Star Trek Infinite Released! (4X strategy Stellaris & Birth of The Federation like game)

I’ve recently been posting about my interest in the new Birth of the Federation and Stellaris looking Star Trek game from Paradox called Star Trek Infinite. Well now the game is out and sure enough the whole release has been a bit rocky with some nasty bugs, but I never play day 1 releases anymore anyway and it’s definitely gonna be a long time before I get to it, so all good lol. Let the patches, DLCs & fan mods floooow and in a year or 2 we should hopefully have something pretty good! In the meantime I’m certainly enjoying their dev diaries and videos!

I love that lovely nostalgic TNG art style of their’s.. There’s something about it that reminds me of  Star Trek TNG Final Unity’s art style (a great old Trek game also covered on my Star Trek Website) in that it was quite realistic but retained a bit of a artistic painted look. Every time I read the ST Infinite dev diaries it makes we want to play good old Final Unity again heh!
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Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1622900/Star_Trek_Infinite/

Dev diaries: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1622900

Cool ‘first day’ gameplay trailer..

Release story trailer…

Interesting that story wise they appear to be basing it around the yesterdays enterprise alternate universe but presumably before the Feds start losing the war to the Klingons and you get to ‘set a new path’..
Reminds me of a great Civ4 Star Trek mod scenario set in that timeline as well where you gotta try and turn the war around for the Feds. I show it around the 9:30 mark of this video below..

Star Trek Infinite Dev Diaries & Preview (4X strategy Stellaris & Birth of The Federation like game)

I recently posted about my excitement for the new Birth of the Federation and Stellaris looking Star Trek game from Paradox called Star Trek Infinite. IGN recently did a nice preview on it and now the developers have started releasing dev diaries for it that even directly mention BOTF as inspiration and recreating that experience which is great. I’m loving all their TNG/DS9/VOY era artwork (presumably used in the game’s many events and story trees).

Dev diaries: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1622900

UPDATE: Game released! Plus cool new videos HERE!

Star Trek Infinite – The closest thing to Birth of The Federation 2 we’ll probably ever get

Well this is a bit of a surprise! We’re getting a new 4X strategy Star Trek game! I’ve told the story on this blog before of that night in 1999 when I finally got my hands on the last day 1 copy of Star Trek Birth of the Federation in my city and fell in love with it, playing it again and again for years and dreamed of a sequel that never came due to Microprose’s demise. In that same blog post I also gave you guys a tour of each of the major BOTF2 fan projects that are quite playable these days and continue to be worked on (I hope to do new tour videos in the future) and that without them and the BOTF modding community we’d would have had nothing over the years.

While we’ll probably never get an official Star Trek Birth of the Federation 2 it now looks like we’re getting an entirely new Star Trek 4X strategy game from Paradox called Star Trek Infinite that much like good old BOTF is set in the TNG era with Picard, Gowron, Gul Dukat, and many more characters from TNG, DS9 and Voyager! You can play as the United Federation of Planets, Klingon Empire, Romulan Star Empire, or Cardassian Union (sorry no Ferengi this time haha) and a huge array of minor races to ally or conquer just like in BOTF. While this might not exactly be the BOTF2 sequel many of us have hoped for, it does look a LOT like the popular Star Trek mod for Stellaris, so I guess Paradox thought “lets make that a real thing” lol, grabbed the Trek licence and enlisted the help of Nimble Giant Entertainment who created the gorgeous looking big budget Master of Orion reboot a few years back to make it happen. Hmm the same people behind a Master of Orion game making a Star Trek 4X game… that story sounds familiar. 😉 While I’ve not played the Star Trek mod for Stellaris myself I’ve heard many times over the years from it’s players that it often reminded them of BOTF so it will be very interesting to see just how similar this new game will be. Judging by the steam screenshots there will be story/quest elements much like with Stellaris too. Will be interesting to see if the Borg make a nasty appearance (judging by the teaser vid they will just like in BOTF), how much control we’ll have over battle sequences, if the game does well enough to have more playable races added via DLC addons (eg Dominion), and how mod friendly it will be.

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1622900/Star_Trek_Infinite/
UPDATE: New videos and dev diaries HERE!
UPDATE2: Game released! Plus cool new videos HERE!

Blake’s Sanctum 2022 End of Year Report, News & Thankyous!

Hey guys! 🙂 Well another year has gone by and once again it’s wasn’t a particularly great one for me health wise, but hey I’m still going (reasonably) strong and am looking forward to travelling again soon (on a fun holiday for a mates wedding where I’m on best man duties!) as it’s been a few years! So as usual this is the time of the year that I look back on the year, check out all the stats and report on how things have been going for Blake’s Sanctum and talk about what’s to come!

