Gormongous

Man, preloading was pointless. The signup and login servers are choking so hard, I can't do jack. Still, very very excited.

The Vita is a mystery to me, too. Well, the business strategy surrounding it is a mystery to me. As far as I can tell, they've put too much fancy tech into the Vita to sell it at a discount without a large enough game catalog for it to play loss-leader for, like the first few years of current-gen consoles, but so long as the handheld remains unpopular, the game catalog will remain small. It's like the archetypal model of how a console fails. The only way Sony could save it is by dumping huge amounts of money into the development community and slashing prices, gambling on a late-onset renaissance of consumer interest, but I think they know deep down that the iPhone market is too strong for that to work, so they'll just let the Vita suffocate under its own over-sophistication.

I think it's really just that the boss requires you to have been prepping since maybe the fourth or fifth sector to beat him and him specifically, if only because he has three different incarnations that each foil certain specialized builds. If I had a dollar for every time I got to the Last Stand and realized A) I won't last long enough for my boarding parties to disable his weapons, I've relied too heavily on a beam-cum-missile build that has no hope of getting through his second, drone-heavy form, or C) his shields are recharging too fast for my laser build to punch through -- and therefore have to quit or just let myself get destroyed -- I'd be able to fund every gaming kickstarter out there. Honestly, the boss is playing by different rules than you, unlike every other enemy. You're not allowed to upgrade your weapons, drones, and reactor to sport the kind of weaponry he has available, which is why I've only been able to beat him through cheese (either cloak-and-teleport or, once, a perfect storm: two dual-missile lauchers with a beam weapon and pre-igniter that barely overwhelmed his defenses every time, before he could kick my ass). You've just got to avoid being tempted to invest in upgrades beyond what is absolutely necessary, so that you'll be able to have the cloak and teleporter that can kill the boss. As a side note, I feel very very strongly that this game will have only an occasional presence in my life after I unlock all the ships. I really enjoy the structure there, even if it's largely random in execution (have W system at X level in Y system and win Z encounter), but once that's gone I have no clue what will motivate me.

You should try the Layout B for Engi. One Engi alone in a ship with no sensors, one boarding drone, and two repair drones. It smacks of drone hard-more, as if that weren't already a tautology.

Well, there's also the fact that Islam considers any visual depiction of God or His prophet to be blasphemy of the worst kind. As much as I hate to see the Muslim response be violence and hatred, I wonder why many in the West haven't picked up that pictures of Mohammad don't really make you that popular out east.

Hot tip: if you can destroy their helm, the ship is unable to dodge until it's repaired. I remember Tom Chick complaining a few days ago that the combat in this game was boring, since there's no reason to target anything but weapons or maybe shields. I thought the same for my first half-dozen games, but now I see the depth there. I'll target the O2 room with breach missiles to suffocate the ship, target the helm to keep them from dodging or jumping, target the medbay before I send a boarding party over... Yeah, I'm really taken with this too.

That's a really interesting analysis, but wouldn't you say it's possible for an author to misinterpret their own work? Say, their use of elements and motifs were intended to produce one meaning, but they are ineffective in this and much more effective in producing another?

Well, Valve has only themselves to blame on that count, since it's fifteen percent of a number that apparently means nothing.

Maybe because the chain is broken? The interconnected series of narratives reaches someone who is unable to understand them and pass them on, despite having heard the whole thing, so we devolve back to the beginning.

Hemingway insisted up to his death that his novels were just stories, with no greater meaning. Does that mean we should stop studying them, since the author's had his say? I can understand a viewpoint that accords a sort of primus inter pares status to the author's opinions of their own work, but overall I find it a shockingly narrow definition of art that confines itself to the conscious intentions of a single individual, however central to the process of composition. The audience is a participant in any work, though more obviously in certain mediums like video games, and if I find a work inspiring or meaningful in a certain way, who is the author to tell me that I'm wrong? I'm the one experiencing their work, an event totally removed from whatever the author might have had in mind when creating it. You'd think that George Lucas and Ridley Scott would have taught people by now that the author, however influential or learned, is just one among many in the collaborative effort that is the creation and interpretation of a work. The merit and meaning of the latter exist outside and separate from them, at least in part. Even more authoritative figures like Thucydides, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Livy can be analyzed in ways they would have found foreign and even abhorrent, yet give us crucial insight into them and their culture, of which they appear to have been more or less unaware. Sorry, I hate people going off on Barthes like he's proposing intellectual anarchy. If the Thumbs crew wants to spend their time rolling into walls in Army of Two or laughing at out-of-date technofetishism in The Wizard, their enjoyment isn't somehow less valid because it wasn't the creator's intention. There's no "right" way to read a book, watch a movie, or play a game.

