FTL: Faster Than Light Review

FTL: Faster Than Light is a space simulator where you and your crew are piloting a ship trying to run from a Rebel fleet bent on stopping you from delivering key data to the Federation. FTL was developed by Subset Games (Matthew Davis and Justin Ma) and partially funded through a Kickstarter campaign. The game is available (Mac, PC, Linux) via the FTL website or through Steam.

I first heard about FTL from listing to the Major Nelson podcast where E mentioned that he was playing the game. From there I searched for the game and found the FTL website. There wasn’t much detail there, so I happened to come across this YouTube video of a play-through that gave a really good overview of the game:

FTL has minimalistic top-down graphics and real-time combat. You control all aspects of your ship from how much power you put into various ship systems to where you station your crew (they add bonuses as they become more proficient at a job – faster weapon power up, etc.) and how you upgrade your ship. The items you most have to manage are fuel, missiles, drone parts and scrap - the currency of the future. The controls are point and click and easy to learn and you can pause when necessary – which it is if your ship has been boarded, has a hull breach and is on fire – to help you think about where to move crew or what part of an enemy ship to target.

The basic elements of the game have you jumping (using FTL drives) to various spots in a given star sector. At each stop you may run into hostile ships, potential quests, black market stores or other challenges or dangers. At each you will have a series of choices to make that may help or hurt your overall goal to escape the Rebel fleet and reach the Federation. With each jump you make in a sector, it will (hopefully) take you closer to the exit point (where you can jump to the next sector) and away from the Rebel fleet (shown on the jump screen as a growing danger area you want to avoid – read you fight enemy ships every jump).

FTL doesn’t waste much energy on the graphics, but the sound is great and the game play is really engaging. It is similar to rogue-like games (Rogue, NetHack, etc.) in that death of your ship and crew is permanent. I found that it made me think fondly of NetTrek and similar minimal graphics starship games of the past. There are also Stats and Achievements to help you track how well you have done on each game. There are also multiple ship designs that can be unlocked by various achievements. I have played six games so far and unlocked one new ship design and haven’t come close to winning the game on normal, succumbing to a different death each time.

FTL is hard, fun and re-playable and at $10, you should go out and get it. If you wonder if FTL is right for you, watch the video above for a little while to get a feel for how it works and how quickly things can go from great to running at the edge of your seat. FTL gets 4 Mick Happies. Safe travels in the darkness of space.

Revolution Pilot Review

Revolution is a new drama series on NBC created by Eric Kripke (known for creating the television show Supernatural). The show is set fifteen years after an event where all electricity (including batteries) stopped working and hasn’t come back on. No cars, planes, lights, etc. As you might expect, the world has broken down and most of the population has died off in the fifteen years since the event.

Revolution, at least in the first episode directed by Jon Favreau, focuses on the Matheson family as “Charlie” Matheson (played by Tracy Spiridakos) searches for help from her uncle Miles (played by Billy Burke). During the episode we get a glimpse at what the world of Revolution is like. Things look a lot like the History channel show, Life After People. There are a lot of gangs and people to avoid, even the authorities of the area Charlie and her companions are travelling through, the Monroe Republic.

Being a big fan of the Emberverse (or Change) novels by S.M. Stirling (the first is Dies the Fire), I was really looking forward to watching the pilot of Revolution. I was able to catch it for free before airing on NBC.com (and later able to download it off iTunes for free). I am happy to say that I enjoyed the pilot. There were the nods to all of the usual post-apocalyptic clichés such as giving all of your cash for some toilet paper. Speaking of which, the Target toilet paper ad during the airing of the show online was inspired and very funny.

I was also pleasantly surprised that Revolution is something different than the Emberverse novels. Guns work along with some other things I won’t mention. It all leaves you wondering if the event may not be permanent for the world of Revolution. I hope that the answers won’t be long in coming and other questions will be posed to replace those that are answers.

I am looking forward to the second episode and learning more about the Matheson family. I will have to see if I can watch them online or if I will need to buy them off iTunes. Either way, I will be watching. Revolution (pilot) gets four Mick Happies. Now I am off to plan my apocalypse stash of ammunition, water and toilet paper. (It’s something my family and I discuss fairly regularly while going through the grocery store or Target).

In Her Name Review

Sometimes I come across things to try in strange ways. My wife has a number of independent authors who she has followed on twitter and suggested I check them out. One of them is Michael R. Hicks and he has published several books in a Science Fiction series called In Her Name. The books are broken into three trilogies, one still being written, and the first books in the released trilogies are available for free as e-books.

Not one to pass up on free books, I downloaded In Her Name: First Contact and In Her Name: Empire through iBooks. I started reading the series with In Her Name: First Contact, which tells the story of what happens when mankind accidentally discovers a technologically superior and vastly older warlike alien race, the Kreelans. The Kreelans make it a habit of going to war with any alien race they discover.

In First Contact, we learn that the Kreelans are an ancient race that is connected spiritually by a connection they call the Bloodsong that shares their emotions and passions and the will of their Empress to all Kreelans. The Kreelan race is slowly dying out and they have a prophecy that someday an alien will be found whose blood can sing and this will be the Kreelan’s salvation. After contact with humans, the Kreelans go to war to test mankind to determine if their souls can sing.

The rest of the first trilogy (chronologically) of the In Her Name series is continued in the books Legend of the Sword and Dead Soul (or collected in a single volume called In Her Name: The Last War). After reading In Her Name: First Contact, I bought The Last War as an e-book through Amazon for less than $5 (it is not available on iBooks). The Last War is a good military Science Fiction story with man fighting to survive against aliens they don’t understand and against their own nature (politics, pettiness and greed).

I have also read In Her Name: Empire, the first book of the second trilogy. Empire is set about a hundred years later during the conflict between the Kreelans and the human Confederation. Empire is the story of Reza Gard, a young boy who loses his parents, is put in a labor camp for orphans and later is captured by the Kreelans and trained in the Kreelan culture. I felt that Empire (which was written before The Last War) was more Space Opera in nature and deals with the details of Reza and is life and what he learns as a Kreelan prisoner than the greater war between man and Kreelans.

I liked these books and will be buying the second trilogy collection, In Her Name: Redemption to see how the conflict between the Kreelans and man ends. It was refreshing in The Last War to have a story where not everyone lives through the massive conflict that the book describes. There are characters that do extraordinary things, but many of them do not cheat death repeatedly. I also liked the unique culture of the alien race and how it was described.

You should download the free e-books In Her Name: First Contact and In Her Name: Empire. If you like Science Fiction, you will enjoy them and want to get the rest of the story. Here are my ratings for the books in the series I have read so far:

In Her Name: First Contact – 4 Mick Happies.

In Her Name: The Last War – 3 and a half Mick Happies.

In Her Name: Empire – 3 Mick Happies.

After reading these books, let’s hope when we do finally travel among the stars that any alien races we encounter are peaceful.