Flesh People

Starbound finally got updated! It kinda sucks though, all of my characters got deleted. Whatever, that bird guy wasn't that good anyway, that nerd couldn't even fly, but he was a bird. There are new starting missions that are really cool, like going to the center of the planet you're on to fix your ship. Pretty badass. It takes a long time to find these core fragments. I feel like mineral spawning has been nerfed. One of the first missions require for you to find iron to make an anvil. This takes more than an hour if you don't want to spend the whole time digging straight down. Never have I ever had so much trouble to find ore. Before the update, you could travel the surface of the planet to find all the ore that you could ever need. Now, You have to travel deep into the bowels of a planet to even locate one ore vein. You need two pieces of ore to make one ingot. Let's do some math here. One hour of digging straight down to find one ore vein. Let's just say that each vein holds eight pieces of ore. That's four bars of ore. If an iron anvil takes ten bars of iron to make, it should take you three hours. If you're playing with a friend, it goes by rather quickly as you're making jokes and poking fun. If you play it by yourself, that's three long, painful hours of agonizing spelunking. The core fragments are a walk in the park compared to meager iron. You can find these within fifteen minutes of starting the game, just dig straight down. After you fix your ship, you go to a place called "The Gate". There there are many people that were stranded, just like you. They give you missions that are, for the most part, really easy. There is one that stands out though. There is a monkey man that tells you to create steel armor, and he gives you an oxygen respirator in return. When he gives you this respirator, he tells you about a mining facility that needed help from the outside world, and there was a distress signal emanating from it. Once you go inside, it's dark and there is no power. You go up through the vents and find a lever. You pull it and two flesh creatures fall from the ceiling, promptly scaring the hell out of you (That might've only happened to me). These assholes are strong. They have a ton of health and hit like a small truck. Don't get close to these guys, I recommend ranged weapons. I have died like three times, and it's goddamn annoying to get back to where you originally were.
I'm not going to spoil the rest of this mission for my homies, but I'll leave you with this picture.

Image Courtesy of: The Community of Starbound

 I'll gladly report it more when my friends complete this mission. I'm just going to issue a warning though. Once you die, everything respawns.

Into the Stars

I recently found a new game that I have had so much fun with. At the beginning, you can choose between six races: Human, Avian, Apex, Floran, Hylotl, and Glitch.

The six races
Image courtesy of: Starbound Explorer

 I have never picked Human so far because I want to experience all the other races first. You are put in a spaceship that has looks that correspond to your race. You start with only one tool in the ships locker, a matter manipulator. This tool can mine pretty much anything, but there's a catch. It's really freaking slow. The first ten minutes of the game are agonizing because it takes so long to acquire the basic materials to create the basic tools. Once you have the tools you start collecting the materials for cooler and cooler stuff. Coal is very important in this game, because it fuels your ship (So high tech right?). Once your ship is fueled up, you can travel to different planets. Each planet can have a different biome, ranging from snow to desert. Each planet has a tech chest, which contains upgrades that make you able to double jump, dash, etc. A planet has a chance to have a building that corresponds to each race, each one having loot in it. The loot is usually guarded by many people that do significant amounts of damage. When you vanquish those assholes you gain access to basic chest stuff. I said there was loot, but I never said what was in it. I'll tell you what's in it, garbage. It's like getting to the light at the end of the tunnel, except the light is super dim and about to die. You die three times just to clear it, and there's nothing to compensate. The great thing about this game is that it's in beta, and it's still multiplayer compatible. Me and my friend have been playing this pretty much every day since I got it. We play this game quite a lot as I have mentioned, and we still have not made very much progress in it because there is so much to explore. When it gets updated there will be so much more to explore, making it harder to progress. It has the potential to be a very exciting game, and it is already, with tiny updates that increase performance.