I actually found the first Borderlands really off-putting. There's always a razor's edge of enjoyment for me with FPS games, and Borderlands was simply doing too much to walk it straight. I also wasn't crazy about Torchlight either, but the beta for its sequel really really impressed me right after Diablo III left me cold, so I feel good preordering. The question is, Embermage or Engineer?

The game ends when it's one jump away, not when it actually arrives. I agree that it's silly. Beam weapons are great, but unless I'm careful I fall into a rut that makes it impossible to beat the final boss. It's really easy to rely on a single missile launcher and a beam weapon to make do, but if I don't upgrade I invariably A) run out of missiles randomly and get stranded, or reach the final boss, whose second-stage defense drone makes him impossible to kill. Sometimes this happens even if I am careful, simply because, as FesteDaFool says, shops seem to carry drone parts twice as often as crew or weapons. In any case, there's this weird balancing act between kitting your ship out for the little fights and keeping an eye on the endgame boss, who often requires completely different strategies.

Agreed.

I stumbled on a picture of Tom Hanks as Dermot Hoggins a few days ago, man does he look silly. I just have so many misgivings about the movie myself. It seems like it's going to prefer literal over thematic interconnections, probably because film does those better, but what film doesn't do well is convey intertextuality and the unreliability of narrative. If it happens onscreen in a movie, it's assumed to have happened in reality, unless the audience is given wavy lines or or a blurry lens to inform otherwise. There's less consciousness of a story being a story first and anything else second.

It tracks that in the stats screen! I've repaired 247 systems, 41 of which were by one poor Engi named Jeff. Nick Breckon is always a Rockman for me.

Sounds a lot like the way races in the Smallworld board games are built, in addition to Binding of Isaac like you mentioned. I'd love to see it implemented, but wouldn't it be incredibly design-intensive, since it requires devs to anticipate all the permutations? Or are you think of something like a slightly less restricted version of skill runes from Diablo III?

Did anyone ever get the video the Thumbs mentioned in a podcast long ago, with the creepy black-and-white Mario?

Yeah, the strong sense of intertextuality between the different vignettes of the novel, literally as well as thematically, to give a fairly stirring picture about the freedom and resilience of knowledge against the caprices of the humans that create it. I was reading this during my medieval exams, as well as while playing through the unbelievably excellent Analogue: A Hate Story, both of which Mitchell's implicit and explicit commentary on information culture resonated with. Does anyone want to talk about the comet-birthmark thing? I personally found that the most fictional of the various little touches.

I ran across it again myself and totally blew it. Looks like you have a chance to find the pod in a Rock sector, with the Rock Homeworld giving a 100% chance; take it to a science center in a Zoltan sector, or maybe just the Zoltan Homeworld, to get a Crystal dude out of it; then finally take it to another Rock sector, presumably so that he can find you his fancy ship (this is conjecture, the only sector between the Zoltan Homeworld and The Last Stand was a Rock sector). Of course, I missed that last stage. Looking on the half-completed wiki, it seems like a pretty nice ship. And yeah, right now FTL has hijacked everything, but it'll blow over once Torchlight 2 comes out, for me at least.

All the racial ships are found by quests at their respective homeworlds (I think. I've yet to encounter a friendly slug-person). Each one of them plays totally different, which gives the game a lot of variety I was deathly afraid it'd be missing.

Ooh, I think the mysterious crystal pod has a chance of starting a quest to unlock the last and rarest ship. I passed that up stupidly the one time I encountered it, thinking it was just another crewman.

I'm unlocking as many of the ships and layouts as I can on Easy first. Jumping into a sun with a Mantis ship lying in wait is hard enough without having all the tools available and a clear mind to boot.

Half Crytek soldier, half cybernetic pervert in my eyes.

You'll get a quest in the Zoltan homeworld sector, provided you have a Zoltan aboard. You have to chase this Rebel ship, which is really aggravating to catch, and then choose to negotiate instead. You start out with the great weapon setup and the fancy "super" shield thing that has to be depleted before anything can be hit. The only drawback is that you don't have enough power to run everything from the start, but that's fixed after maybe one fight. I will be humble and admit that it took me three jumps and fifty percent hull damage to realize that the stealth ship didn't start with shields. It's a cool ship in some ways, but it doesn't suit my playstyle at all. Neither do the Engi or Rock cruisers, really. Finite weapons systems like drones and missiles make me nervous. The game makes me nervous.

Playing FTL the past few hours, the Zoltan cruiser has rapidly become my hands-down favorite. You start out with the Halberd, a disgustingly effective beam weapon, and a light missile launcher. Get a better launcher to knock out the shields of bigger ships later on and you'll carve a bloody path of death from day one. I only started upgrading shields and engines as an afterthought, since most enemies weren't even getting one shot off. I can't even imagine what would've happened if I'd had a pre-ignition charger...