The Drunken Lizard Pub

Is this officially a role-playing game? Who knows. But it has a lot of features that appeal to my turn-based RPG preferences, and it's awesome, so I thought I'd mention it.

You fly around space fighting bad guys, answering distress calls, and doing quests. You collect money, and you can spend it to improve your existing systems, buy new systems, or refill depletable resources (fuel, ammo, etc.). You can also recruit new crew, and assign them tasks, which eventually improve their skills. You don't "level up" like in most RPGs, but you're continuously improving your ship/crew in ways you directly control. It's technically real-time, but you can pause at any time to give orders, so in practice it doesn't require any twitchy reflexes.

It's a perma-death game ala Nethack, which may put some people off, but I've really enjoyed that aspect. Unlike Nethack the game is pretty quick to play, so losing a ship doesn't feel too bad. There's also no demo available, so unfortunately you have to shell out money to find out if you like it.

It's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is $10. If other Eschalon fans check it out, I'd be interested to hear what you think.

http://www.ftlgame.com/

I have played FTL, mainly because it was featured on TotalBiscuit's WTF Is... channel. Bought it from GOG, because I was too anxious to wait for the Steam release.

It's a very interesting game, but not exactly up my alley. It's rather roguelike in nature and thus incredibly unforgiving and with a really high reliance on chance. Basically, if the randomization goes against you when the game universe is created, you can be royally screwed right from the get go. It's a really well crafted game and a breath of fresh air in the current gaming scene, but it just doesn't appeal to me that much.

Oh, I played this. Never beat it though. It took me forever to even get to the third version of the boss, where I died pretty much immediately even on easy. It was fun, but there seems to be a bad difficulty set up. The game is much too easy, but some events and the last boss are much too hard. Besides the boss, the entire game is a breeze as long as you don't get one of the very stupid random events that mean instant death, such as the teleport 4 people onto your ship and disable your medbay one, it just makes you automatically lose no matter how good you were doing.

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5992

....