Indie Spotlight: FTL

You all remember that game “Oregon Trail,” right? You get a family, you try to travel all the way across America to the promised land of Oregon, all the while trying to ration food and making sure that nobody died from dysentery. “FTL” is like that but with space pirates and giant space spiders. A Kickstarter game that was released in September of this year, I thought it would be a perfect choice for our first Indie Spotlight.

“FTL” is not a realistic looking game, nor is it a game that touts revolutionary gameplay. It has a simple idea, with simple graphics, that is absolutely fun. You pick a ship, name it and your crew then fly off to try and warn your fleet of the impending danger that is following you through the 8 space sectors in which you have to travel. Each map, randomly generated for every game that’s started, randomizes encounters available to you. Your ship might jump to a sector that is directly next to a sun and have to worry about solar flares lighting some of your cabins on fire. It might jump into a nebula that can play havoc with your sensors, making it difficult to tell if your ship is damaged during a fight. Whatever the case may be, there’s always something happening in “FTL.”

Battle encounters happen in real time, but they’re not fast twitch style fights and it’s even possible to pause everything while it’s happening. This helps since repairs may need to be made during the fight, and boarding parties might force you to rethink who is manning which station on the ship. At the end, the rewards are ammo, fuel, drone parts and scrap metal.

Scrap metal can be used to upgrade your ship. These upgrades can go into shields, getting more and more levels which make it harder for enemies to actually damage the hull integrity. Engine upgrades make it more difficult for enemies to hit you, and can even be used to evade encounters altogether or successfully navigate asteroid fields. More weapon power levels allow for more weapons to be active on a vessel during an encounter. Each system can be upgraded like this and they all have their benefits to surviving the dangerous trip.

Types of crew members help as well. Throughout the journey, it’s possible to get different species to join your crew from the various ones found throughout the sectors of space. Slugs have mental abilities that can show where enemies are on a ship and can help defuse situations with other aliens you might encounter. Engi, organic and artificial beings, are immune to certain sicknesses and might be able to help hack into artificial intelligences. There are more aliens, but you get the picture.

The reason I wanted to talk about “FTL” is because of how simply brilliant the game is. Not that it is so obviously brilliant, I mean that its simplicity makes it brilliant. It isn’t graphically intensive, its focus is not the visual but the easy to pick up and put down gameplay. “FTL” is great if you have some time to kill and you don’t want to get involved in something so deep that you’ll need half an hour to save, complete a quest and then quit. However, should you get into a groove of it, the game can capture a player for hours at a time, pushing them to try multiple playthroughs and to search for ways to unlock all of the ships available in the game.

There is enough meat to “FTL” to satisfy someone looking for a good game to play, but it also has such a light and casual feel to it that anyone looking to play a game can really turn it on and enjoy for a little while. Kudos to  Subset Games for making such a fun little game. You can get it now on Steam should you desire, so check it out. This is a great example of a little indie game that did well. Take some notes from it and try to utilize that to your advantage.

Gemini Wars Review

 Space RTS games are really hard to come by. From "Sins of a Solar Empire" to the beloved cult series "Homeworld," there have been a multitude of games that have really tried to nail down intergalactic warfare.

Of course, this means there are some lack-luster games that make their way to shelves. While it may be clever but surprisingly pretty, "Gemini Wars" is one of those games.

Large scale battles are the big feature for "Gemini Wars."

Coming out of the indie publisher Camel 101, "Gemini Wars" is actually a good concept and I was surprised that I found the issues that I had with it after I realized they were recycling a formula from another popular space RTS, "Star Wars: Empire at War," a personal favorite of mine.


As many people know, the story or campaign of an RTS is rarely the reason you play it. I've really only found that in Blizzard games or the "Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War" franchise that the story has meant anything to me. Maybe "Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth" and "Command and Conquer" too.

The point is, there really isn't a reason to play through the story mode of this game. It just seems pretty forced and thrown in there in an effort to provide something for the person who is looking for a really long tutorial on how to play the game. After all, that's basically what the campaign in an RTS is.

The skirmish mode and online play seem to be the sole purpose of this game, and since that is the case, I will detail the mechanics for you.

"Gemini Wars" has your standard resource gathering. Both Research points and Minerals are your driving forces and can be gathered by creating mining facilities in asteroid fields or a research center above a planet. Points are then spent on building your fleets or researching betting engines, new ship hulls, weapons and the like.

Honestly, it is a pretty game and the ships are cool looking.

Ships range from small gun-boats and missile frigates to hulking capital cruisers that deal out damage by the blast. This is what makes the game really similar to "SW: Empire at War." The game even has a Battle Camera option that takes away the UI and puts the player in very cinematic views of the carnage that plays out. Just like "Empire at War." Seeing a pattern?

