Like a tin of hyperstrength lager lurking behind grubby plastic curtains in the chiller cabinet of a dismal newsagent, Gratuitous Space Battles knew just what it was about, and didn’t make any secret of the fact. It was about selecting massive fleets of spaceships, tooling them up with guns, and wellying them into each other like shopping trolleys full of anvils.
]]>It's always nice to have a demonstration what a complete fool you are and how poorly you think things through. Humbling. Gratuitous Space Battles offered that experience with huge spacefights where your input ends as soon as the battle begins, and all you can do is watch as the plans you laid, the issues you ordered, and the ships you designed failed spectacularly to deal with the enemy's far superior plan. Or maybe you were good at it. I don't know.
Either way, you may get something out of Gratuitous Space Battles 2 [official site], which launched yesterday.
]]>I’ve never much thought about what goes into the little white tablet I swallow when I’m hungover, have the sniffles or another bout of Geek’s Disease.* It’s just chalky magic, right? Well, no: it’s the result of millions of dollars, aggressive R&D, production facilities of breathtaking size and precision, ruthless marketeering and impossibly sinister downplaying and mitigation of side effects. While medicine-themed management game Big Pharma doesn’t go for pharmaceutical industry’s jugular, Goldacre-style, its pills-as-merciless-industry approach is certainly a welcome change from the bland, smiling, comfortable faces that advertising tells us medicine are all about.
]]>I've spent untold hours watching back replays of my own Supreme Commander games, taking the opportunity to slow-down or speed-up time, watch maneuvers by my opponents I missed the first time around, and to marvel at the bombastic laser wars that eventually decide each match.
Gratuitious Space Battles is that whole process as an entire game: you build a fleet, design the ships, and then click go to watch a spectacular hands-off space battle. The sequel seems determined to make those battles more spectacular than ever, as demonstrated by this new trailer. Such pretty lasers and explosions.
]]>The conflicts in Gratuitous Space Battles 2 are certainly deserving of the adjective applied in the game's title but the new video below brings several other descriptives to mind. 'Colourful', 'cunning', 'extravagant', 'fabulous' and more besides. Like it's predecessor, GSB 2 is a game in which players construct fleets, position them and then watch as they do battle. Remember the text crawl that sucked all the excitement out of you like a joy vampire at the beginning of The Phantom Menace? "The taxation of trade routes to outlying starsystems is in dispute", says Star Wars. GSB says, "BOY HOWDY THE PURPLE SHIPS ARE SHOOTING THE EVER-LIVING CRAP OUT OF THE GREEN SHIPS YOWZERS!"
]]>Gratuitous Space Battles was not a game of masterful tactics. It didn't allow damn fool gambits. GSB was won or lost long before then. GSB is played in the planning, the design and customisation of a huge space fleet and the careful behaviours you order them to follow. Once your ships are ready to launch, it could run the numbers and say if you won or lost, but that would be somewhat against the name. The eponymous space battles are gratuitous, with cruisers and fighters and lasers and missiles and drones and so many explosions for you to simply watch.
Expect more explosions, as sequel Gratuitous Space Battles 2 is now officially announced.
]]>I know many of you will be spending the weekend tending to your winter-blasted shoots as you celebrate the feast day of Serenus the Gardener, or perhaps remembering Red Army Day by engaging in tabletop recreations of the Battle of Kiev or, for the more ambitious, Operation Bagration. Commendable pastimes, I'm sure, but if the dusty red blocks that represent Soviet armoured divisions are lost in the attic, or Serenus' spirit is locked in the frozen turf, then you may be interested to hear that Gratuitous Space Battles is free to play on Steam until Sunday 9PM GMT.
]]>The release of the conquest mode for Gratuitous Space Battles caused me to reinstall and lose a couple of weekends plotting and planning. Conquest provided a campaign to sit alongside the standalone bouts of ship wrecking and, lo, it was good. A few months ago, unbeknownst to me, a clever sort who goes by the name Pendra on the Positech forums released a random galaxy generator, providing Endless Consecutive Contextual Gratuitous Space Battles. There was an update to the generator this morning, which Cliffski mentioned in the Twittersphere, and I've copied some details into the emptiness below.
