tberton

But the problem is that the Flagship is a final exam with trick questions. EDIT: To address one of your other points, the Lanius B and Rock B are built for suffocation and fire-bombing, respectively.

The invalidation of builds is a problem for three reasons. First, as SuperBiasedMan said, the permadeath makes it difficult to know what the boss is going to look like ahead of time, meaning you have no idea whether or not your build is going to be successful or not the first few times you make it to the Flagship and no recourse once you realize you're fucked. If the game wants to be about beating the final boss, it should tell you much, much earlier that your build is not going to work. Second, because of the high degree of randomness in the game (which I generally like), there's a good chance that you'll never come across the tools you need to beat the boss. Maybe the best weapon loadout you could must relies on a Hermes missile - well, that Defense drone is going to screw you over. Maybe it relies on boarding - good luck with the Zoltan shield, good luck with the AI. You encounter those problems in regular battles, but you can always run from those. Of course, you should try to get a more varied toolset, but the game often won't allow you to. Third, a lot of the strategies that don't work against the Flagship are hella fun for the rest of the game. Suffocation and arson strategies are really entertaining and totally viable for certain ships, but they don't work against the Flagship and that's annoying. Of course, you can just ignore that and have fun all through Sector 7, but if enjoying a playstyle (one that is encouraged through the abundance of certain weapons, drones and augmentations) requires ignoring a large aspect of the game, that seems like a design flaw. As for bosses in other games, I think people do complain about them a lot. Deus Ex: Human Revolution got tons of flack for having bosses that were a huge pain to get through using builds that were otherwise perfectly viable through the rest of the game. A good boss fight (and I would extend this to final levels in general) should be the culmination of all the skills you've learned up until that point, not a trick telling you to get it right next time.

Off the top of my head, rules that the final battle breaks - I'll ignore the sector itself, because I agree that while it is a problem, it's not the biggest one. Rule #1: Everything a ship does is attached to a system. This is true for every battle but the final one, which has its power surge attacks that cannot be prevented by destroying a system. Rule #2: Killing a ship's crew ends the fight. The Flagship's AI will take over and start automatically repairing systems if you kill all the crew. Rule #3: When you destroy a ship, it's destroyed. Obviously, the Flagship comes back twice. Rule #4: A Zoltan shield disappears once it's destroyed. The Flagship's Zoltan shield reappears halfway through its third form. The Flagship's Zoltan shield is also twice as strong as any other. Rule #5: Every ship except the Flagship has all its weapons concentrated in one room. The Flagship has four separate weapons rooms. To be clear, I love FTL. It's one of my favourite games ever. I don't hate the Flagship or the randomness as much as many others, but I do think that there are serious problems with how the game works and the Flagship is the most important one. It works so differently from the rest of the game that there are strategies you can build for every other sector that will just leave you fucked for the Flagship.

Mainly the whole final sector, which breaks all the rules of the game. Also, I wish the randomness of the stores was softened. And the stupid Crystal Cruiser questline.

That still involves a ton of save scumming, since the right sectors might not even appear. I think it's easier for me at this point to just finish with those three ships, but I probably won't. I don't think any game I love as much as FTL is so deeply flawed.

I'm so sorry Teg. I want to help too.

I just need Slug C, which only requires you to get to Sector 8 with Slug B, but that ship is fucking garbage. Then I need the two Crystal Cruisers, which either require a blessing from the random number god or completing the game with every other A & B ship, except the Lanius. The only A & B ships I haven't won with are both Slug Cruisers and Mantis A.

Hmm, reading the production section of the Wikipedia page, that's not the sense I got. It says that Miller storyboarded the film before writing the screenplay and that he also intended the visuals to come first, but not that Max or any other character wasn't supposed to have any lines at all.

Do you have a source for that? It's not that I don't believe you, it just doesn't make sense, because there's an extremely important plot scene that makes no sense if Max isn't talking. And there are definitely points where people respond to things he's said, which doesn't make sense if he wasn't supposed to speak in the first place.

At exactly 200 hours and after a string of runs that failed on the third form of the final boss, I think I may have given up on my goal to unlock every ship in FTL. I love you, darling, and therefore must let you go.

Is that true? A lot of his lines sound kind of dubbed, but there's plenty of moments where you see his mouth move and at least one that makes no sense if he's not speaking.

Is anybody familiar with my favourite weird linguistic thing, Eggcorns? They're mispellings or mispronunciations of words or phrases that result in a new word that has a similar implied meaning to the original. The best example is the original: a newspaper writer saw somebody write "egg corn" instead of "acorn" and realized that acorns kind of do look like eggs, so why wouldn't that be a good name? Here are some of my favourites: "Old timer's disease": an eggcorn for "Alzheimer's disease". It's a disease that primarily affects the elderly, so it's easy to see why someone would hear that. "Waiting on tenderhooks": the actual term is "tenterhooks" which were hooks that were used to stretch out cloth. But nobody's ever heard of those, and tenderhooks sounds so much more evocative of painful anticipation. "Chomping at the bit": I suspect a lot of people don't know about this one, which makes sense, since apparently "chomp" comes from "champ," which is what a horse does to its bit when impatient. "Scald": instead of "scold." This might be particular to me, but when I was younger, I always got the words confused. You're angry with someone, which burns them. Makes sense to me. Let's discuss these wonderful words and turns of phrase and see if we can add our own. Don't just make them up, try to make them things you've actually heard or said.

Not currently residing in Toronto, but I'm from there, so here goes. The CN Tower is pretty impressive, if big tall things interest you. You could go see the Blue Jays play if you're into baseball (although the Blue Jays are not good right now). If you like board games, there's my former employer, Snakes and Lattes. For museums/galleries, there's the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario and Bata Shoe Museum downtown, with the McMichael gallery a little ways northwest of the city. For nature stuff, there's High Park and the island, as osmosich mentioned. That's stuff off the top of my head. Any specific interests you have that could help me narrow stuff down?

Witness sounds like a really cool game and very similar to Hanabi, the best co-op game ever. I'll need to check this out.

I find the idea of private blood banks so disturbing. ugh.

I was a super picky eater as a kid, but gradually expanded out of it. Food has a lot of anxiety associated with it: there's social pressure, it's strange, you're putting it in your body, lots of flavours make a weird first impression. Like Merus, I have a hard time with people who are pickier eaters than I am. One friend has huge anxiety around it, and it's tough for me to be sympathetic toward it, even though I know I should.

Canadian Blood Services have a lot of similar questions, although they might be more specific. I'd be really interested to talk to an expert on the subject, because I understand the sentiment behind those questions: if the blood donation supply gets diseased, that's extremely bad and has resulted in huge scandals in the past, so wanting to block off any possibility of that happening makes sense. I'm just not certain those questions are the best way of doing it. Do you still get paid for giving blood in the States? That to me is far more disgusting than any of the questions. EDIT: Here are the questions you get asked when donating blood in Canada. I'm also not certain how many of those are "answer wrong and you can't donate" and how many are "we just need to know this about your blood."

Every time somebody brings up that pun, it takes me a second to figure it out again.

"She wouldn't know us from Adam." It's not a super common saying.

Oh for TV, can't believe I didn't mention Steven Universe from Rebecca Sugar.

Books: Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (graphic novel) Games: Depression Quest by Zoe Quinn Music: Tegan and Sara, Metric, Regina Spektor

That one is great!

Somebody clearly hasn't played Mario Kart's combat mode or F-Zero X's Death Race mode.

Oh man, I loved the Human Revolution hacking game. Best hacking minigame I've played by far.

It's weird to me how much this looks like a Jeopardy! clue.