Worrying about the large ships is a simple matter of having enough smaller ships to survive the onslaught. However, if you have your own giant vessel, you may be able to target the vital points on that ship and knock out its life support or engines to completely disable it. Just like "Empire at War." See where I'm going with this?

Now there are several huge problems with "Gemini Wars." First of all, I encountered major framerate drops during the campaign at points where it seemed like there was very little going on. And then, I played skirmishes with double the number of ships on the screen and more detail and the game ran fine. Also, the framerate drops happened at the exact same spots each time, so I don't know if it's bugs or simple programming errors slowing the game down.

When I started a skirmish, there were absolutely no asteroid resources available to me or the NPC enemy. I actually saw their scout flying about in a futile attempt to find a place to mine just as I was doing the same thing. Which is weird, because I told the game to spawn 8 asteroid fields.

Resource gathering! You either love it or hate it. You'll have to make your own decision for "Gemini Wars." If you're able to get one of the fields in the game, you're pretty likely to keep it, unless some overwhelming force comes and blows your station out of space. Solution? Multiple mines! Only problem is that the game has the same tactic.

This results in a very sci-fi Cold War standoff where each player is systematically upgrading their ships and researching while building bigger and bigger ships. This is a little silly because you need to have a military space station to increase your unit cap, and you can only build those if there is a free planet to do this at. This complicates things if there are only two planets in game. You could always tell the game to spawn multiple planets, but then you're fighting a war on multiple fronts and if you're not comfortable with that, then you're stuck.

I also found that the game can paint itself into an extremely long and arduous corner. I made a bunch of capital ships, was ready to go do battle at my enemy's base after fending off a large attack, only to find that their nearest base was literally a grid of heavy turrets and they had barely any ships left. Not only that, but the turrets alone could destroy all of my heavy cruiser capital ships.

This situation explained why I hadn't seen any more enemy ships, because the NPC had literally spent all of its resources on turrets to defend itself. I ended up quitting the skirmish and saying, "Yeah, I don't have time for that."

Here's the thing: The game is pretty to look at, the formula is there and it is really hard to screw up an RTS. Camel 101 knows this. However with the bugs I ran into, not to mention the fact that when I told my ships to go someplace and they very obviously ignored me and or would just go for a bit then turn back around to the fight, I find the game somewhat lacking.

There's some good stuff in "Gemini Wars." Targeting the vital systems of the larger ships allows you to take it out before destroying it, and if you've got a bigger ship yourself, you can send over marines to capture the vessel and take it for you own, no resources needed. Downside? The amount of time it takes to repair is absolutely mind-numbing.

You're going to want to put a lot of research into shields. Just sayin'.

It seems like the ideas were here for this game, but the execution was just off. At the Vault, we always tell you to push old formulas and make it your own. Camel 101 really did try this, and for that I applaud them.

While this is nothing new for an RTS, it still is a good try at making a system like this new with mechanics like the marines and the large map sizes. "Gemini Wars" gets a 6 out of 10. Maybe next time, folks. Keep working at it.

Primal Carnage review

Do you like dinosaurs? Of course you do. Who doesn't? Don't answer that.

Would you like to fight dinosaurs? How about devour humans as a dinosaur. In this "Counter Strike" meets "Turok" game, you can do just that. Get ready for "Primal Carnage," available now on Steam.

Just what is "Primal Carnage," you ask? Well, it is a multiplayer game wherein two teams, dinos and humans, face off against each other in a battle to the death that would make Charles Darwin proud and the producers of "Jurassic Park" drool at the sheer brilliance.
Some of you are probably really concerned about the teams being even. I mean, I was, because honestly dinosaurs are way more powerful and deadlier than humans. At least, according to every single movie I've ever watched.

That being said, it is a fairly  balanced system. But, I'll get into that in a second after I detail the classes and teams.

What does help to balance things out is the ammo and health caches for each team spread about. Humans can find first-aid boxes or ammo crates, while the dinosaurs can feast on the various flora scattered about the map to replenish their health.

For the dinosaurs you've got your velociraptors, flying dinos, spitting dinos, charging semi-t-rex dinos, and your t-rex.

The raptors can run fast, sneak up on the enemies and their alt-fire is this awesome lunging jump that has them maul the poor victim to death.

The fliers are actually really helpful because they've got this skill that allows them to see where the enemies are if they screech while in the air. Not to mention it's pretty fun to pick up a human and drop them from the tree tops to their doom.

The spitter is handy, much like the Boomers in "Left 4 Dead." They can blind the humans, and then allow the team to converge for a feeding frenzy of awesome.

