the earlier games in the series (which are all in the SuperBox), I can't really say the same for X Rebirth (which is not), though. Rebirth you could safely skip and not be missing much of any value.
kane_magus: (The_Sims_Medieval)
In the past, I made a few posts about the X series of space-trading PC games, and in those I mentioned more than once that I was looking forward to the, at the time, still unreleased X Rebirth. Then, I never mentioned it again. This is a good reason why that is the case. I bought the game, played it for... *checks Steam* ...about 22 hours (which also includes more recent failed attempts to get back into it again), and then just went back to X3 Albion Prelude, into which I currently have 611 hours, according to Steam. This is not even counting the 484 hours I put into X3 Terran Conflict, which is more or less the same game as Albion Prelude.

X Rebirth was indeed "an appalling, broken mess" when it was first released. The previous games weren't remotely perfect on launch either, mind you, but nothing as bad as X Rebirth was. And the fact that X Rebirth "was originally conceived as an entirely separate game from the X series, with a new setting, different mechanics" is definitely evident for anyone coming in from the previous games. I agree that they'd probably have been better off just making it its own thing rather than shoehorning it into the X Series. That said, I knew that this (and many of the other things, such as only controlling one ship and such) was going to be the case going into it, so I don't hate the game nearly as much as some of the more vehement anti-fans in the comments under that RPS article or on the Steam forums or elsewhere appear to, but I'm not a big fan of it either.

If someday Egosoft manages to turn it around into an actually viable game, then I might go back and give it another go, but for now, well... I'm still not finished with Albion Prelude yet, which I recently restarted as a Terran in order to wrap up the Terran plotlines that I'd neglected by playing as a Commonwealth character for so long, well after the point where their plotlines had ended. I'll also continue waiting for a proper X4 as well, which X Rebirth most definitely was not and will never be. I hope they leave the whole "walking around on the stations" thing out of X4, though, assuming they ever do make it someday, of course.
kane_magus: (The_Sims_Medieval)
This week's Humble Weekly Bundle is the entire X series.

I have talked about this series on several occasions in the past. Updated time counts, according to Steam, are 76 hours on X:BtF, 1.9 on X-Tension, 113 on X2: The Threat, 72 on X3: Reunion, 485 on X3: Terran Conflict, and (currently) 406 hours on X3: Albion Prelude, for a current total of 1153.9 hours spent on this game series so far. Suffice it to say that this is, by far, one of my favorite game series of all time. You can get the entire thing via Humble for $6. That is all I feel I need to say about that.

The reason behind this being the bundle is, I'm sure, the fact that X Rebirth will be released in just a couple months or so.
kane_magus: (kanethumb1)
Link.

While I don't limit myself to one single game, I do have a couple of games that I keep coming back to.

Since I first bought it on Steam around a year and a half ago, I have played through all of the X series, up to the current Albion Prelude game. Looking at my Steam statistics, I've played X: Beyond the Frontier for 76.2 hours, X2: The Threat for 113.2 hours, X3: Reunion for 72.4 hours, X3: Terran Conflict for a whopping 484.9 hours (most of which was probably spent on that freaking Hub plotline), and Albion Prelude for 166.8 hours so far, for a grand total of 913.5 hours. Or 915.4 hours if you also count the 1.9 hours I spent on X-Tension, the expansion to the original X:BtF before moving on to X2. And there's no telling how much I'll put into X: Rebirth, whenever that gets released eventually. (EDIT) Turns out it'll be not all that much. (/EDIT)

I couldn't even begin to imagine how many hours I have put into the various Sims games over the years, from Sims 1 up through the current Sims 3 plus all expansions and such.

And that's not even counting all of the various RPGs I've played, which I usually end up spending at least 100+ hours on each (and double that if it's a Bethesda game like Morrowind or Fallout 3 or whatever), assuming I ever get around to finishing them, and sometimes even if I don't.
kane_magus: (The_Sims_Medieval)
Yeah, I've been playing a whole lot of the X series lately. As of this post, I've completed the (one and only, so far) storyline plot missions in X3 Albion Prelude and have returned to Terran Conflict in order to wrap up some of the plots I'd left incomplete when I moved on to AP.

The music is not an insignificant part of why I like these games so much.

So, let's get to it.