]]>The point of Gratuitous Space Battles was that it was a fleet manager, not an RTS. So while you watched the space battles play out, you didn't actually influence them - you were the admiral who had designed the ships and decided upon the tactics. And that made the actual battles gratuitous in terms of the gameplay. That, however, is no longer necessarily true. Cliff from Positech has sent word that he's continued fiddling with the game, and has released a free patch to allow players to get involved with the battle-action. Cliff says: "It's only an 'optional' feature, and only works in single-player offline games, but from patch 1.60 (which is now live, steam copies will be updated soon), the player can select ships and issue movement and fire orders mid battle, and even edit the 'standing' orders for ships in the middle of an engagement." There's a video, which explains it in a bit more detail, below.
]]>Details of the next Humble Indie Bundle have once more leaked, because Steam's Content Description Record Viewer Thingamie is so ludicrously easy for people to spy. And it looks like it's going to be a bit of a corker, as spotted by DIY Gamer. In the pay-what-you-want collection it seems there will be Super Meat Boy, BIT.TRIP.RUNNER, Jamestown, Nightsky and Shank. That's the first wave, and then there's even better to get added in.
]]>Observant eyes may have noticed that there’s a new expansion out for Gratuitous Space Battles, the fleet building slice of indie goodness from Positech. While this fresh bit of DLC doesn’t add any new game modes, it does add 10 new ships, three new pieces of equipment and a new scenario. The new ships belong to the titular Parasites faction, who sound very unpleasant indeed. Swanning around the galaxy looking for host species to grow their larvae in? It’s not on. There’s a trailer showing some particularly gratuitous space battles below and a new pic from Positech’s upcoming Gratuitous Tank Battles for your eyes to look at.
]]>Hurrah! Cliffski's announced that the Galactic Conquest expansion for Gratuitous Space Battles is now available for purchase, although the expansion isn't actually out yet and technically the £5 you're dropping is a pre-order that gets you access to the beta, which may have a bug or three.
Galactic Conquest is a big ol' update, adding a brand new campaign mode where you battle for planets and gradually build up fleets using captured shipyards and academies. As Jim pointed out, a campaign mode surely makes all those space battles much less gratuitous. Less Gratuitous: Space Battles, that's what Cliffski should have called it. Full, lengthy features list and video after the jump.
]]>If there was a significant problem with fleet-management game Gratuitous Space Battles, it was that it was almost too gratuitous. There were a lot of space battles, with nothing to link or contextualise them. To fix this black hole in the space-time of his creation, Cliff "Positech" Harris has been constructing some DLC, a "massively single-player" non-linear campaign, which is now nearing completion. I had a quick chat with him about this development, which you can read below.
]]>Cliffski really does have a knack at this. He's just released his latest bit of Gratuitous Space Battles DLC, introducing the Nomads, a whole new race with ships, weapons and similar. Oldest race in the galaxy, according to the GSB fiction. But the trick is the spin he's given to this. There's two editions of the DLC you can buy. One is $5.99, the other is $2.99. There's no difference between 'em. It's simply an experiment, to try and cater for the people who say they can't afford that amount of money. Look at your life, decide what you can afford, then pay it. He's also keeping a running tally of the results. Currently, 28 $5.99 editions and 10 $2.99 editions. And if you've never played GSB, you can try the demo. Oh - the new trailer follows.
]]>There was a problem with the rather clever space-battle fleet manager game Gratuitous Space Battles. It was this: there was no campaign mode. I've no idea how you would fix a problem like that, but fortunately one man development army Cliffski has plenty of ideas. One of them is relevant: he's going to add a campaign mode. He explains: "The GSB campaign is a singleplayer 'conquer-the-galaxy' style game, where you build up vast space fleets and kick interstellar ass. Rather than set, pre-determined fleets to battle against, the game utilises the fleets designed by other GSB players to provide an endless variety of opponent, so you will be pitted against real carbon-based intelligence on every step of your path to galactic dominance." Read more about this extraordinary move here. It will be paid DLC, price TBC.
