Recently the Starbound roadmap was updated to cover the updated progress of the project. Many of the high level sections are at 90% complete but some still need more love. If you are interested in checking it out, check it out.

http://www.playstarbound.com/roadmap/

The Starbound team has been pumping out daily updates on their website and Starbound News collected all the past week reveals into one video linked above.

This screenshot was released this morning.

http://i.imgur.com/dZv7wZJ.png

A few days ago I launched a few new features for Cheerful Ghost events that I want to talk a bit about.

moderated events

All the events created with Cheerful Ghost events to this point can joined by anyone. This is a pretty awesome default and will remain so, but occasionally we all might want to create an event that we want to be bit more selective with. Intro moderated events. Moderated events allow the event creator to approve people to join the event that request access.

server support

In the past Cheerful Ghost has run game servers that last a month or so and as such events now support that use case. You can now put in your Server URL and Server Password into the event and if someone successfully joins an event they can access the URL and password. The reason this information will only be available to people that join the event is so you can keep this information secure to avoid griefers.

Moderated events in conjunction with server events will run the next Terraria 1.2 Cheerful Ghost server. So basically people will ask to join the server and when you are approved you will get access to the server URL and password. This will make it easier for us to communicate when we pop the game into hardmode as well as ensuring we don't overload the server. Over the lifetime of the server, the password may change as well and keeping this all in the event will make this much simpler.

Creating moderated and server based events are only available to Cheerful Ghost Members. If you are interested in becoming a Cheerful Ghost member read about it here:

http://cheerfulghost.com/membership

I want someone to remake The Dark Knight in Minecraft. Not just the trailer, the whole film. Its cool, I can wait.

If you were wanting to wait to dive into the world of Skyrim, now might be a good time to do that. Bethesda released the Legendary Edition that wraps up all the Skyrim expansions into one game. Featuring Dragonborn, Hearthfire and Dawguard this should keep you in Dragon slaying heaven.

If you buy large game tomes, Prima is also releasing the Skyrim legendary edition Game Guide. Last game guide I bought was for Fallout 3 and all its DLC and was quite large but this looks like it covers much more stuff. You know, if you were into reading game hints on actual... paper and all.

http://store.steampowered.com/sub/28187/
http://www.primagames.com/pages/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-legendary-edition-game-guide

Hey Paisanos! For retro Tuesday I decided to talk about a television show I watched the hell out of as a kid. It is a show I rarely ever missed and had a blast watching each episode. The Super Mario Brothers Super Show was the first taste I got of a video game theme show and quickly became my favorite of its era. Watching Mario, Luigi, the Princess and Toad foil Bowser over and over again never seemed to get dull. The plots were interesting and they seemed to add in the right amount of Mario-ness to the show. I even liked the live action set pieces between animation.

Each season of the Super Show is available on Netflix and YouTube now, so if you are interested in watching this again, its available. Some things I loved as a kid don't age well and The Super Mario Brothers Super show straddles that line. On one hand, the voice acting is done well but on the other hand not every aspect of the show holds up. Its not the aging quality of the visuals either and surprisingly I think the live action set pieces are some of the stronger parts.

If I can take point with the show now, and its not a huge point, is that the plots of the shows are a bit lost on "older jdodson." Each show is a take on a old fairy tale or some kind of folklore. Like Mario in Camelot, Mario and the Beanstalk and Mario in the Old West. None of these set pieces I find interesting and honestly I would prefer if they just had to stop Bowser or Wart in the plain-ol Mushroom Kingdom. Because of this, I point to the first episode as some of the best of the episodes because they simply exist in the Mushroom Kingdom without a fairy tale or folklore backing.

That said, the show is still fun in all its gloriously cheesy Mario-ness. I love the intro music and can still sing it by heart and get excited when the teaser for the Friday Zelda episode plays.

Starcraft was a staple of my ol' LAN parties and to get everyone playing the game we occasionally spawned copies of it on people's machines that didn't have the game. Some have lamented this loss but it seems today Blizzard is bringing this back.

Starcraft II has had the starter edition for quite some time, which allows you to play as Terran on a few maps and also allows cross play with your friends that own the full game. Up till now, all the Heart of the Swarm maps and units were unavailable if you wanted to play with your starter edition friends until now.

