Faster Than Light
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Daily App: Faster Than Light brings real-time, rogue-like spaceship combat to your iPad
Released in 2012 for the desktop, Faster Than Light from Subset games is considered to be one of the top indie real-time strategy games. In the game, you control a spaceship from Galactic Federation that contains critical information. You must escape the pursuing rebel fleet and make it across sectors to the Federation HQ to deliver your vital data. This spaceship simulation game challenges you at every turn with rogue-like combat situations that sometimes require you to fire away with your weapons and other times practice diplomacy. Ship emergencies, often in the middle of combat, add a whole new level of complexity as you struggle to keep to vital systems like your weapons array on key sensors online. Though you start with a basic Kestrel-class cruiser, you can unlock upgrades, weapons and new ships. Gameplay can be hectic at times, but FTL does include a pause function, allowing you to stop the action so you can plan your strategy. The pause function gives you some breathing room, but it doesn't make the game any easier. Always on your mind is the game's permadeath feature that doesn't allow you to start in mid-game when you die. If you are destroyed, you must start over at the beginning. Of course, starting over means you get to try to new strategies, unlock different ships and discover new tricks the next time around. The iPad version of Faster Than Light ships with the new FTL:Advanced Edition expansion pack, which adds new ships, enemies, events, and weapons to the game. This pack can be disabled if you prefer to play the classic game. The touch interface translates nicely over to the game, making it easier and more intuitive to use than the mouse clicks of the desktop version. Faster Than Light is available for the iPad for US$9.99. If you have any interest at all in this genre of game, then you won't be disappointed in Faster Than Light. The depth of the game in incredible and the gameplay has just the right mix of slow-paced waypoint jumping and resupplying mixed with hectic combat situations that require fast thinking on your part.
EVE Evolved: Fanfest 2013 video roundup
Last month saw the huge tenth anniversary EVE Online Fanfest, a three-day convention packed full of exclusive reveals, behind-the-scenes talks, and community events. This year's Fanfest was the biggest one yet, celebrating EVE's tenth anniversary with special guest speakers from the scientific community, the reveal of a new virtual reality dogfighter, DUST 514's launch, and details of the upcoming Odyssey expansion. Massively was there to bring you coverage of the big news as it happened, and CCP streamed some of the key talks and events live to viewers at home. This year's Fanfest sold out so quickly that many people who wanted to go didn't get a chance to, and only a select few talks were shown on the public livestream. With such a packed event schedule, even players in attendance couldn't be there for every interesting talk. Thankfully, CCP recorded over 30 of the most anticipated events and has now uploaded the videos to YouTube. Highlights include the Make EVE Real videos, the EVE keynote, the CCP Presents Keynote, and the talks on how DUST 514 integrates with the EVE economy. In this week's EVE Evolved, I round up all of the EVE Fanfest videos in a handy list.
Steam Holiday Sale, day 9: Assassin's Creed, Prototype, Left 4 Dead franchises and more
The majority of mainstream shopping holidays have now reached a complete stop, but the sales live on – especially in the case of Valve's annual Steam Holiday Sale, which today enters its ninth day of dealing out discounted digital sundries.PC gamers can save 25 to 75 percent on every game in the Assassin's Creed series, 75/50 percent off Prototype and Prototype 2 respectively, get Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 for a cold dead $7.49, Limbo for a spooky $2.49, Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion for an astronomically low $13.59 and Just Cause 2 for a justified $3.74.Yesterday's deals also remain active for another 20 hours or so, including LA Noire for $4.99, FTL for $4.99 and 33 percent off XCOM: Enemy Unknown. As always, flash sales and community choice sales change throughout the day.
The Daily Grind: Would you play an MMO based on The Walking Dead, Borderlands, or FTL?
Christmas is a time for family, for giving, and for giving family some credible excuses as to why you're ducking them in order to catch up on all the gaming goodness you missed during the year. In my case, I binged on Age of Wushu and a handful of the year's single-player critical darlings including The Walking Dead, Faster Than Light, and Borderlands 2. As I was feeling guilty for neglecting my bread-and-butter MMOs, I was also thinking about which, if any, of these titles would make for an engaging MMO translation. How about it Massively readers? Would you play MMO versions of those three titles? Why or why not? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
'A Slower Speed of Light' is an open-source game on special relativity from MIT Game Lab
The behavior of light may seem static and uninteresting (it's bright and fast, we get it), but there's actually an incredible amount of science going on that we generally don't experience during our normal lives.A Slower Speed of Light, a new open-source game for PC and OSX from MIT Game Lab, explores the more intricate and interesting behaviors of light in a "relativistic game engine." As players collect objects, the speed of light is slowed and players are able to experience phenomena such as the Doppler effect, time dilation and the Lorentz transformation, among others.While the open-source aspects of this project are not yet available, the plan is to release the game's Unity3D-based engine as OpenRelativity sometime in 2013. For now, the game itself can be downloaded here. %Gallery-170585%
Faster-than-light neutrinos are back in the game
Back in September, CERN dropped the improbable news about its faster-than-light neutrinos, causing eggheads worldwide to cry foul. Understandable really, as if true, a lot of what we think we know about the universe essentially falls apart. So, expect severe bouts of head-scratching once more, as a second round of experiments from the same OPERA collaborative has reported similar results. The initial experiments used a long chain of neutrinos, fired from point A to B. Skeptics claimed that this might have introduced an element of uncertainty to the results -- the new tests used much shorter blasts, meaning that if they arrived just as quickly, then this potential cause for error is scratched out. The new data still needs to undergo the usual peer review, and other possible causes for error remain. For now though, it looks like one of the main arguments against has been addressed, making the Einstein-challenging neutrinos one step closer (or is that ahead?) to re-writing the rule book.
Remember those faster-than-light neutrinos? Great, now forget 'em
A week ago the world went wild over CERN's tentative claim that it could make neutrinos travel faster than light. Suddenly, intergalactic tourism and day trips to the real Jurassic Park were back on the menu, despite everything Einstein said. Now, however, a team of scientists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands reckons it's come up with a more plausible (and disappointing) explanation of what happened: the GPS satellites used to measure the departure and arrival times of the racing neutrinos were themselves subject to Einsteinian effects, because they were in motion relative to the experiment. This relative motion wasn't properly taken into account, but it would have decreased the neutrinos' apparent journey time. The Dutch scientists calculated the error and came up with the 64 nanoseconds. Sound familiar? That's because it's almost exactly the margin by which CERN's neutrinos were supposed to have beaten light. So, it's Monday morning, Alpha Centauri and medieval jousting tournaments remain as out of reach as ever, and we just thought we'd let you know.
