Twitch.tv Live Stream FTL NOW!

I am streaming FTL Live right now. Come check it out, and vote on what decisions I make.

twitch.tv/Robot2600

Click that link to go to my Twitch.tv page. I'll be playing all night.

New Let's Play FTL Series Starts Today!

I was making a ton of FTL videos, and I realized that I need to standardize the number system and decide if deaths should stay in the videos. I am going to leave all the deaths in the footage, not just post good runs with ships. The Basalisk run I posted yesterday is a "good run" but if you start watching the series below, you'll see me fuck it up a few times and explode some perfectly nice spaceships.

The "space girl" wallpaper is made by an anonymous artist. You can check out the funnyjunk page here if you like.

Also, I have full video and recording capabilities now.... if you'd like to see some LPs now would be a good time to ask.

Let's Play Faster Than Light

FTL: Faster than Light is a spaceship roguelike. Imagine nethack meets Star Craft and you might begin to understand what it all about. Death is permanent, and the game is known for its brutal difficulty. Sounds perfect, so watch my new FTL: Let's Play videos! I don't ramble on if there is nothing to say. 

I finished recording a few hours of FTL adventures, but I plan on doing more. I'll be posting a new video or five everyday until to new expansion comes out on Thursday. I'll always post new youtube videos here, but you can also follow me on youtube. No twitter or anything else, just the blogspot and the youtube.

If you haven't started playing FTL yet, you need to start! I'll be reviewing the new expansion as soon as I play it, but experience vanilla now before the world is changed forever.

Part 1



Part 2

Steam Is Down

Steam crashed for everyone today. At about 12:15 in the afternoon (Central Time), just about everything associated with Steam crashed. This includes Team Fortress 2 (published and maintained by Valve), the game I was racing home from work to play. This can cause huge amounts of frustration for players who spend legitimately time, money, and energy into games only to get blocked out at an inopportune time.

No one knows what is causing the problem, although I suspect it will be something rather mundane like a power outage or coffee spill. These kinds of massive site-outages (Youtube and Yahoo! I'm looking in your directions) are usually associated with high traffic, but noon on a Thursday seems an unlikely time for such a rush.

If you look at the Team Fortess 2 player stats (http://steamdb.info/graph/440/) you can see that there was a small (30 minute) disruption of service about 1 hour before things went totally black. Whatever the problem, it appears that it was not fixed in time, or perhaps the instability is all the result of some deeper issue. In any case, the last time Steam was down like was in October.

When I started writing this article only some chat and community functions are up, as well as the Steam Store. Now, everything is down except the database
.

You can check the current status of steam services at http://steamstat.us/ and http://www.issteamdown.com/