FTL

We're taking a break from XCOM for a bit and trying something different.

So this is FTL (“Father Than Light”) a indie-game about traveling through space. The premise is that our little spaceship has been tasked with taking crucial information about the evil rebels to our allies in the virtuous federation. We expect to fail. The game is designed to be very, very hard to win. The fun is not so much in seeing if you can beat it as in seeing how far you can get before you die. We’ll travel from star to star encountering various other ships and (most of the time) shooting at them. Ok. Let’s customize our ship and get started.

            In the spirit of doomed ventures and futile struggles, let’s name our ship “Fool’s Errand.” I’ve customized the crew such that the fate of the galaxy will now hinge on the combined efforts of Ron Paul, Ralph Nader and Ross Perot. I don’t see how we could possibly fail!

            

The only part of the ship that actually requires a crewman to operate is the bridge, which needs a pilot, but having someone man a subsystem increases its efficiency. I put Ron Paul in charge of our shields and, because the thought amuses me, assign Nader to our weapons system. We’ll let Ross Perot drive…I hope that doesn’t turn out to be a mistake…

The might ship Fool's Errand

 Right out of the gate we run into a moral quandary. Interstellar pirates are harassing some unidentified ship. They offer us a substantial bribe to look the other way, but that just wouldn’t be right. Third-party candidates to battle-stations!

We make short work of the pirate scum: our missiles vaporize their ship’s shields, allowing our repeating lasers repeatedly play havoc across their hull! But lo! What’s this? The unidentified ship turns out to be a rebel scout, one of our sworn enemies. We have the option of either destroying them and stripping the burning hulk of their ship for supplies or granting them their lives in exchange for promises to slow down the pursuing rebel fleet. I have trouble envisioning Ralph Nader gleefully shooting at a helpless opponent, so we decide to let them go. 

Somewhat later we face another challenging adventure: pirates! They want one of my former presidential candidates to take as a slave, which implies they have a buyer with rather quixotic tastes. But we won’t be surrendering any old white guys today; open fire, Mr. Nader! Give ‘em hell!

We are once again victorious. The battered and bloodied slavers offer to turn over one of their human cargo to us in exchange for letting them limp away. We accept, since we could use a new crew member and all the slaves would just die if we destroyed the ship. Our prize turns out to be a Mantid (an insect-like alien) to which the game has randomly assigned the name Makail. We’ll call him “Gorbi.”

We press on through many systems and encounters. Poor Gorbi doesn’t last long; we get boarded by a quartet of Mantid assault troopers who proved to be more than we could handle. In a final act of desperation, I end up rushing Perrot, Paul and Nader into the med-bay and venting the rest of the ship into space. The cold vacuum of the eternal void forever silenced our assailants, but not before they finish off our own Mantid crewman (crewmantid?).

In what turns out to be our final encounter, our intrepid political trio stumbles upon a rebel attempting to make contact with a pre-space flight civilization, hoping to bring them onto their side in the war. A different alien ship is trying to prevent this and preserve the planet’s native way of life. Our choices are (A) try to make contact with the aliens first and win their support for us, (B) try to preserve the alien’s native culture by attacking the rebel ship, or (C) ignore the whole situation. Our crew discusses these options and their non-interventionist beliefs convince them that we should stay out of this situation; after all, we have no exit strategy. Unfortunately, they’re all politicians and, stated positions aside, can’t resist the opportunity to intrude into people’s life and do some campaigning; we choose option A and, as a result, end up in a fight with the alien ship.

 Which results in this:

Everything went wrong: the ship caught on fire, we got pummeled by enemy missiles, and our own weapons couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. And thus concludes our brave venture. Farewell good ship Fool’s Errand. Farewell good crew of third-party candidates. Time to reload and try again. Next time we're bringing Donald Trump!