Final thoughts on Theros - I didn't even mention the flavor.
http://magiccards.info/jou/en/74.html Check that out. Notice the "may" in the ability. This card was designed to evoke and reference a specific myth, and was so close to succeeding, but then somehow, somewhere, it ran into a bizarre design woodchipper of "we shouldn't make mandatory abilities that might hurt their own player and cause feelbads!" ... and the result completely destroyed the entire point of the mythological reference. It turned a flavor success into a flavor fail and reversed any goodwill that mythology fans had for them printing the concept in the first place. Somewhere in the halls of Wizards, things went horribly wrong with Theros block.
... relatively speaking of course. It is still Magic, Magic is still laying an increasingly strong critical claim to being the best game in human history. Also want to note that "Maro" the public persona is a constructed corporate spokesvoice, and things as presented by Maro are absolutely not an accurate picture of what actually happens in Magic R&D. In fact they are not even a particularly accurate portrayal of Mark Rosewater the real person - google anecdotal accounts from people who have worked with him and you will find impressions of a quite different person than the diplomatic, family friendly Maro. When I talk about the oversimplified persona there, I am referring to the presentation WOTC gives us, which is deliberately simplified and sanitized on their end. The realities behind the scenes are surely considerably more complex than "Rosewater believes this so we do things this way."
A N Y W A Y let's go out of order and talk about some good video games.
FTL: Faster Than Light (Advanced Edition) is a game that I knew about for quite a while, and knew it was "good," but never could work up an actual interest to investigate it. It seemed impenetrable, hidden behind an arcane and painful looking interface and who knows what sort of gameplay actually lay beneath. Finally Laggy beat me into playing it.
It is, in fact, a very hard to penetrate game with an arcane and painful interface. I will go so far as to say that the interface is outright bad. It expects you to heavily micromanage some things, yet makes other things impossible to micro. Sometimes it automatically restores power to systems that had been unpowered for some reason, other times it does not, and if you don't notice the difference you can find that your oxygen was knocked out and not restored and your entire crew will suddenly asphyxiate with no warning except a tiny 4 point font blinking box that you never normally look at. Some actions can be queued and adjusted during a pause, other actions can be queued but cannot be taken back even if you haven't unpaused yet, and still others cannot be queued at all. You can box select multiple crew members and tell them all to go to a room, but if there is not enough space in the room for all of them, unlike every other RTS style game EVER, only a random selection of crew that will fit will move there and the others will not move AT ALL rather than trying to get as close as they can. Whenever you are free of danger, the FTL drive automatically charges to full and your teleporters have no cooldown, but there is no command for "everyone wounded go to medbay and heal up." You can rename everything, but the hangar doesn't save any of your renames, ever. The interface sucks and nearly stopped me from playing it.
But I kept playing it, perversely, and discovered that the game is... superlative. Incredible. Can't put it down. Most of all, it's unique. There is
nothing else like FTL out there, not even remotely. Playing it is like stepping into a completely alien world, a parallel universe of gaming as though kickstarter funds had been diverted through some sort of time portal, and the strange intelligences there crafted a human vidsoft and sent it back.
http://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=KDH8iYSeTU0#7._FTL_soundtrack-Mantis_Explore Put this on. Go ahead.
That's the theme music for the Mantis, the hyper aggressive razor clawed insectile alien race.
Think about how any other video game would portray that, what sort of music it would use.
There is
nothing else like this game.
Ben Prunty's incredible soundtrack is one of the game's key elements. There's no voice acting, limited text, and minimal sound effects. Only the soundtrack is the player's constant companion through the void, and it quietly impresses upon you that space is a void, that even though you're finding encounters and plotlines and occasionally spewing lasers, you are alone in a universe that is above all else
space.
For all the flaws of the interface, it is intensely immersive. The tiny sprites of your crew members feel invested with agency beyond being stupid video game units. Some of the ships are bad, a lot of the ships are bad, but the worse a ship is, the more story it can have if you let it. FTL is a better horror game than most horror games and a better role playing game than any title that has ever been ranked in the DL. Yes, including Planescape: Torment - and speaking of that, did I mention Chris Avellone wrote for this game? Because Chris Avellone wrote for this game, and his touch makes the dialogue boxes a joy to read even when I've seen them a hundred times.
The gameplay is flexible. It's probably too hard, and some things are unbalanced, and there's a lot of RNG involved. But you can run quite a lot of things outside of the optimal path, and continue to find new combinations and uses for "useless" items and upgrades. The mandatory final boss fight is stupid, I thought at first... but only in context of thinking of the game like a normal roguelike. The more I play the more I appreciate it, even if it does force certain paths of play.
I wish there was more. More sectors, more growth, more options, more ships, more endings. More everything. But what exists is already so transportive that I am thankful just for that. Playing FTL is simply an unforgettable experience. This game is absolutely going to stick with me more than anything else from 2014. There is nothing else like it, and it is thing of simplicity and understated beauty. I wish I could make games like this.
