FTL: Faster Than Light - Steam

Faster Than Light: Failing To Live.

When my cousin suggested I play this game, and when I'd heard about it originally, I wasn't that impressed by the idea and scope, and if this is a lesson to go by, it's that I really should play more new ideas and new games coming up. Once someone mentioned Rogue-like however, I became intrigued by the game that is FTL: Faster Than Light.

Ah the good ship S.S Dickslap, may she carry us far on our mission!

The scope is simple enough, you get to pick a ship that's outfitted with various components and various crew members and you set sail through the cosmos in a race against time from the Rebel Fleet that is chasing you, while you're trying to get back to your home base and fight off the advancing war. In the meantime, because you're on the run and likely will NOT have enough fuel, you'll have to fight, kill, barter, trade, con and use various other means to navigate your way through the interstellar space zones, gathering resources and finally getting to the last destination, a huge war.

Where to go next? There's plenty of choice and option but each one could be dangerous

As once might guess, this sounds virtually impossible, and in true rogue like fashion, it is. In what feels a little more like Oregon Trail in Space than an actual Rogue-like, you'll be navigating through the stars and hopping from beacon to beacon using up fuel as you go. Run out of fuel and you'll have to put on your distress signal and wait a few turns, in which the Rebel Fleet can catch up to you. However you could also end up being picked off by pirates, other aliens or opportunist space faring people.

Fight time, see their ship, see your own, plan quickly an attack strategy and try to win.

To go with this, you also have to micro manage your ammo if you're using rockets (not so with lasers, that just requires power), your extra systems such as Oxygen (though not ALWAYS important if you're ONE species of space creature...), Cameras to scan your ship and others, engines to escape and evade attacks, shields to ... shield from attacks (though rockets go through most shields), your weapons systems to ensure you can counter-attack and various optional ones ranging from medibays, cloning vats, mind controllers (great for fucking up the enemy's crew), drones, hacking tools and more.

To the victor go the spoils.

While you start with very little, a bit of exploration later and you'll gather some scrap from various places and can use that to trade, buy new crew members that each have their own positives and negatives with them, new weapons, new systems and bonuses such as enhanced shields and such. In many places you may find distress calls which can be someone in need of help, or a trap set by pirates that will involve being engaged in a fight.

Are they refugees? Or are they in disguise? Choose carefully.

The events are staggering, ranging from helping out planets with infections, to losing your own crew to a virus that later reconstitutes itself as your former crew member with maxed out stats and wants to help (assuming you didn't kill the virus), meeting mad crews and having to duel them, being boarded by other crews and having to fight them off in hand to hand combat on your own ship WHILE fighting back with your weapons, even going so far as to board THEIR ship and wipe them out if you can. In some cases, your opponent may offer a surrender and you can either take it and their offer of resources with it, or wipe them out and take it all (if anything is left after the explosion). Other events include being too close to stars and having to contend with solar flares that set parts of your ship on fire.

Plan your route carefully, some zones are more treacherous than others.

There is a LOT of game beneath the surface but we're still faced with the Oregon Trail/Rogue like problem, in that you WILL die, a lot. For some this is a problem, for those brought up on the arcade days where you play and play and get a little better each time or try something new, they'll get the most from this kind of game. I'll openly confess that I've never beaten the original Rogue and have no idea if it's even possible, though THIS game can be beaten if you manage to get to the 8th zone and defeat the flag ship. Take into account that it's very unlikely that you will, if ever. But that doesn't mean the game is unenjoyable, it's just a sidestep away from those games that let players beat the game if they continue to plug away at the game and end up with a lovely plot based ending. This game will make you earn it.

The red line is where my beam will ruin their day.

The graphics are almost minimalist and yet there's a surprisingly good level of detail to them, the HUD isn't cluttered or confusion (unless you REALLY go overboard with the upgrades) and the layouts of other ships make it nice and clear to see where their shield generators are so you can hammer those then pick out the weapons systems or just laser the crew and set the place on fire. Everything is iconic in nature and contrasts well with the interesting backdrops of space, planets, stars and asteroid fields.

Systems repaired, ready to advance once again into the dark unknown.

As for the audio, FTL brings a rather calm and eclectic mix of music that never becomes overbearing or distracting and is the louder side of ambient to the game enough that you may catch yourself humming the occasional bars of music now and then. Laser blasts, rockets, explosions and beams never take away from the soft experience of the game that makes you rather away that this is more a management game than an action game.

Careful, some alien ships mate this way, you don't want in on it. I'm not joking.

