I know a man who was once consumed by Gratuitous Space Battles. The stand-offish strategy lets you design a fleet, sketch out a plan of attack and then deploy them against the enemy. It's like cultivating a bionic army of space-pokemon. Once they're away, you can only watch as they're lasered, rocketed and bombed into shimmering clouds of galactic debris. My friend spent hours tinkering with the modules on each ship. He tried sending hordes of tiny fighters into the fray. He tried lone rocketeering behemoths. With every iteration his score increased until he entered the upper echelons of the global high score table. Then, one day, he was gone. All that remained was his chair, a puddle of alien goo and a note in cryptic cosmic shorthand.
I sometimes wonder what happened to that guy. I like to think he was recruited by some interstellar warmongers to direct their ships. Wherever he is, I'm sure he's playing the new Gratuitous Space Battles expansion, The Outcasts.
As you'd expect, the expansion lets you play as The Outcasts faction. It includes 10 new ship designs and some neat Outcast-specific ship modules like the "multiple target tractor beam" and a "decoy projector" to create wobbly holographic decoys. See that particular gadget in action and many, many lasers in the trailer below. The Outcasts is available now from the Positech site , or via Steam for $5.99.
If you're intrigued by Gratuitous Space Battles, check out the demo , and have a look at Positech's innovate tower assault/tower defense hybrid, Gratuitous Tank Battles (which also has a demo )
