Space Game Junkie Podcast

Welcome to this episode of the Space Game Junkie podcast! This time, Jim and I sit down with producer Josef Vorbeck of Chasing Carrots games to talk about their upcoming spaceship crew simulator, Cosmonautica. We play the game on the stream, and find it to be wondrously frustrating and engaging, as I personally learn that this is less of a spaceship game and much more of a crew management game. Unlike FTL, which gives me anxiety attacks, this game is might lighter in tone, which makes it much more fun. The game is full of vibrant detail, and it makes the game a fun topic of conversation. We had a great time with this podcast, so we hope you do too. :) As always, if you have suggestions for topics or guests, please hit us up at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks for listening and/or watching! :)

Hello friends, and welcome to this episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast! The date we recorded this podcast was 9/30/14, which is 15 years to the day on which the finest space combat game ever, Freespace 2, was released. Therefore, Jim and I talk to a couple of folks who are not only fans, but also experts on the game itself. Our guests include longtime journalist for PC Gamer and Gamespot (he wrote the review for the game there a while back) Stefan “Desslock” Janicki along with Hard Light Productions (THE place to go for your Freespace modding needs) administrator and creator of the fantastic Freespace Open Installer (among other things), Ian “Goober5000” Warfield. In our roundtable discussion (and this was the first time I tried to do something of a topic-based roundtable, so I was a bit nervous I admit), we talk about the game’s development, its marketing, its release, the Source Code Project and much more. A few things were mentioned in the podcast such as playing the first game on an Amiga, a 3D printed Sathanas or an interview with the game’s writer, so check those out as well. :) Thanks to our guests for joining us and making a fantastic podcast, and thank you for listening! As always, if you have a guest or topic you would like us to copy, please don’t hesitate to hit us up at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks again for listening, and enjoy!

Welcome to this episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast! In this episode, Jim and I talk to Paradox Producer Joe Fricano about their recently (and by that I mean TODAY!) published game by Creative Forge Games, Ancient Space! This was a very fun podcast in which we not only talk about the game, but the amazing voice cast (Dwight Schultz for the win!) along with the philosophy behind being a single player only game. We had a great time, ultimately, talking about what’s looking to be a great game! :) As always, if you have a suggestion for a guest or topic for an upcoming show, hit us up in the comments below or at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks for listening/watching, and we hope you enjoy the show! :)

Hello my friends, and welcome to this latest episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast! In this latest episode, Jim and I sit down with Arthur Danskin to talk about his upcoming open-world spacey combatey buildey game, Reassembly, which is also going through a Kickstarter campaign. We talk about how the campaign is going, the inspiration for the game, how much fun it is to play (it really is, folks), how the game is built and so on. It’s a fun discussion that hopefully gets y’all as excited about the game as we are. :) As for the video, we have to apologize for that one, as something happened with Jim’s stream that caused the feed to start and stop several times. This is my first attempt at using iMovie to stich anything together, so what I did was upload the separate videos from Twitch to YouTube, where I downloaded them to separate MP4s, then used iMovie to try to put them together. I hope it worked out, but please let me know if there are issues. I apologize for the quality of this video, and we’ll try to make sure future videos end up in much better shape. As always, we thank you for listening, and invite you to hit us up at hail@spacegamejunkie.com if you have suggestions or requests! Enjoy the show!

Hello my friends, and welcome back to the Space Game Junkie Podcast! After a couple of weeks off so that I could prepare for and recover from my recent move, we’re back! Yay! This week, Jim, guest cohost Todd “Nack” and I discuss Zombo.com, some new space games such as Transverse, and then jump into our main topic, the classic 1996 RTS Star Command: Revolution, which was recommended by reader Timmaigh! (thanks Timmaigh!). My copy of the game had no manual, but even with that issue, I had actually a great time with the game. Now that I’m back in the saddle, we have a passel of guests and topics coming up, which you can see in the right sidebar, along with several irons on the fire, so stay tuned as I’ll continually update the schedule as I get new guests and topics. If you have a guest or a topic you’d like to suggest, please say so in the comments below or hit us up at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks for listening/watching, and we hope you enjoy the show! :)