There is a lot of strategy in this game, whether it's how you attack one ship and then how you attack another. Deciding whether to investigate a distress call or pass it by with dwindling fuel and low shields, who to hire and fire to get the most efficient crew that you can and many more different means of trying to fend off death and it's slow, inevitable approach. Failure is always an option and sometimes the only answer and that may put off a lot of players from giving this game a chance, personally, I wish I'd played it sooner.

Christmas Special 2014

This Christmas is brought with a little extra. An animated GIF aren't you all lucky!

Full of festive cheer as always.

Merry Xmas all and keep up the good gaming!

Typing of the Dead - Dreamcast/PC

That's right, TYPING of the Dead.

UltraKey, Mavis Beacon, Typing Instructor, all popular and famous typing tutor programs that people have used through the years. Programs that deal with accuracy, learning the home keys (asdf and jkl; for those interested) while also there's the lovely aspect of online competition for some programs that allow for people to duel off at writing up pangrams, anagrams of pangrams and words that consist of either the left hand, right hand, or specific rows of the keys like Typewriter (Top row only on QWERTY). But did anybody really consider we could use such a program to kill zombies?

Viciously villifying vocabulary there.

Typing of the Dead, a game that takes Hose of The Dead 2 from the Dreamcast and gives you a keyboard instead of a light gun and sets you up to type zombies to death. It is as impressive as it sounds. Though it's on the PC, it's clear that this is a conversion from the Dreamcast as you can see that the characters are carrying keyboards, with Dreamcasts on their back with a GIANT BATTERY atop that. Which also explains why you cannot quit out of the program and have to switch to the Task Manager to get out (or alt-tab) as the Dreamcast would have just switched off.

Dreamcasts and keyboards!

The game is essentially the same, same levels, same bosses, same secrets and bonus routes but there's more. Oh so much more in this game. Firstly, there's a whole tutorial session that lets you practise to improve your skills, there's Arcade mode which is just straight forward typing at enemies and bosses, Original mode that gives you bonus items and power ups from Molotov's that kills all on screen to golden hands that auto type the right keys regardless of what you type. You can also go the route of the tests and boss runs or even play against the CPU (how's that even fair?) and Network modes.

No, it's not Cell phone.

But the gameplay is what really sells this game. The first level will run you with words like AD, R2 and D2 (and not unintentionally I should add) while some of the bonus areas will have things like defeating 10 or so zombies without getting hit, while the words will be specifically focused ranging from all of them having double letters, or all themed on animals, or themed on greetings for a date. The topics and selection of words is very ranged and varied to the point of being outlandishly obscure such as "Everyone's a Schoolgirl". You just have to type the word in the box (spaces are optional) before the monster hits you. Some will be huge sentences, some just words, and the quick fire ones will be a single character from A to Z, symbols and numbers.

"Wasting my life writing shitty articles" isn't an option?

The real gem in this is the outright ridiculous humour and wordplay that comes in the last few levels. Bosses that require you to type out answers to questions. Questions like "What can you not buy in a shop?" and of the three responses, "Body parts" should be your answer. Other questions have all three answers as viable and yet crazy to the point where I've lost hit points as a result of laugh my arse off at the options. Though you can take hits from enemies, it should be noted that with every perfect response (no typos), you build up a refill bar, once that's topped off, you get another free life point. You can also pick up lives from saving people and being quick enough to hit the keys when you're passing boxes and crates with items within them.

You won the game, now type out the credits.

Having to answer the question "What do you do in bed?" and being treated with answers like "Make a bed fort", "Pretend to be sick" and "Have a wan-" ok maybe not that last one, but it's almost as close to the mark as some of the options available to us. The game itself modifies from the original in that zombies will hold back as long as you're typing their words consistently, inaccuracies will cause you to drop score ratings on those enemies while bosses are a lot less forgiving. It's a fascinating idea and the humour is rife through the game with how it's delivered. Play it, if only to laugh at the humour, laugh at the risible notion of a typing tutor that fuses apocalyptic zombies scenarios and keyboard accuracy and laugh at a game that pokes as much fun at you as it does at itself and western society.

House Of The Dead 2 - PC

There's the dead, it's the second game, but... Not so much the House from the first game.

I have to admit, I'm a big fan of light-gun games. Whether it's the joystick-cum-machinegun in the form of Operation Thunderbolt/Wolf, Mechanised Attack or Beast Busters, or an actual light gun that you specifically aim and shoot such as Point Blank, Time Crisis and this lovely little game, House of The Dead 2. On the PC, without a light gun... Well technically you could buy it with a sort of light gun and it came with House of the Dead 2 and it came with Virtua Cop... It didn't work so well.