Multiple Youtube video embeds behind cut )

There is a ton more awesome music in the games besides those, but it's beyond the scope of this post to just list everything. >_>;
kane_magus: (The_Sims_Medieval)
Yeah, I'm still playing X3:TC currently, even though Albion Prelude is out and Rebirth will be out relatively soonish. Mainly, I'm just trying to get through the rest of the story campaigns in TC before moving on to Albion Prelude. (EDIT) Actually, I've already moved on to Albion Prelude now. The Hub plot looked like it was going to take several days (real time, and probably even more like weeks than days) to finish, and that was a bit too overwhelming for me, so I just said "close enough" for Terran Conflict. I did finish the Terran, Goner, Treasure Hunt, Operation Final Fury, and A New Home quests though. That just left The Hub, and then the other plots that required at least part of The Hub to be finished: Player HQ, Aldrin Expansion, and Balance of Power plots. That and I still hadn't built up the almost 400 million credits needed to buy the reward for the A New Home plot yet either. I might go back and wrap them all up someday, maybe. Doubtful, but maybe. (EDIT 2) Yeah, I went back and finished them later. (/EDIT 2) So far, Albion Prelude seems almost identical to Terran Conflict, but then I haven't yet gotten into any of the storyline stuff in that yet, given that I'm still trying to build up from scratch with just one ship and almost no money to start with. (/EDIT)

Here is one thing that I never once thought I would ever have to do in the course of playing a spaceship combat/trading simulation game: solve a frickin' Sudoku puzzle. And yet, I did. Well, actually I didn't solve it. I cheated and let a solver website solve it. I am not in the least bit ashamed to admit that, as I had exactly zero interest in trying to actually work the thing out. Just entering the results was excruciating enough, as the entire thing had to be done through a series of clunky menus.

For example, the steps to enter just a single value on the board:
1. Scroll through the rows until you find the one you want to change.
2. With a row selected, scroll through a list of the open slots and select the slot you want to change.
3. With that slot selected, scroll through a list of the numbers 0-9 to pick which number you want to place in that slot.

I had to repeat that process roughly 60-70 times, given the 9x9 board and the fact that some slots were already filled in and didn't need to be changed.

Dear Egosoft,

Please never put another Sudoku puzzle in one of your X games ever again.

Sincerely,
Me
kane_magus: (kanethumb1)


For anyone out there besides me who cares about Egosoft's games in the X series, the above video is the trailer for the upcoming second expansion pack for X3, and it comes out on December 15 (the Steam version, anyway). If you already have the X Superbox on Steam, then you get this for free. It is intended to be a lead-in to the upcoming X Rebirth which will be released sometime next year. Well, guess I should try to finish up on the storyline missions in Terran Conflict. (And by "finish up" I, of course, mean start. Seriously, my current playtime count for X3:TC stands at 71 hours, according to Steam, and I haven't even touched a single one of the several story campaigns as of yet.)

The only problem I have with that trailer is that the actress playing "Saya Kho" is a red-headed white woman, instead of the black-haired Asian woman Saya actually was in the previous games. It's even more confusing since there already was a Russian girl with red hair in X3 Reunion. The actress in the trailer looks more like Miria than she does Saya.
kane_magus: (kanethumb1)
I downloaded the X series from Steam the other day, since the whole thing was on sale for a total of around $11 or so. (Normally, that same package is $39.99.)

So far, I've only been playing the first game in the series, and I'm "only" about 40 hours in or so,* though it kind of feels like I've still only barely begun. When reading about this series on various websites and forums, I've often seen the recommendation to just go straight to the (currently) last game in the series and not even bother with the earlier ones, since that one is apparently the best of the bunch. I'll just say this much: if that one is as good as everyone says it is, and given the fact that I'm enjoying the first game as much as I am, well... when I get to that one I just may never play another game again (figuratively speaking, of course).

So, "What is the X series?" you might be asking. (Or, perhaps, you may be berating me for not having played these games at all until now, given that the first game came out in 1999, and if so all I can say is, yes, I totally agree. I was completely missing out until now.) I'll just describe the first game, based on what I've played, and then what I know of the sequels based on what I've read on the Internet.

Description behind the cut )

So yeah, while the series probably isn't for everyone, if you are looking for a slow-ish paced game in which you fly a space ship around, docking with various space stations and trading stuff, then you can't really go wrong with the X series.

Also, there is apparently a new game in the works. Whether or not I'll have made it through the previous games by the time that one comes out, I'm still quite interested in that now.

* - According to my Steam account, anyway. The game clock, associated with the save games, says I'm over 100 hours in, but I think this has to do with the "Singularity Engine Time Accelerator" or "SETA" device, which increases the game speed by up to a factor of 10, which is useful for when you're flying a long distance from station to station or system to system. Apparently, this also affects the save game timestamps as well.

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