]]>Cliff "Cliffski" Harris, creator of Kudos, Democracy and Gratuitous Space Battles, is launching another survey of his Positech customers to learn about their purchasing habits. Or more specifically, their lack of purchasing habits. He's asking people, "Why didn't you buy Gratuitous Space Battles?"
]]>Positech's popular hands-off build-and-release strategy game Gratuitous Space Battles have just released an expansion pack. How does it expandier the game's expansosity? Well, for six dollars you get a whole new race, 2 scenarios and a cent. The aliens in question are the swarm who deploy masses of fleets with smart bombs and focusing-in disruptor beams. All the while looking like the big gold bird out of Mysterious Cities of Gold. And a trailer follows! Yes! No, really.
]]>...which sounds like an account of what happens when you buy the game, but is actually a new race that Cliffski has added in over the weekend. I'm downloading it to take a proper look, but in the meantime you can cast a theological eye over the details and then watch the trailer below.
]]>Blimey, space-fleet management game Gratuitous Space Battles already has an expansion, called The Tribe. Creator Cliff Harris says: "The pack adds an extra playable race to the game, complete with shiny new spaceships to blast apart in gratuitous slow motion. As well as new ship hulls, the game adds two new missions and a scattering of new tribe-specific modules to reflect their emphasis on 'strong hulls and weak shields'. It also introduces the first use of kinetic weapons." There are also improvements and changes in the pipeline for the vanilla game.
The Tribe is out now, and it's $6. (Trailer below)
]]>News of a mini-expansion for GSB arrives over on the Positech blog. Cliffski says: "...current plans for the pack are to introduce a new race to the game. It will have the same variety of ships as the other races. The ships will also have a few race-specific modules, and some quite drastic ship bonuses. It was a relief to work out that ship bonuses can be negative, meaning this new batch of ships will have weak shields, weak armor, and very strong hulls." He's not yet decided on a price for said expansion, claiming he only wishes to recoup the cost of making it.
]]>Positech's battlefleet manager game, Gratuitous Space Battles, is now available to purchase. To celebrate this space-fact the demo for the game has been posted, which means you can all have a play of the game without having to pay a penny. Get it here. Cliffski says to expect more development, as well as mods, in the coming months.
]]>It looks like Cliffski wants modding to start for Gratuitous Space Battles even before he's properly released the game, as he's releasing the ship models for people to fiddle with. "Basically I couldn't think of a good reason not to give modders access to the raw models that are used to make the art in the game," says Cliffski, "and I know that if I was a modder, I'd find that very handy indeed, and be churning out lots of variants and tweaks of it." The full game launch is apparently happening this week, with the release version of the game going up on the Positech site on Thursday.
]]>Jim and Kieron got to talking about the beta of Gratuitous Space Battles. Their ruminations follow.
]]>Earlier today we talked to Positech's Cliff "Cliffski" Harris about his new game, Gratuitous Space Battles. There was also some discussion of a Saddam Hussein sim, the pitfalls of outsourced indie art, and the problems of small-playerbase multiplayer.
]]>In space, no-one can hear you be gratuitous.
Space is gratuitous. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly gratuitous it is.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Gratuitous.
Ack, it's no good. I just can't decide which stereotypical sci-fi quote to tiresomely rip-off. Instead, just watch this video of Cliffski 'Gets A Bit Feisty' Harris' new'un. BOOM.
]]>Positech have been busy capturing the essence of spacewar for their new strategy/management/simulation game, Gratuitous Space Battles, and we get a glimpse of it here: giant, glacial capital ships firing colossal beam lasers through swarms of tiny fighter craft. Yeah, that's the stuff. Cliffski knows what to do. Now go! Witness those titular space battles below. (And I have to say, this one really interests me, and not simply because I'm an unmitigated spacewar nerd.)
]]>Positech (Kudos, etc) have announced a new game: Gratuitous Space Battles. That is all.
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