This is a boss. This is also how to kill the boss. Shoot the annoying gobby one.

But here it is on the PC, House of the Dead 2 and you get to use the mouse with the game instead of the light gun... Pretty much defeating the point but hey-ho, let's go onwards with the game as it is.

Hold my fire? Seriously???

House of the Dead 2, a game by SEGA where you take it upon yourself as an agent of some sort armed with unlimited clips of ammo and a pistol, to uncover the undead conspiracy (it's a kind of obvious to be honest), and battle your way through armies of the undead, monsters, mutations and all other sorts of nastiness in an effort to... Get to the end of the game and see if you earned some sort of award. At least, that's the arcade part.

Yeah um.... Ooops...

Journeying your way through the desolate and ruined city, you'll encounter other agents and hear more of the plot, not that it matters as you'll be fighting your way through things regardless. What you can do however, is find that fights are easier if you score headshots and hidden in places around the game are a whole host of little bonuses such as extra points, extra hit points and even alternative routes depending upon if you hit the right item at the right time or if you rescue specific innocents before their untimely demise. (Or you shoot them yourself).

Dead in 3... 2... 1...

The levels start out easy enough with relatively few enemies appearing and those that do give you plenty of chance to line up, squeeze off the right shot and move onto the next little confrontation. While later levels and later within levels, you'll be set upon by more and more immediate threats that pop up and require not only quick reflexes but multiple shots to dispatch of your foes. Get far enough through the level and you'll be greeted by one of the game's many bosses. Ranging from "Flying nutcase with a headless knight" to "Giant chainsaw man" to "My cousin as a fish monster" and my personal favourite "The Magician" from the first game. Yes, I actually grinned at the opportunity to fight this little mascot of House Of The Dead again.

Welcome back, Magician. Let's go for Round 2!

What the PC (and home console) version have however, is an abundance of extra options beyond just the game itself. There's the Original mode where players can play through multiple times in order to gain extra powerups and adjustments that give them an extra edge, such as larger clips, different guns, more powerful rounds, unlimited ammo machine guns etc. But at a single use cost for that play through and performing better in levels will net more purposeful and powerful rewards. It does make quite the difference when you upgrade your pistol for a grenade launcher.

The further you get into the game, the more futuristic things become.

Boss mode, Training and Network modes are available for those that want to practise on the bosses, practise at practising the game with various tasks and options and lastly, for people that like to play co-operative not on one machine. There's a little extra here for others that gives a slightly better replay value and the die-hard fans can also get themselves bonus items for 5* ratings on EVERYTHING but you're rewarded some VERY powerful items and infinite use items such as credits too. Though by this point, there's going to be little challenge in the game for those players.

Bonus lessons in Gray's Anatomy did not feature this.

The music and audio are fairly good though don't pause the game as the whole music restarts if you do. It keeps to light little upbeat tempo with an undertone of orchestral accompaniment and doesn't become overbearing on the actual gameplay. Though the final boss fight and magician boss fight feature the more pronounced compositional work, with the Magician in particular being a reprise of the original game's final boss music and a welcome return it is too.

There's a lot of different, varied, and sometimes stupid ways, to lose health. This is the stupid way.

Everything looks a little dated by today's standards. The 3D engine fitting well with the game back in arcades on the AM2 systems and the Dreamcast but the transition to the PC has left things feeling a little hollow, animations and movements come across straight from the uncanny valley and the lack of facial expressions leads us to believe that this city is inhabited by the army of the uncaring bastard when people watch their friends and family eaten alive and still show the same nonchalant expression.

Dead, of the House...2?

It's a fun game but without the light gun and that extra level of immersion, it falls flat on itself, you'd be better off finding it in the arcades (or the later games for that matter) or getting the home console version.

Terminator: Future Shock - PC/DOS

T-800 is going to shoot you in the face, from an FMV

The first game to use the XnGine from Bethesda Softworks back in 1995 before later being used to develop Daggerfall and further TES games before Morrowind plumped for a better engine, but you can see the work being laid down in this game and the direction it started to take gaming.

He's not joking, he's dying but won't until you actually begin the mission.

