Friday Indiegame: FTL (Faster Than Light)

"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."
Ha! well that was fun, no? all right, damn it.

Faster Than Light (known as FTL) is made by Subset Games founded by 2 people with the names Justin Ma and Matthew Davis, both former 2K China employees. This game is their first released title which was the product of a successful Kickstarter campaign which raised over 2000% of their requested budget. How much you ask?

Subset Games asked for 10,000 dollars but boasted in 200,542 dollars instead, using the additional funds on music and more content for the game. (alot of the money went to the Music)

Now then! TO THE BRIDGE!

The game is based on a galaxy with different sectors controlled by different races, coalitions and pirates. The player belongs to a once powerful Federation, which has been weakened by the years of war against Rebels, and it's so severe that the Federation is about to be Destroyed.

The crew on your spaceship managed someone to get theirs hands on the secret Rebel plans that can turn the tide of battle. The problem is that the Federation base is many sectors away from your starting position, and to make it more fun; The entire Rebel fleet are chasing you with a reckless attitude.
Not only that, almost all the spaceship you meet on your voyage wants to kill you and use your spaceship for scrap materials.

OK so that was the story behind it, but what about the game and whatnot?
The first thing that happens when you start up a new game is how you can rename the crew and spaceship, You can change the layout or choose a different ship (although you need to finish the game or do certain achievements to unlock them). All the ships have different weapons, layout and looks. You can choose between Easy and Normal, get used to die, because this ain't a happy place when you try it for the first few times.
The start is in a sector where you have to jump from location to locations until you're at the far end of that sector and to phase to a new one. From time to time you will get some distress calls, ambushes, quests and stores.

TO THE COMBAT! 

The combat in FTL is something new (in my eyes at least), you start with 3 crew members and you need to assign them to different locations on your ship, of course you need a pilot but you also need someone to control the weapons and shield, so you send them all around the ship.

The combat starts with you FTL to a new location, there are times you get ambushed, you got the upper hand or simply the enemy is trying to escape. You have the ship's energy that you need to assign to certain utilities on the ship, at the start you probably need to turn of the power on the first aid station to power up all the weapons for a full attack on the enemy ships or to power up your shield so you can survive the attack. The start is the "best" part since you need to think on how you want to engage the enemy ship.

There is a small speed boost to pick up when you assign people to different posts, for an example how the weapons recharge faster when you have a gunner there, and the shield if you have someone working on that post.

To be honest what makes this game is so addictive, is when you start to play you'll just tell yourself "i'll just play one game" and BAM, you've played through the day/night with no clue of what time it is. After you've failed a couple of times and learned how the game works, you've probably paid attention to how the games you've played haven't been exactly the same, maybe the distress call wasn't there the last time, or how you get attacked by a bunch of pirates so often.
This game take a small time to get used to, but when you do it's a game worth playing forever!

And not to forget the setting, the music, sounds and looks! 
First of all, the graphics are so well done, everything goes so well hand in hand.
The music is really enchanting, when I listen to it while i play i get this wanted feeling, or that I'm in space, ready to fight whatever that's out there.
The sounds are the classic "MIDI" sounds but on purpose, making it even better!

oh great... I started playing it again!
oh well, this should make up for the "Friday indiegame" I hope, and dont forget to +1 the hell out of this one if you want me to keep up the 'good' work ;D

Friday Indiegame: Minecraft

From this day forth! I shall attemt to make a theme for fridays, which should be about indiegames, maybe i'll even make wednesday FPS day or something. You can find more about indie games on wikipedia.


Indie games! it's everywhere and it's one of the most popular subjects gamers talk about. Sure you got the regular talk about how greedy EA is and how horrible the program Origin is or how great job Valve is doing with the program Steam is for that matter! But one of the 'indies' people talk about is Mojang and the game they've greated: Minecraft.

In the world of minecraft some people are lucky to find epic places like this.

Minecraft:
There is over 9 million copies sold, and I bet there is thousands of copies... pirated.
Still this is a game that was 10 euro in the early days when it was in alpha and beta, but 20 euro after the game came out as the "final product". Impressingly enough the game itself is modfriendly and there is thousand of mods available and here is to name a few:

FTB (Feed the beast, not really a mod, but a collective of mods)
Better Than Wolves (same as above)
Rei's Minimap
Millenaire

Alot of people enjoy the vanilla PvP and you got those creative minds that got the minecraft world at their disposal. You can find popular Minecraft videos like The Yogscast which does a great job in actually making an adventure in a player created world and scenery. yes, there is more people who make youtube videos, you got the griefers.

"Griefers, a sad bunch of people who got bullied at school or home, and just want to take on to other innocent people", as one would say by one that have seen the "assault" or even videos about it. Sure, there is the pro and con's about it all. yes I don't see the point in ruining others creations, other than they are just enjoying the misery of others, or they are just jealous of their victims creative minds.

But what's really interesting is how people enjoy watching those teams go into a server and literally just crash the server. But I do bet they all go an agenda to it, For an example:

1. The "griefers" get a mail or an insult from a guy or more people from the same server, where they tell them they are a piece of shit and have no life and should just die of cancer. 
2. Some power-hungry kids/teens/adults (whatever the age really) Abuses their powers being an admin, but then again I bet it would have been a scenario where they've hanged around on the server being "nice".
3. Ridiculous pricing on being a "VIP" on the server, or even an admin. Yes I know... server costs money, but there is a line between overpriced and normal fee. I've seen some stupid pricing myself, especially for being an admin and mainting the server.

 Then again.... there is always a bunch of people who just do it to ruin other's fun.


I could have written so much more about indiegames, but I feel that would be an essay rather than a small blog.