The ramming t-rex dino is pretty much the heavy for the dino team. It can crash through the human forces and go toe-to-toe with the best of them.

The t-rex itself is the equivalent of an actual tank. It lumbers about with an enormous amount of health, but has a crap turning radius and really slow speed. However, it basically does an insta-kill no matter what.

You might need a bigger gun than that...

What I was actually impressed with was the fact that the giant t-rex can't spawn unless there's a proper amount of people on the server. This means that the game actually ensures that it's a fair fight between the teams without actually giving one team the dinosaur equivalent of a nuke to trounce the other.

In the human corner, you've got your machine gunner, shotgun surgeon, pistols guy, rifle lady and flamethrower dude. Now, the alt-fires for the humans get a little varied because each is suited to do damage in their own way.

For example, the commando machine gunner can fire grenades from his gun. Trappers can actually shoot a net that traps the dinos and allows the humans to run up and kill them. It's smart actually. I found myself trapped a few times while pouncing at a human and thinking, "Damn, I had him! But, that was kinda cool."

The maps are cleverly crafted to allow both humans and dinos to hide in large shrubbery or sneak up behind each other. This means open floor plans with very little elevation, which also means a little running around aimlessly. Of course, there are roofs and walkways for humans to run up to and attempt to gun down dinos from above. But that becomes moot when the raptors can practically jump onto the roofs of low buildings and the flying dinos can swoop from above. That and the spitters have a pretty good range to get folks on buildings.

Here's a fun little design choice that I liked. When you play as a human, it's all first-person, while as dinos it's in third-person. This means, as a human, you're literally watching your back and turning around frantically to make sure that the dinos don't sneak up on you from behind. I was blindsided dozens of times by pouncing raptors. However, the rex's weight means that the screen visibly shakes when one is nearby, so you know to duck and cover.

As a dino, the flares from the pathfinder or the tranq darts from the sniper blind and disorient the whole screen so that you will actually turn away from the bright light, or run from combat as you stagger aimlessly and sluggishly until the effects wear off. Clever ways to level the playing field for both sides.

Unfortunately, the game suffers from a few problems that, while totally fixable, are very common for multiplayer slugfests like this.

Fighting without a shirt and that safari hat are actually dino-hunting musts.

The raptors are almost too fast. Even while playing as one I had a hard time not over-shooting the target from sheer movement speed with both the melee attacks and the lunges. This might also have to do with the fact that you have to be incredible precises with every weapon. Humans and dinos. I mean, like, Bethesda targeting system accurate.

I found it nearly impossible to melee a human as a dino within the first three strikes before I finally connected out of sheer frustration and luck. Meanwhile, the humans are spraying-and-praying about in the hopes of hitting the almost unbelievably speedy raptors or how-the-hell-did-I-miss-that-sized rex classes.

In the midst of all of this, it's a meat-grinder. Sure, I was on a server where people were getting upwards of 17 kills or so. But they were also dying a dozen or so times themselves, making the kill/death ratio not nearly as impressive as any other multiplayer game like this.

As a human, I found myself rushing into the fray, shooting wildly, and then respawning within three minutes to do the same, almost infinitely until the round ended. As for dinos, I felt like I'd run about, pounce on a human or pick one up, only to be shot from the sky or blown to pieces by three or four enemies.

Not to mention the de-evolution of tactics that most people seem to go through. At first, the round starts good. The dinos are weaving through the map, trying to hunt down the humans, while some of the humans try to stay in groups and others go off on their own in the hopes of trying to bag a couple kills themselves.

As the round progresses, it seems like all the humans will invariably find a corner near a weapon or health cache and stick there with flares and wait for the dinos to come into the line-of-fire. The dinos will then send spitters to blind the humans and either a rex or a rammer to break up the humans and the raptors will swarm in. Half of each team will die, and then those that respawn will go back to their positions on their teams.

People will get bored of this, some will use the respawn to try and outflank the other team, which then results in entire teams respawning from death, and the cycle to repeat itself.

The game is a hard 7, maybe a 7.5. It's fun, but it suffers from meat-grinder syndrome and there is definite room for improvement. You may not even get to play a match to find out because often times I find myself having to restart the game half an hour after one try because the game will tell me that there's no servers available. Then when it opens up again, there's like 7 or 8.

So, if you do get online and get to play with a nice 20+ person game, you'll have fun, but probably only want to play for half and hour to an hour. For the money, it's a good buy, but you really have to want to play these kinds of games to try it. If you're looking for a study in how to do things a little differently or on how to make a new spin on the "Counter Strike" formula, this is a great study tool and example. I'd check it out purely for academic purposes if I was a game developer.

I can see your house from here!