Future Shock takes the Terminator franchise and gives us a 3D world in which to explore level by level, as we develop from a general runaway in the future from murderous robots into a fighter with the resistance to the greatly exalted SAVIOUR OF EVERYTHING! Yes the game does escalate your achievements quickly towards the end but justifiably so. As said, you start off as someone that escapes a disposal camp and while being chased down, is rescued by a resistance fighter that gets killed in the process. Upon talking to the dying man, you're given the objective to get back to the resistance and alert John Connor. From there it all goes mad.

A little exploration will net you stronger weapons than you'd usually find.

The first thing that grabs you when you start to play is that the levels are huge, especially considering at the time that the usual game was ranging from Doom, to Duke Nukem, to Quake with significantly smaller (but also more involving) levels. Here we have the first level can take players around 30 minutes to complete if they get involved in the exploration incentive of the layout. Wandering the nuclear wasteland of post-apocalyptica lets you head into derelict buildings and ransack them but with the added details you tend to find the untold stories of families murdered in their homes but the machines and left to rot, while other places show signs of damage and destruction and few skeletons huddled together in one of the bedrooms, the detail is surprising and bleak.

Yep, it's the map. Yep, it's a little complicated but moves in fluid 3D.

That's the beauty of Future Shock, you can explore the entire map and find weapon caches with access to a rocket launcher on the first level IF and ONLY IF, you find and locate them and that alone can take some serious levels of exploring to achieve. The rocket launcher for example is found in a laser-fenced off area, atop a building that you can leap to if you have the health to survive but after jumping over or around a human-sized blending machine. Later weapons are even more difficult to find.

Certainly a bleak outlook.

The story however, unfolds steadily in cut-scenes and in small snippets received during play. As such it delves into the idea behind time manipulation, branching into theories of quantum mechanics and deploys various gaming tricks to involve the ideas into more than just back ground plot. The key focus is the idea that the main bad guy, SkyNET is capable of sending itself information into the past to alert itself of key and critical points in time. As such, it can send more and more robots your way, resulting in time based teleportation of robots appearing in front of you when we switch one timeline for another. More impressively is the design of some levels to mimic déjà vu and repeats key components of the levels to repeat themselves which leaves the player genuinely wondering if they're actually lost or being subjected to the time dilation issue mentioned within the game.

Flying missions and personalised messages!

As you progress, the game throws out bigger and more powerful robots until you're faced with floating/flying monstrosities that can shred you instantly (and the first time you meet THESE is when your back is turned to them) as well as a hovering uprightly little tank with a laser gun and TWIN ROCKET PODS of which you will NEVER HEAR IT COMING. You will learn quickly to hate this little fucker. On top of that you'll come up against the less subtle robots like the HKs and the Goliaths which are based straight on the large tank looking robot from the first film "The Terminator" that was fought in a flashback-of-the-future and generally is the game's bullet sponge for draining ammo and giving back nothing in return.

Ho, Ho, Ho, now I have a machine gun.

Weaponry is fairly varied though limited at the same time. Machine gun, Assault Rifle and Uzi use the same ammo and jump pump out more at a time. The shotgun is fairly standard, reliable but slow. Grenade launcher has no reticule thanks to gravity affliction. Rockets are powerful but so rare and valuable you'd not feel up to using it, laser rifle and laser cannon eat through ammo too quickly and plasma weapons are too slow to cause significant damage at a sufficiently fast pace. However, throwables like Molotovs, pipe bombs, grenades, canisters (ow) and the satchel charges (missions only and be CAREFUL WHERE YOU USE IT!) give a little extra to play with while battling the robots.

A steady mix of on-foot, driving and flying missions to battle through.

But you won't be fighting the robots for the most part. Instead you'll be fighting the scripting within the game engine. The biggest problem with the game is that unless you do the right thing at the right time, you'll not be able to progress. For example, and it may seem obvious at the time I say this, but in the third level if you venture into the processing point for human captives, you'll be trapped. It seems obvious but at the same time this is a game that has encouraged wanton exploration and now punishes you HEAVILY if you venture in and more so if you save because that means you're starting over from the beginning. Later missions have the issue of making sure you hit the right button at the right time in the right order otherwise you're sunk and not going any further in the game's progression and there's NO real clue as to the order required until you realise you're stuck and not going to be making it home to see little Timmy for Xmas.

Whether an oversight or intention, be careful here as you too can end up trapped like the others and doomed forever.

The game has quite the level of emersion if you let it take you and can really sell itself on the "end of the world" situation and how it plays but if you hit one of this sticking points that disrupts your game entirely then reality is brought crashing back with such a suddenness that you'll find it harder to get back into the game. Aside from that, if you can stomach the bugs, you'll find an impressive game to enjoy.