The video above showcases how it works, simply start a game with starter edition friend and you get all the Heart of the Swarm multiplayer options and maps available. This is a really cool feature and I plan on using it in an upcoming Starcraft 2 event, so stay tuned for that and if you haven't load up on the starter edition.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/10145834

Revision 3 recently posted a video with Tara Long and Anthony Burch the lead writer for Borderlands 2 going over the new Assault on Dragon Keep DLC. The walkthrough contains some mad spoilers but its fun to see the game unfold with Burch's commentary.

The new D&D influenced DLC will hit June 25th.

After Humble Bundle 8 dropped I picked it up and after thinking it over decided to play Awesomenauts first. I had heard from people on the site that this is a good game, plus I see people playing it on Steam all the time so I figured it was time.

While I was at University I played a fun Warcraft III UMS map called Defense of the Ancients. That made it into our LAN rotations among other Tower Defense maps and regular ol' War III. I really dug DoTA but never was exceptional at it. Fast foward to today to the more modern DoTA 2 and League of Legends and whereas the core idea is fun, the immense difficulty ramp is not.

Intro Awesomenauts. It comes packed with all the Tower / Hero destruction fun you could want in an easily accessible game. That doesn't mean the game isn't challenging, but it doesn't throw you straight into the pits of hell to start. The game starts with a simple tutorial that covers how to play as Lonestar, a good overall character. From there you can head to practice matches against bots.

As you play matches you gain EXP that unlocks the other characters in the game as well as other arenas to fight in as well as some special attacks. The first few matches I played as strictly Lonestar and then Gnaw & Derpl Zork. Derpl Zork and Gnaw are really fun.

One thing worth noting is that Awesomenauts is playable on Mac, Linux and Windows such that when you pickup the game later on another OS your progress is saved. I imagine it employs some cool Steam cloud wizardry and it works very well for you all that bounce between multiple OS's like I do.

Head over and nab the recent bundle to get a slew of other great games and... Awesomenauts. Oh and if you are into Awesomenauts, checkout our Cheerful Ghost event on Friday for the game!

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/events/17

http://www.humblebundle.com/

"Nekro is a dark, twisted action game about summoning demonic forces to do your bidding. With a fully-customizable array of powerful monsters to summon, Nekro challenges you to create a specialized army of hell-spawn to counter the forces of a corrupt King.

Playing with the speed and fluidity of an old-school action game, Nekro breaths fresh life into the genre with a deep and robust minion upgrade system. Use different monsters in unison to create a force that's greater than the sum of its parts. Utilize a blood mechanic unique to Nekro by harvesting the flesh of your enemies to power your unholy war machine."

Hot off of a successfully funded Kickstarter, darkForge games just put Nekro on Steam Greenlight. I recommend you head over and give it an upvote if you dig dark action games featuring blood and evil things. Wait, don't we all love that? :D

The game seems to be shaping up well from the video and I can't wait to try it out. The Necromancer is a character I always play in any game where they allow me the choice. Awesome to see a game where that is the draw.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=149845361

Recently Travis and I were able to play the all new game Tiny Barbarian DX. After playing it a bit the last few days I decided to do make a video to showcase the Horde Mode as well as to see how far into the Single Player as I could go. From the video you can see that my Horde Mode performance is a bit lacking but I make it WAY further into the Single Player story than I planned. In fact, I decided to quit where I did because I didn't want to make the video too long. That said, I plan on doing a follow up video where I try and take down the first chapter boss.

I won't try and cover too much of what Travis already said in his review again but I will sort of toss out a few bits on the game that I didn't cover in my review video. If it wasn't apparent from the video, Tiny Barbarian is a hell of a lot of fun and the play control is great. It really nails the style and tone of a Conan side scroller and you really do feel like a bad-ass at times.

The game is challenging though and keeps changing up the challenge so once you get used to playing a certain way, it immediately tosses you something different. This really keeps the game interesting and allows you to feel like you are progressing. I liken the challenge to Portal 2 in that it keeps each consecutive part fresh and interesting.

If you are on the fence about picking this game up you really need to get it and also stop sitting on fences, I can't imagine that's comfortable. Do yourself a favor and get a USB controller and JoyToKey because this game shines on a D-pad. The game works well with the Keyboard, but it is really awesome with the ol' controller layout.

http://www.starquail.com/tinyb/

Head over to the Steam Greenlight page and give this a vote, this game needs to come to Steam.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=110272647