In last years round up I commented that Blake’s Sanctum website traffic had dropped from the usual 10,000+ a year visitors however it turned out that once again the old counter site I was using was not working properly and was being blocked by most browsers due to being classic http and not https SSL certified. Then the whole counter site died completely! So in actual fact I probably did have the usual amount of visitors in 2021 but just couldn’t see them due to these issues. So in 2022 I got another counter, then that died, then another counter that seems to only work sometimes, plus I had issues with people going to the old http version of my site and not getting redirected to the certified https version (which I’ve just fixed) and the counter only worked on one and not the other, so I’ve had no friggin luck with this lol. It’s currently sitting on 77,747 so it’s safe to say I DID actually hit the big 70,000 mark this time last year and I’m probably actually around the 80,000 mark now if not more! I should look into counters I can host myself as all the free ones out there hosted elsewhere are useless these days!

My wordpress blog here has suffered a legit drop in hits though as last year I was closing in on 45,000 continuing the blogs usual form of around 10k hits a year too however right now it’s on just over 51,000 hits so only just over 5k this year. I’ve been posting more news than previous years so reasons could be lack of work on my main website and some of my most popular posts (eg the 2017 Star Trek Birth of The Federation 2 projects post) becoming old and moving down the ranking in google searches. This years top post appears to be my Walking Dead Webisodes post where I try to keep track of where people can watch all these not so well known extra side stories from the WD universe.

All my blog news posts are copied over to my Patreon page too which would increase my news hit totals however Patreon don’t give seem to give total annual views stats so who knows how many visitors I’ve had there lol. However I’m very pleased that my first (& probably last lol) Patreon Jack is still with me after a year, thank you sir! I believe Jack originally decided to support me because of my lost Civilization 2 scenario preservation work which had some brilliant successes this year with donors giving me some huge collections to add to the repository resulting in literally thousands of lost fan creations and some truly awesome scenarios I’d been looking for being found and saved!

Once the Civ2 MGE preservation work was completed (at least until the next scenario collection donation comes) mid year, I then set about getting back to work on my huuuuge Civilization 2 tour video I’ve been working on for years (which the scenario preservation work all feeds into) and then also finally got back to working on finishing all my own Civ2 scenario mod projects. I’m pleased to say that as soon as I’m back from my holiday I’ll be able to start releasing all my Civ2 mods and videos meaning 2023 will finally be the year where I finish up most of my Civ2 work and can move on to Test of Time and do a bit of preservation work along with releasing a couple of scenarios I’ve made for that too. This is a big step in me moving on in the Civilization series and wrapping up all the videos and the big Civilization series section website work, finally freeing me up to play more other games and work on other new sections of the site as well as updating old sections (I keep word docs with all the new fan projects I find & the lists are getting massive!).

Speaking of me working on the website I just wanted to say I haven’t totally neglected it over the past few years lol! As previous posted I decided to start paying for a website host giving me the space I needed to solve all my image hosting issues. I then painstakingly fixed broken image links across the site replacing all the old dead Photobucket links with new locally hosted ones (although I’ve still gotta replace some of my newer Imgur ones but at least they still work for now so replacing them is not urgent). I also did a bit of work to update the old WIP Final Fantasy Series tribute page making it more accessible and ‘ready’ for adding game tributes to, I also then used it as a template to create 2 more preliminary WIP pages for the other 2 sections I’m planning to create on the site over the next few years, a Resident Evil Series tribute page and a Wonder Boy Monster World Series tribute page. A few times over the last couple of years I’ve wanted to get started on adding tributes but because the pages weren’t setup I deemed it too much work time I should be spending on continuing work on the Civilization section, so it feels to good to have finally laid the foundation for me easily adding tributes to them in the future. I’ve hinted at these new sections over the last few years but I guess you can consider this an official announcement that these new game series sections will be coming to Blake’s Sanctum haha!