Hotline Miami review

Okay, so I really didn’t know what to expect from this game only having the trailer and people’s tweets to go off of, but I’ll show you the trailer and let you make your own assumptions and draw your own ideas about it, then we’ll to the review.

If that wasn’t enough to make your head tilt to the side in a sort of "Whaaaaat?" gesture, then you’re a better person than I. However, I spent the $10 on Steam and downloaded the game. It’s amazing. You can quote me on that. It. Is. Amazing.

While it may not look like much, the game is a cleverly constructed piece of top-down shooting and crazy story. You may not understand it right away, but it is just enough to keep you from going, “Is this game just killing people randomly?” If it was, there would honestly be no real lasting appeal or motivation to continue playing after you got tired of it the first time.

Fortunately for us, the game has an eerie sort of Stanley Kubrick/QuentinTarantino thing going on that is both disconcerting and incredibly hypnotic. The music is just the right kind of late 80s lazy with a creepy indie vibe to it that makes you cringe but also entranced. Honestly, the game is a cross between one of their movies and “Super Meat Boy.”

This game is not for the faint of heart.

The game expects you to die and even encourages you not to give up. I found myself not frustrated or angry when I got killed, but motivated to do better and to keep trying. It does a wonderful job of teaching you that none of the situations in the game are impossible, only that they require a solid bit of thinking.

You’re able to shoot, stab, cleave, throw, punch and crush people to death. But be warned, every shot and hit is a one-shot-kill, even to you so there’s no stand-offs and there’s no way to charge into a room guns blazing without feeling like you’ll get mowed down yourself. You have to be smart in how you tackle certain situations.

Luckily, you’re able to move the screen a bit to see what’s ahead, if only a little. But the biggest help are the masks. The main character, a nameless man who is killing all of these people at the behest of mysterious voicemails on his phone, goes to each job with a rubber-animal mask on his head.

You can unlock new masks that have different powers. Some make throwing weapons automatically lethal, others make it so that dogs don’t attack you or display certain secrets spread throughout the missions.

It’s not an overly complex game, and there’s not a lot to talk about because you truly have to experience it for yourself. It’s worth the $10 and it has a lot of replayability because at the end of each level your score is tallied and calculated off of your combinations and creativity of kills. That, and the secrets and unlockable masks are fun to get.

Yeah, this is a pretty accurate description of the game in a single frame.

This game could have been done wrong in so many ways, but it’s so good that I’m thankful to find an indie game that shows the ability to remake an old type of gameplay and make it fresh and innovative. If you haven’t played it yet, you really should. It’s only just been released, so there will be bugs, but if you have the patience and the will, you’ll really have fun with “Hotline Miami.” It's a 10/10 throwback to crazy arcade games with an interesting story to keep you going.

Valve uses Steam to show players Big Picture

Valve, the creators of the "Half-Life" and "Portal" series, recently released a new view mode for their digital distribution application, Steam, called Big Picture which allows the interface to be displayed on larger screens like those normally found in living rooms.

It wasn't impossible to hook up a PC or Mac to your big-screen TV before Big Picture was introduced, but the layout of an application made for small computer screens didn't translate well to a display that was between five and ten feet away from players.

Big Picture mode changes the entire Steam interface, and does away with all the tiny details normally displayed to users in favor of highly-simplified, large buttons and a virtual keyboard.

All of these new features make gaming through Steam with a gamepad much more accessible than ever before.

Big Picture's virtual keyboard is mapped to gamepads for simple text input

Using a gamepad to play video games on a large TV in the living room. That sounds a lot like console gaming. 

Steam's Big Picture mode is a major step into the home gaming console market, and it only requires players to connect their PC to their TV with and HDMI cable. All of these things are most likely already owned by most gamers, so the initial investment for this pseudo-console is arguably $0.

Not all of the people who play games have a computer capable of running "Skyrim" or "Crysis 2" on even medium settings, but, in the long run, investing a little bit more money into a new computer than a new gaming console is a better investment because computers can be used for more than consoles.

We may be entering an era where Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have to take on Valve in the console wars, but the features of the Playstation 3 and the next Xbox have yet to be seen.

Big Picture mode also includes a web browser that is also navigable by gamepad.

It could turn out that PCs will remain the go-to devices for more dedicated players and home consoles make the transition to all-in-one entertainment boxes geared toward families and casual players. The technical specs of the next generation of video game consoles has yet to be seen, though, so it's anybody's guess what the next few years will bring for the industry.

Open for Discussion: Downloadable Games

With the demand for digital versions of games now at a record high, Parker and Anders discuss their feelings about downloadable games. How do you feel about the Live Marketplace and the PSN Store? Do you like them? Do you miss physical copies of games? Tell us what you think!