
Gosh, it's been a while. Work and life have both been incredibly manic over the last couple of months and haven't left much time for playing or blogging. I did play a bit of UFO back at the start of Feb, just after the previous post, but I haven't played it since and I've mostly forgotten what I was doing. What I do remember was that I was just feeling like I'd screwed up big time. The game had been going okay, I'd built up a decent squad and a few bases, but then realised I'd over-stretched myself. I hadn't realised that when you hire new staff for your bases you have to pay their wages every month (I know, I'm an idiot), so I built bases and hired as many new people as I could, then when the end of the month rolled around I had to fire them all again to get back into the black. Not a great situation. The other mistake I made was to gleefully pour my money into research (something I always do in games, much to my detriment) and upgrade all my interceptor ships to the best models based on alien tech I'd discovered. I funded this project by selling off my old interceptors. "I won't need them", I thought, "I've got my spangly new ships to take their place." It was then that I noticed that the spangly new ships run on an alien fuel source that I can't synthesize, I can only rescue it from downed alien craft. So basically, my interceptors all ran out of fuel and I have no way of making any more or getting any more from the aliens because I have no ships to intercept them. Great! Way to go, Ben. So, where I left it was that I was frantically selling off my other assets in order to raise enough money to build an old-school interceptor that I can use to actually continue the game. Meanwhile, the aliens are enjoying raping and pillaging the globe at their leisure and I have no way to stop them. It's a great game, but I've played it *really* badly. I should probably start again, but I can't quite face that at the moment. I'll give it a bit longer and see if I can get my new interceptor up and running before it's too late.
As a result of this slight hiatus, I'm going to drop Startopia back into the mix - I don't fancy starting up another fairly free-form game at this point - and see if the randometer will throw me something quick and linear I can buzz through. And the randometer says...Bad Street Brawler! A Streets of Rage style beat-em-up from the heady days of 1987. That'll do nicely.
In other news, I noticed one of my readers (I only have two...you know who you are!) playing FTL on Steam. Enjoying it? I thought it was a great little game.