It’s been ages since I've done a status update as to the current health of Base and System Services. It’s kind of an interesting time in the history of the organization, so I thought I’d bring you all up to speed.

[bass] Infrastructure

The website , Facebook page , Twitter account , and YouTube channel are all being updated regularly, though the website has been primarily been updated via the Facebook and Twitter Apps. I have been including some content from shutamultimedia.com and vincentshuta.com(a.k.a .talesoftheblackknight.com) where I think it would interest those who visit this site. But I haven’t had the time to write a lot of content just for this page. Hopefully I can turn that around a bit.

The YouTube channel has been doing particularly well, and is my most popular channel. It’s getting around 9,000 hits per month, and has over 150 subscribers.

Oh, and we still have the forums ...*sound of crickets.*

Coordinated Gaming

There hasn't been a lot of this as of late—at least that I've heard. I think I’m the last of [bass] still playing Freelancer, though I still wear the [bass] tag. I've been playing sporadically at best, and not recruiting very much. The Freelancer Universe server seems to be stable with players online, and I've been maintaining the [bass] capital ships along with the Black Fleet and IIkami’s account.

I’m tagged up on my Steam Account, so [bass] continues in existence there. I haven’t hooked up with any other [bass] members online in a while. The only online gaming I've been doing on Steam is Team Fortress 2, and that’s mostly just dropping in on servers from time to time—nothing organized.

Freelancer is the only online game I can think of where we could all work together towards a long term goal while maintaining our individual schedules, and I think people are hesitant to invest more time in FL right now. After all, this January marks the tenth anniversary of when I joined the GOI forums as a member of [bass]. The game has staying power, but most of the team has moved on. The main hope for a revival comes from the hope for a new multiplayer space game, which is anything but EVE.

Oh, and we still have the forums which is set up for different games now...*tap tap*...is this thing on?

Star Citizen

Star Citizen is a crowd-funded project put together by Chris Roberts, the main man behind Freelancer. It’s still early in development, but I've already got a ship with a lifetime unlimited warranty, and I’ve established [bass] as a faction in the game. It looks like everything we ever wished Freelancer was. It also currently requires a top of the line PC to run, which I personally lack. My parents recently upgraded to an i7- 4771 based machine when theirs packed it in. It’s got on-board video because the builders said that you would need a 2Gig card to surpass what was on the board, and my parents are not gamers. Still I tried the hanger module on this quad core, 3.5Ghz beast and found it choppy at high res—and muddled at low res. Now the minimum requirements do not suggest trying this without a dedicated video card, so I’m not surprised. But I also know that my dual core 2.53Ghz is probably going to have to stay as my top machine for a while. That doesn't bode well in the short term for me flinging myself about a new galaxy.

On the plus side, there’s nothing holding me back on the administration side of things, and there is a plethora of information about the game online. I plan to start working on the back-history of [bass] in game as it relates to the in-game factions. Certainly our identity will develop, but we need a starting point. I will keep you posted as this develops.

I can tell you that as of now I plan to keep us—as much as possible—neutral to other factions so we have the classic [bass] ability to work with just about anyone. Player hunter/killers will probably still be our primary enemy, but then they usually pick that fight. If for some reason this doesn't make sense in the Star Citizen Universe, I’ll make sure I come up with something interesting that we can get into.

Final thought for today on SC: Just checked the website and we probably won't be rocking that universe until sometime in 2015.

“You need a new game."

Steam sales have left me with a ton of games that I haven’t even installed—including Skyrim, Bioshock Infinite and a few other space sim games that may be useful alternatives to Star Citizen for those of us without the latest and greatest machines. I plan on sharing these experiences with you as well as my continued wanderings through the Fallout universe.

The long and short of it, or “TL:DR"

We’re not online together a whole lot, but thanks to social media, the team has never fallen apart. [bass ] is still alive and well, and gaming in a hundred different universes. I plan to continue to wear the tag proudly, and maintain the infrastructure. I’m confident the day will come when we’re walking side by side in the same world once again. Until then, we share the same interest as fellow gamers, and friendships forged in steel.

There are good times ahead!