And lastly once again because of nearly all my free time going into the Civilization work not much has happened over on the Blake’s Sanctum Youtube channel this year. In fact I think I’ve only released one video this year which is terrible lol, I’m going to start getting “are you dead?” comments on my channel again at this rate lol! I’ve actually filmed a whole bunch of videos from LAN parties and my own gaming sessions however because of all the Civ video work I keep delaying them. So I’ll work to remedy that and get some of these other gaming videos out there in Feb/March after my holiday. Then once I start releasing the big Civ2 videos the channel will really come to life again as I’ve got so much content in the pipeline (literally gigs of unreleased recordings I’ve got backed up on like 3 portable hard drives cause I’m scared of losing it all lol). Anyway despite my inactivity the channel finally hit the big 1000 subscribers earlier in the year and nearly 200 more wonderful people have subbed me since. Sadly because my total public watch hours time is still below 4,000 I still can’t re-monetize the channel which is annoying but hopefully once I push out all the content that’ll change things! However in the end it’s not the end of the world as I don’t create videos to make money, I create them to share my love of great gaming/modding content with fellow fans!

Well I think that’s enough rambling for this year. Thank you everyone who has supported my site over the years. Hope you all had a lovely Christmas and let’s knock down some retro gaming goals in 2023! 🙂

PS – Oh and I haven’t done a list of site changes since 2018 so here’s a new one below covering everything I’ve done since then…

Netbash 2019-2020! Retro Gaming Multiplayer LAN Party Videos

Hey everyone 🙂

I don’t know about you guys but when I was a young man in the late 90s and early 2000s I loved meeting up with 3 or 4 mates, getting some booze & bad take away food, bringing our computers over and playing multiplayer games like Command & Conquer, Unreal Tournament, Counterstrike, and Civilization just to name a few. We nicknamed them ‘netbashes’ (although most of the world call them LAN parties) and had many over those years but sadly for whatever reason (grew up, got jobs, got girlfriends etc) we stopped doing them after 2001ish.

Well in 2017 we decided to bring back the netbash (possibly due to an early midlife crisis haha) and relive our youth playing some of these great old games. Thanks to the fan gaming and modding community its easier than ever to play some of these classic games on modern machines. OpenRA in particular is just an utterly brilliant and addictive way to relive C&C and Dune gaming. Since I already had a website and youtube channel devoted to retro gaming and mods I decided to start filming some of our netbash games to improve the content. Below are some of the videos of these great fan remakes and mods of great classic games!

If you haven’t seen my earlier Netbash posts then you can find them HERE, HERE and HERE

2019-2020 Netbash’s
Well once again I’m super late with this post that I’ve combined lots of LAN parties over 2 years into one post as I no longer remember how many Netbashes we had and what naughty foods we ate haha!

We had number of great netbashes in 2019 and 2020 with Mick , James & myself along with David and Bryan making appearances. New games were tested such as the awesome Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion mod scene (Star Trek Armada 3 and Halo Sins of the Prophets) and Age of Empires 3 and we also had some more OpenRA games testing awesome 3rd party mods like Classic Dune 2, Red Alert 1 Doom horror survival map Purgatory, Red Alert 2 Romanov’s Vengeance resulting in a number of cool videos filmed! Here they are below!
2019 Bashes naughty meals of choice: Salsa’s Fresh Mex Grill, Nordburger, and Lawash Bakery (Afgan food)!
2020 Bashes naughty meals of choice: NONE! We were stuck in lockdown and had to play remotely over the internet!

OpenRA C&C Red Alert 1 Survival Horror Map Purgatory (4 Players vs DOOM MONSTERS)

OpenRA C&C Red Alert 2 Romanov’s Vengeance Mod Allied Multiplayer (4 Players vs 4 AIs)

Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen in VR & Touchscreen!

OMG he’s done it again. Last time I posted about a guy playing my Star Trek Doom Mod in VR and hoped that he’d play my Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen mod in VR too and he has!!! It’s super cool seeing him raise his hand shooting bolts out of it as if its his own lol. On top of that another fellow saw this video and decided to showcase QFG4-3D on his Doom video channel where he plays Doom mods on a touchscreen pad. Under normal circumstances my nasty monsters would slaughter anyone foolish enough to try and play the game with touch controls haha but he employs a number of clever programs and mods that add special moves like a Mortal Kombat style fast ground slide attack. It’s super fun to watch however not being QFG fans combined with trying to play fast means these guys miss a lot of the secret places sadly haha. Oh and like last time there’s a few glitches and they’ve both removed my QFG4 music sadly. I’ll post both videos below with my commentary! 🙂

VR Video

00:00 good to scene my cutscenes big and readable in this video, they were so tiny in his star trek video. ZDoom forum has a really good guide now on how to do strafe style cutscenes and npcs removing the need for my ‘virtual cinemas’ so when I come back to these projects one day I’ll overhaul all the cutscenes.

