hmmm... maybe there is a choice at the end where he sacrifices himself....

But no surprise they will do more Mass Effect games - they would be stupid not to.

Am I the only who feels that Notch has become a bit too full of himself lately?

Loved Terraria - I have logged over 40 hours on it!

Enjoyed Solar 2, which is hard to classify it's genre. Really fun, but at 10 hours I am done. Still, for the $10 it cost I feel I got a good deal.

Also have recently enjoyed Dwarfs!? (5hrs) and HOARD (21hrs).

By way of comparison, Dragon Age 2 (21hrs, and that only cause I was desperate) Crysis2 (16hrs), TW:Shogun2 (63mins - shame, I just can't get into it), Civ5 (21hrs).

Bang per hour, for me it's indies all the way, apprently. AAA's are just too derivative and expensive now.

Thanks Blue, I would like one.

BTW - I am curious did they look you up for this? Any previous contact with the people involved?

I'm asking because it sheds some light onto how aware of the gaming community the developers are.

Not to break up this orgy of political name calling, but doesn't this pairing kind of make sense?

Gamestops first choice would have been Valve, but for whatever reason Gamestop could not acquire them. That is a good thing. The drones at Gamestop are not without any sense or idea - they get it that brick and mortar is doomed. They have money and presence in the here and now and they want to make a play for the future. So they buy the #2 star.

And yes, I do think Impulse is above all others to be considered #2. I dislike Brad and his politics, but I only ever have two distro's on my PC's and that is Steam and Impulse.

Maybe I buy into the whole capitalistic thing too much, but having only one major player in the field is bad. Maybe Impulse being driven by Gamestop bucks will give Steam a run for it's money. That's good. Because otherwise we have an electronic disctro market that is as limited as the retail market is currently...

it's fun, but I encountered a crash bug on the second tutorial...

I would still recommend it though, as I'm sure that sort of thing will be fixed quickly.

They need the extra time to add more bugs!

I love the series, but wow it's like Firefly doesn't do QA.

I really enjoyed this game. It is a throwback to 80's and 90's 4x, and it works well. I doesn't have flashy graphics though so that may be a deal killer for some.

And yeah, Distant Worlds is great too... As is Sins....

I haven't bought any, but would.... if they put it all in one pack at an affordable price. And no, not the GOTY edition. Basically, I'm looking to buy all the ME2 DLC for under $10, is that unreasonable? By the time ME3 comes out I will not take the ME2 DLC for free...

Interesting. I liked the music of the first two, so it will be interesting to see how this works out. If they were going to replace the composer it would have been cooler if they had hired Vangelis as the replacement.

I'm not sure why everyone seems so happy... The game concept seemed decent. Space Siege aside, I have found other GPG's to range from decent to good. I enjoyed both the Dungeon Sieges and Demigod (and yes, I was playing Demigod at the start), while I found both SC's to be okay. It seems like we lose something on this news and don't get anything back.

I have the Android version, and it is actually a neat game. My problem with it is that I found the touch based controls to be frustrating, so I was planning to buy either the Xbox or PC version.

I suspect the reason for the delay is more driven by Trendy trying to reach a deal with MS & Sony rather than a technical issue. MS seems to announce upcoming Live titles 4-6 weeks in advance, so I knew the chances of this coming out before March were slim to none. I would not be surprised if this get push back further than April...

Also, I thought MS had a policy of not letting Live titles be cross published with Sony by Indy developers. Anyone know anything about that?

I thought they already had that - practice sessions with a team vs AI?

edit:

OK, seems they have improved the AI and taught it sneaky tactics. In addition such matches will yield some XP and IP (they did not previously).

I hope one day they can get this product up to the point it deserves. We are going on six months since release and it is still basically in beta - they pretty much admit it. They are making huge changes to the mechanics, the interface, and the AI. That's what you do.... in beta.

I never had major problems with bugs, didn't mind the interface once I got used to it, but it drove me crazy that the AI never did anything. It is apparently now multi-threaded which should help in the future, but it is still really stupid --- six months after release!

I'll never buy a Stardock developed product again before release or at release. Wait for the reviews. That probably also applies to anything they publish.

It will be interesting to see who the publisher for Sins Of A Solar Empire II will be. Did Stardock nail Ironclad down before all the poop hit the fan? Will Stardock be able to sign any new developers now they have shown twice in a row that they are apparently incompetent at project management and quality assurance?

I've not played with this patch, but the AI is apparently still horrible. It's understandable since they change so many of the game mechanics that the AI had to be reworked, but it sucks because the game is still boring - it's mostly a sandbox with little competition.

@Silicon Avatar
I would say #1. This is frustrating because there is so much to like about the game but without a challenging opponent it fails. I never ran into the bugs that have gained so much attention; I just never saw the AI *do* anything.

It's a good game. Yes it is basically an updated version of Empire Deluxe, but then that game too is just a version of an 1970's mainframe game. So really this is an update of an 40 year old game!

It's very neat with the technology research, resource management, exploration, production management, and the combat is good too. Well worth the money if you like strategy games that last more than an hour.

I enjoyed the vanilla game, but all the expansions and DLC seems to be too little while asking for too high of a price. If they package ALL of the expansions and DLC together it may be worth $15, but not any more. I'm sure it will get to that point - eventually.

I suppose that Stardock gets kudos for trying to do something to fix this POS. Still, it's hard to see how anyone could do anything to make things right, especially from the point of view of those who got burnt by pre-ordering or buying on day 0.

Two months since release and the AI still just largely sits in it's cities. The best news about the announcement that Paxton is taking over as producer is that Brad Wardell is allegedly going to work on the AI now. Give it a few more months and the AI may actually twitch on occasion.

The net effect is that by Christmas this game may be worth the $5 people pay when they pick it up from the bargain bin.

This whole fiasco just shows that if you poop in the soup just once, you ruin a good reputation that took nearly ten years to build and transform your fans into haters.

zodden wrote on Sep 17, 2010, 22:27:
At least Stardock continues to try and improve the game and fix it. Many companies abandon totally a project that's less then successful.

True, and that is one of the qualities that made Stardock's good reputation. They have been working hard under horrible stress for weeks at this point, and shown that they truly care.... but....

Elemental should never have been released in the first place. We all hear about buggy games, but seriously I have been playing computer games for twenty years and Elemental is on top of the list for 'bad state at release'. Good post release support does not excuse releasing garbage.

Stardock has veered into dangerous turf, and they have gotten zapped for it. They thought that any failings could be made up for in a quick 0day patch, and they planned their business strategy around that. An example is the multilayer - it is touted as a feature yet we now know they never intended to have that as a feature at release. They thought they would patch that in one week after release. Instead, the product is so distressed and they are so far behind that one month after release they still have not implemented it.

I downloaded the patch, fired it up and... found that I just don't care. The game is boring, and I'm not willing to put more time into it just to find out that the AI is still broken. It's horrible to put 10 hours into a single session and find out that all along the AI hasn't moved past it's starting cities. I feel like Stardock ran a massive con job on this.

Even if this patch fixes the AI, it's impossible for me to get interested in the game anymore.

Civ5 comes out in a few days, and from what I have seen it's going to wipe the floor with Elemental.