Within a couple of minutes of sitting down with Justin Ma and a build of his new game, Into the Breach [official site], preconceptions are torn to shreds. Ma is one half of the team behind FTL and when Into the Breach was announced, I wasn t alone in thinking it looked like tactical skirmisher Advance Wars, with added monsters. It is that game, to an extent, but its most notable feature isn t tied to the setting at all – it s that this is a tactical combat game in which the enemy is entirely predictable. Everything is explained below, but in short, this might be the smartest turn-based design I’ve seen since Invisible, Inc.

… [visit site to read more]

The creators of FTL have announced their next game, Into the Breach [official site], and it looks a bit like the isometric, tactical version of EDF I’ve always wanted. Tasked with defending the last remnants of humanity from giant monsters, you’ll protect cities and fight monsters in randomly generated turn-based scenarios. It looks gorgeous, as you can see in the trailer below, and will have a new soundtrack by Ben Prunty, FTL’s composer, as well as writing and world-building from the keyboard of Chris Avellone.

… [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

FTL is a Star Trek episode generator. You are in control of the crew of a spaceship and forced to race across the galaxy. Each new system visited brings with it drama, tough choices, high comedy, and the very high possibility of death. It’s thrilling.

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An entirely objective ranking of the 50 best PC RPGs ever released. Covering the entire history of computer role-playing games is a daunting task and attempting to place the best games in such a broad genre in any kind of order is even more daunting. Thankfully, we are equal to all tasks and below, you will find the best fifty PC RPGs of all time.

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Hello there, best keep your distance, for I am ill. Not just ‘bit of a sniffle/put a bigger pullover on, you great ninny’ ill, but ‘noxious substances violently erupting from everywhere’ ill. My daughter started going to nursery about three months ago, and has been bringing back a delightful cocktail of viruses and bacteria ever since – it’s been a relentless assault on my immune system, and while I’m oddly proud of how long it stood against this microbial siege, it has now collapsed in gruesome style.

It’s OK, I don’t want your pity. Unless it’s a special magical form of pity that renders me instantly able to eat again. I want to talk about games.

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I’m a broken man today, having been up til nearly 2am playing the freebie ‘Advanced Edition’ expansion for impeccably clever/brutal space survival sim/strategy/RPG FTL: Faster Than Light last night, so I guess it’s safe to say the new features haven’t broken the old spell. I had worried the various new weapons, rooms and encounters would upset FTL’s simultaneously delicate and chaotic balancing act, but in four run-throughs (three failed, once successful #humblebrag) I haven’t felt its famed cruelty ever collapsed into either messy excess or over-complication. In one game, I lost because the enemy kept teleporting over a stream of invading clones. Another I won thanks to an excellent new weapon. All’s fair in love and murderous rebel space fleets.

Thoughts and a video (with commentary, or something approximating it) below. … [visit site to read more]

Are you ready to have even more of your life sucked away by FTL’s infinite, endlessly twisting black hole of finely calibrated systems? Then you are in luck, person with an improbable amount of time on your hands, because FTL: Advanced Edition is just around the corner. Or rather, the space equivalent of a corner. There are not a lot of corners in space.

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No release date for the free FTL ‘Advanced Edition’ addon as yet, which makes me an even sadder boy than I already was. Especially in the wake of the new Clone Bay subsystem being revealed.

“The goal of the Clone Bay was to really disrupt the core way you play the game,” the devs have explained. “You ll be able to send crew off into dangerous situations without fear of death. Giant alien spiders will no longer be the terrifying, unstoppable force that you re used to, since the system can simply revive your crew after the event.”

“Giant alien spiders will no longer be… terrifying” is a bold claim, isn’t it? … [visit site to read more]

I’m beginning to think there’s some kind of conspiracy to have Torment/Project Eternity/Wasteland 2/Every Classic RPG You Can Think Of story megamind Chris Avellone write everything. It’s only a matter of time until we’re all glorified flesh puppets for his dialogue. I’m not even sure what I’m writing right now is my own. Avellone could already be pulling the strings, plucking away at my thoughts as though a master of mind-controlling bluegrass banjo. Nah, that’s crazy. Surely it’d be more eviden– BUY FTL BUY FTL BUY FTL IT’S GETTING AN EXPANSION WRITTEN BY CHRIS “SEX-LYMPICS CHAMPION” AVELLONE YEAH.

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It’s not Android games, nor soundtracks, nor books about kettles. The new Humble Bundle is the original, the Humble Indie Bundle 9. And for a ninth time in a row, it’s a corker. With names like Mark Of The Ninja, FTL: Faster Than Light, and FEZ, you can see the dollar signs spinning already.

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