01:15 haha welcome to hell.. the ‘badders’ are a annoyingly fast with their swoops in the original QFG4 so I was thrilled when I found a super fast bees addon for hexen that I could modify into Badders. Having them swooping at your face in VR looks nasty haha.

Star Trek Doom GZDoom Mod in VR!

OH MY GOD!!!! Someone has played my Star Trek Doom Mod in VR!!!!!!!! I knew it was possible but had never seen it. It’s so cool seeing him hold up his arm to fire the phaser like its real haha. Its a bit glitchy and he removed all my music for copyright reasons sadly but its a very cool vid! Hope he tries my Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen mod in VR one day too!
EDIT: Now he has!!! Check out my new post about him playing QFG4-3D. 🙂

Blake’s video commentary:
bahahaha at 06:05 !!!!! I set that jump scare up deliberately as everyone will be distracted by the borg and not notice the species 8472 broodlings coming out of the jefferies tube. It makes you jump in 2D/regular non-VR 3D but in VR I can see from his reaction its even worse hahahaha. 🙂

06:10 Bit of shame the ducking doesn’t work properly in VR, you can’t stick your head through the ceiling in the regular version lol.

07:50 He just killed his allied friendly crew members who don’t attack you..oh well that’s what they get for wearing red hahaha.

08:40 More crew members slaughtered lol!!!

11:30 Welcome to the bridge! Picard thanks you for not murdering more of his crew there hehe. 😛

12:29 Congrats on finding the ‘secret’ area. I was looking forward to see how this would go in VR. For anyone watching the intro text (unreadable in this video) warns you that this engineering area is a test area that’s not finished hence the recycled tiled textures.

Star Trek Borg & Star Trek Klingon Movies

I recently posted about the Starfleet Academy movie fan cut using footage from the Starfleet Academy and Klingon Academy, and that got me thinking about how I’d never got around to playing or watching the other big FMV Star Trek Games from the 90s Star Trek Borg and Star Trek Klingon. So I went hunting and found some great long play videos where there’s no commentary and every story alternative is played out for you allowing you to just sit back and watch them like a tv episode or film.

These interactive FMV games were made in the mid 90s when Star Trek was firing on all cylinders giving them access to the TV shows sets and actors. No big names other than John de Lancie (our favourite superbeing Q), Robert O’Reilly (Gowron) and J. G. Hertzler (Martok) appear but you will recognise many of the actors in both games from their many guest ‘alien or crew member of the week’ appearances on TNG, DS9, Voyager and the TNG films too.

Star Trek Borg was directed James L. Conway who directed many Trek episodes and Star Trek Klingon was directed by none other than Jonathan Frakes (Riker) so both games really do feel like interactive episodes of trek due to the directions, sets and actors. Fans of Q and Gowron will definitely enjoy these as both John de Lancie and Robert O’Reilly are brilliant!

Star Trek Starfleet Academy The Movie

Despite being a big classic Star Trek gamer (hence why I have a massive Star Trek Gaming Website section at Blake’s Sanctum) I never did get around to playing Interplay’s Starfleet Academy and Klingon Academy games other than maybe a quick try of a demo or 2. The gameplay never blew me away however what I did regret missing was all the FMV cutscenes with original cast members including William Shatner (Kirk), Walter Koenig (Chekov), and George Takei (Sulu) along with Star Trek 6’s excellent Klingons Christopher Plummer (General Chang) and David Warner (Chancellor Gorkon).

Well thankfully a youtuber has gathered all the FMV cutscenes and arranged/cut a movie out of them that has over 2 million views now! It’s quite funny looking in the comments and seeing all these confused people saying “I didn’t know about this movie, how is this possible??” failing to realise its from video games haha!

Seeing this makes me want to check about all the FMV footage from the Star Trek Borg and Star Trek Klingon games too!

More Star Trek Doom and Quest For Glory IV 3D Hexen reviews!

Red alert! Clearly it was a good idea to create those ModDB pages as another youtube reviewer playing my Star Trek Doom Mod for his Patreon page has been detected. This one is really good! His presentation and editing is excellent, his delivery/comments are funny and his criticisms are fair. There’s also hundreds of comments (some not so nice lol) that are a fascinating read.

Both Star Trek Doom Mod and my Quest for Glory IV 3D Hexen mods have been tributed at DSOGaming which is cool.

QFG4-3D has also been tributed at a Norwegian gaming site too!

And finally someone also appears to have put up a Star Trek Doom download and Quest For Glory IV 3D Hexen download on the Gamepressure website too which is nice!