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A few weeks ago, I had to take both of my computers and my external hard drive to the PC repair shop to have them wiped. Everything. Every last nanobyte of data had to be destroyed. Why? A virus that's been plaguing me for over a year now. It all started around the time I accepted a folder of infected PDF files from a friend of mine who shall remain nameless. His antivirus wasn't totally worthless, and actually managed to quietly locate and quarantine the little nightmare. My computer, on the other hand, was equipped with Norton. Let me take a moment now to illustrate exactly how well-protected your computer is with Norton Antivirus.
Picture a shield. Not a kite or heater shield, but a big square Roman-style tower shield. You can stand behind this thing and not be seen from the other side. Seems like great protection, right? Okay. Now, replace the steel and hardened wood with a square frame made of pine, and a sheet of paper. Now soak that paper in water. Now put termites in the wood frame. Now burn it a little bit. Now punch out about five big gaping holes in the wet paper. Now slap on a big sign in all capital letters that says "PLEASE SHOOT ME." Now write that message in Comic Sans font. Now march this creation of yours, alone, against a standing battalion of over 500 angry men armed with illegally modified machine guns. And maybe an artillery battery.
Congratulations, you've experienced Norton Antivirus. As you may have imagined, it was fairly ineffective. So my computer caught the virus. And it infected everything. And then I transferred some files to my other computer. And it caught the virus. Then I paid a large amount of money to have my computer upgraded with a brand new hard drive. And then I restored some files from my external hard drive. Which were also infected. So my new hard drive became infected. And the nasty thing about the virus was that it installed itself onto the hard drive, so you could have the computer swept and cleaned of all the bugs as many times as you wanted to, because that sucker was still coming back.
So now I have an empty external drive and two very empty computers. And absolutely none of the data I had before. I lost countless amounts of short fiction, class assignments, papers, projects, images, music and other important stuff. And I needed to distract myself from that. So I bought a new game to play. Now, it's been a really long time since I've done a blog post almost exclusively over a video game. Last time that happened, my blog was still a Tumblr page and it was over Star Wars: The Old Republic. But you know what? I'm doing it again. Because this game is hilariously torturous enough that it deserves its own blog post.
The game I bought is a new independent game called "Faster Than Light." It's a game with simple graphics reminiscent of the Gameboy Advance style. You take control of a spaceship and crew, all of which you get to name yourself, and take off across the galaxy as you fly from space beacon to beacon in an attempt to escape the evil rebel fleet pursuing you. It's essentially the opposite of the plot in the opening scenes of Star Wars Episode 4. The entire goal of the game is to pilot your ship successfully through seven dangerous sectors of space to reach the 8th sector, and defeat the Rebel flagship in epic space combat. So, excited to get started, I set the game to Normal mode and started up.
Thus began the adventures of The Space Dingo and her faithful crew: Tech Specialist Luke, in charge of shields and repairing damaged ship systems; Weapon Specialist Ben, in charge of exploding things and beating the piss out of boarding parties; And last but not least, Captain Hayden, in charge of piloting and navigation. Never before had the fate of a galactic Federation rested in the hands of such a rag-tag band of incompetent laser fodder. But they had high hopes anyway.
So I started the game off with a shiny new ship and a full-health crew. Then I moved two spaces forward. There, I encountered a ship who hailed me and informed me that he was selling slaves. I had the option to either buy one for an obscenely large amount of money (which I didn't have), ignore him and move on, or fight him. The noble crew of The Space Dingo doesn't deal with slavers, so we attacked. Two minutes later, my shield system had been destroyed, my oxygen had been knocked out and my medical bay was on fire. We did manage to beat the slave ship into submission, and they gave me a slave for free and ran away. That was the positive side. The negative side was that my Tech Specialist was nearly dead, and infernos make terrible medical bays. "That's alright," I thought, "I'll just open an airlock and suffocate the fire." That would have worked better had I not forgotten that my Oxygen systems were still offline and poor Luke was doing his best to repair them as he bled out. As you may have guessed, venting the remaining oxygen in the ship was a poor choice.
Oddly enough, it wasn't the suffocation that killed Luke, he survived that well enough. He died when the oxygen system room burst into flames because the fire had traveled there from the med bay. We held a little vigil for him (when the flames finally went out), and he was then replaced with the free slave we were handed. It wasn't quite the same, but at least we had our shields back. And from there, we carried on. For about three spaces. And then we encountered an automated combat drone with a cloaking device that promptly destroyed the rest of the ship. Back in the hangar menu, I decided it was probably best to switch the difficulty to easy mode. Actually, that's a bit of a misnomer, in this game's case. I've found that there's nothing remotely easy about easy mode. In easy mode, you're going to die horribly. On normal mode, you're going to die horribly, only sooner. Still, undaunted by my initial failure, The Space Dingo 2 began its doomed voyage into the stars.
About the time I launched The Space Dingo 10, I began to accept the fact that I might not be very good at this game. I had also begun to notice a particular parallel with my crew and their D&D player counterparts. And what that means is that Luke always died first. Naming an NPC Luke is like handing him a red shirt with a particularly offensive phrase written on the back in every alien language. It was never a glorious death, either. At one point, my ship had recovered a drifting escape pod, which I opened hoping to get a new crew member. Instead, an enraged space mantis creature popped out and sliced Luke in half before proceeding to attack the rest of my crew. In another playthrough, Luke was part of a boarding party who I'd beamed over to attack the enemy crew. What I didn't realize was that all members of the party had to be in the same room before I could beam them back over, and I didn't pick his room. The enemy ship took advantage of this miscalculation by destroying my crew transporter with a missile, leaving Luke to run circles around the enemy ship trying to avoid getting shot. He was successful enough at evading the enemy crew, however he wasn't so successful at not being on the ship when the fires breaking out in all the rooms destroyed enough systems to cause fatal damage to the ship. It exploded with Luke still on board.
The other trend I began to notice was that not naming my crew members after my friends made me far less attached to them, and therefore easier to lose without wanting to restart the game. This, however, did not improve my gameplay. I still died every single time. Captain Picard would be ashamed of me, but he died in a previous playthrough. As did Captains Kirk, Morgan, Solo, Planet, Crunch, Falcon, Hook and Obvious. Virtual space pirates are ruthless.
It took me literally three weeks to beat this game. Three weeks of near-daily attempts. It doesn't seem like a long time to beat a game, but then you have to remember that this game consists of just 8 sectors, and a typical play-through from start to finish lasts only an hour or so (assuming you make it to the 8th sector without dying.)
Of all the lessons I've learned from playing FTL, the clearest one is this: If ever there comes a time when space is populated by cruisers and ships manned by small Enterprise-esque crews... I definitely shouldn't be captaining one.
-The Sarcastic Soul-
Lolz.
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