We do apologize for the paucity of updates this week; Pike has had various matters of consequence to attend to (more here) whilst my Internet decided to be nonfunctional for almost a full 24 hours, then I came back online and just watched Saints Row The Third trailers until I remembered we have a blog that should probably be attended to!

Honestly I’ve not been doing much special in videogaming terms lately. I’m playing Baldur’s Gate, playing Saints Row 2, and messing around with my usual array of 4x/grand strat games. There are a couple of things that might be worth relating though!

First is that I still can’t wrap my head around how great Master of Orion 2 is. I mean I’ve heard all the hype and stuff for years, and I finally got around to playing it, and it lives up to every word. It really is that good. And it has an amazing soundtrack as well!

You may or may not have heard that Sword of the Stars 2 came out this weekend, and that the release was the very definition of a clusterfuck. Kerberos not only uploaded a beta version to Steam but, once they fixed that and had a real version up… it was no better! They’re working hard on getting it up to par, and I’m sure they will given the gulf between SotS at release and SotS today, but Kerberos + Paradox making a game was a pretty amazing recipe for disaster. I think they’re trying to top that time CCP deleted everyone’s boot.ini.

As I said I would I’ve spent some time with Hearts of Iron 3, and I can safely say it’s really not my cup of tea. I’m not a fan at all and I feel that I have given it a fair shake now; I can see what they were aiming for but it just didn’t work out that way, sadly. Oh well, it’s not like HoI2 has gone anywhere!

But we’re moving into the busy season now, so hopefully we’ll have plenty to say over the coming weeks! And of course what we’re going to talk about is old strategy games. Funny story, when Pike and me first planned this we considered making a strategy gaming blog, but considered it too limiting. And now look at us!

Oh yes, and there was the GTAV trailer, wasn’t there? I’m blown away by the graphics and San Andreas is a great setting. I’m actually not too worried if they’re taking a serious route with it; that’s a perfectly legitimate thing for them to want to do, and R* do it very well. But I have to admit, I’m more excited for Saints Row nevertheless.

(66% of consoles have 100% of the games; #OccupyMS+Ninty)