Hey folks, welcome to this random-ass episode of the Space Game Junkie podcast! This week, Jim and I were supposed to talk about Orbiter, the realistic space/orbital flight simulator. However, since I’m mired in moving, and Jim’s internal calendar got thrown off by our Saturday podcast, we were both woooooefully unprepared for just how detailed and deep the game actually is (I so don’t have time to read the 130+ page manual right now), so we put that on the backburner and did some testing with Hitbox.tv and discussed games which left us with negative first impressions that were later turned on their ear, like Independence War 2, for example. It was a fun discussion, and I think makes for a fun podcast. :) Now with the move coming up next week, there won’t be a podcast for the next two weeks as I have to focus on the move, packing, unpacking and all that. Once all that should be done, we’ll be returning on 9/9 with a podcast about Star Command: Revolution, which was recommended by one of our listeners. If you have a suggestion for a guest or topic for us to cover, or just wanna yell us for whatever reason, hit us up in the comments below or at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks for listening folks, and have an awesome day! Note, Hitbox.tv seems pretty great so far for some things — such as having a much smaller delay than Twitch — but it’s YouTube upload capabilities are problematic at the moment. With that said, please enjoy the video from Hitbox directly below. Thanks! Yay, Hitbox finally uploaded it to YouTube, I just had to do it in Safari rather than Chrome. WTF? Enjoy!

Say you wanna play in the open playground that is Elite: Dangerous, but don’t want to shell out $75 for the beta version. You’re in luck, my friend, because this week Jim and I take a look at some of the open-source Elite alternatives that cost significantly less (or nothing at all) yet still scratch the same type of itch as Elite: Dangerous. These include: * Oolite – This free clone of the original Elite has over 200 mods one can download in the game to make it more expansive or appealing, but we found the difficulty to be a bit on the brutal side. Still a good time if you want that original Elite experience. * Pioneer – This free clone of Frontier: Elite II has an expansive universe and detailed gameplay, and I was quite enamored with it, at least until… * Paragon – This is a $15 fork of the Pioneer project, and comes with prettier graphics, more streamlined gameplay and a more alive universe. While this is the only one of the games we tested that cost moneys, we found it was worth it, as both of us (especially me) have put a good amount of time into it since purchasing it. It’s still early access, so it’s got bugs (like a sometimes-suicidal autopilot) and crashes here and there, but overall, it’s a great time. * First Encounters D3D – This is a free port of the third (and worst) game in the original series, Frontier: First Encounters. Since we couldn’t even get this game to run on the stream, and found it as cumbersome as the original, we skipped it, but I put it here for your reference. It made for a fun show, especially in the surprise discovery of Paragon, which I sadly forgot about until we were rolling. ;) As always, if you have a suggestion for a guest or a topic you’d like us to cover, hit us up below or directly at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Also of note, the video had some issues as we were streaming, both with my audio and with the Twitch cutting out a few times. YouTube can stitch videos together, but it still might be a bit jarring, so please keep that in mind if watching the video. Thanks again!

Welcome, my friends, to this episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast! In this episode, Jim and I fawn and gush over the recently-released Elite: Dangerous beta. Now before you worry that this site will become an Elite: Dangerous fansite, that won’t happen. That said, we are a bit…enamored, to say the least. Jim has the stream this time, even though we’re both playing the game at the same time, which means there might be some lulls in the audio. This miiiiiight be a better one to watch, but that’s up to you. :) Overall, we had a great discussion about the game regardless. We WERE going to talk about Star Wars: Rebellion, but sadly neither of us could get it installed, so that one will have to be put on the backburner for a while. In it’s place, next week we’ll talk about the surprisingly fun space portions of Star Wars: Battlefront II! If you have a guest you’d like us to seek out, or a topic/game to focus on, let us know in the comments below or directly at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks for listening/watching folks, and we hope you enjoy the festivities. :)

Hello friends, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast! I’ve been waiting for this one for a while, as we always seemed to be playing tag getting things arranged (crazy time zone differences were the main culprit), but Jim and I were FINALLY able to sit down with Mario Mihokovic, CEO of Little Green Men (LGM). If you’re unaware, these are the guys behind the hotly anticipated Starpoint Gemini 2, a game that I’ve been excited about for a while now. While I played the game on the stream, we asked Mario some questions about the game’s current state and its future, and we learned a lot about how to do Early Access right, and learning from the mistakes made during the original game’s development, and more! It’s a pretty fun discussion, I think! ;) As always, we thank you for listening, and invite your comments below or at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks again for listening, and enjoy the show! :)

Hello my friends, and welcome to this episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast! In this episode, Jim and I sit down with Steve Hawkins, developer of the exciting looking “5X” space strategy game, Imperia. In Imperia, you live out the life of a newly-crowned emperor with psychic powers who inherits a crumbling empire, and must do what you can to keep it going. This is the closest I’ve seen to “Crusader Kings in Space” since Star Wars: Rebellion, and it looks like it’s gonna be awesome! You can also play it for free if you go to the game’s home page. Steve is a very passionate developer, and it results in a fun discussion about the game and his philosophies behind it. Now Steve was specifically requested by one of our readers, I think his name is Ben? Maybe? ;) If you have someone you’d like to hear on the podcast, or would like us to discuss a specific game or topic, don’t forget you can hit us up at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. :) Thanks for listening/watching, and enjoy!

Welcome to this week’s Space Game Junkie Podcast! In this episode, Jim and I talk about another game celebrating its fifteenth birthday. It’s not Freespace 2 this time, oh no, it’s X-Wing Alliance, the last Star Wars game by Totally Games, and by far the most controversial. Some folks love it, some folks don’t, and folks like me are kinda “meh” on it, at least until one passes those AWFUL family missions. Jim and I discuss the game’s issues, its successes, and why it’s completely overshadowed by a game that came out five years before it. ;) Please note, the video is much longer than the audio portion of the podcast this time because Jim began the stream far sooner, so if you wanna watch us spend around forty minutes trying various settings to lessen Jim’s lag, go for it. ;) If you want to skip that and just right to the actual podcast portion, you can jump to 42:13 in. Thanks for listening/watching, and we hope you enjoy the show!

Hellooooo my friends, and welcome to this episode of the Space Game Junkie podcast! In this episode, Jim and I talk about three main topics, which are the latest news, what we got on the Steam sale, and some marketing tidbits wherein one of our listeners asks us to diagnose a game’s website and Kickstarter campaign (I won’t say which and let you figure it out yourselves by listening). It’s a fun, random podcast that we hope you’ll greatly enjoy. As always, if you have a comment, question or suggestion about the show — as in you’d like to suggest a guest or a topic, as some have — you can leave comments below or contact us at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks for listening!!

Welcome to this episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast! In this episode, Jim and I fulfill a listener request via Twitter by bringing the developer of spacey action RPG Zigfrak, Alex Ayers, onto the show. We had a great talk with Alex about the history of his awesome game, its humor, its gameplay, its journey to Steam via Greenlight and much more. It makes for a really fun podcast, especially since I think I’m getting better at being able to play a game AND be a host at the same time. ;) We hope you enjoy the show, and as always, invite comments below and via hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks for listening! :)

Welcome to this week’s episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast. In this episode, Jim and I sit down with Stephen A. Rogers, who has created pen-and-paper role playing games based on both Starflight  and Wing Commander (both of which you can buy or download at Lulu). These books are fantastic reference materials in their own right, but they’re also great RPG systems in here as well, so we discuss with Stephen the mechanics of the games, how the source material was made into a pen-and-paper RPG and much more. As always, you can leave questions or comments below in the comments section, or if you have ideas or critiques of the show you’d like to share just with us, hit us up at hail@spacegamejunkie.com. Thanks for listening everyone, and enjoy!

In this week’s episode of the Space Game Junkie Podcast, Jim and I sit down to talk about a game that popped up on Steam a little while back called O.R.B: Off-World Resource Base. Since most people overlook this game, it was Jim’s idea (and I stress this) to give the game a little attention. Once we played it a bit…we noticed why it was overlooked… As always, we look forward to your comments below and invite you to email us at hail@spacegamejunkie.com if you have questions, constructive comments or suggestions about something to cover on the show. Thanks for listening, and enjoy!