What are you playing?

[Sam_P]

Would you recommend it? I'm in two minds about buying it after NHL 14 and 15.

Bit late on this sorry.

If you didn't like NHL 14 it's basically just brought back most of that stuff. It's definitely an improvement over 15 from what I've seen.

It's mostly the little things that bring it down. If you want a game that plays super well and looks good on modern hardware 16 is pretty great in that regard.

No problem, thanks, I'll probably pick it up as I've seen a fair few negative comments on it, mostly from fellow hockey fans over on Twitter, so I'll probably pick it up.

In other news, I'm starting to work my way through Gun again, surprisingly I much prefer it to Red Dead Revolver (I'm playing on PS2).

[Luke]

Excitebike.

It may not be Mario Maker, but the design level ate up most of my late night last night. If you haven't dabbled with the design option in Excitebike, do have a go. It's super simple to create super easy, super difficult, and super radical levels within a few minutes.

[BoneSnapDeez]

Level design is about all I do in that game. I've never been great at the traditional play mode.

[Ack]

Continuing on in Banished. My current town had a problem early on where I didn't create enough housing fast enough. This caused people to live with their parents and not hook up, eventually causing a large chunk of folks to die off without enough kids to keep up the population. I hunkered down and built up my food stores, then built more housing as I needed. I have now recovered and watched my little hamlet generally grow(with a few occasional contractions). Right now I have a quarry and a mine in operation, as well as several forester stations to store logs. My food stockpile is having issues though. I will need to build more means of production, but I have a big enough supply to last me while I do and prevent mass starvation. Hopefully this will be the first hamlet to break the 100 worker barrier.

[BoneSnapDeez]

I keep reading "Brandish" at first glance.

[Ack]

Sorry chief, totally different. In Brandish, you fall into the mine. In Banished, you condemn your peasants to the mine!

Work will set them free.

[TEKTORO]

I keep reading "Brandish" at first glance.

Want this game pretty bad, I heard they dug up and fully developed this with the PSP tools badass considering many devs already moved on from this... Well I guess except for Summon Knight now

Decided to start Saints Row today and been playing all day so far, had the bro in law over again and we did play a shit ton of Sonic UGC Golden Axe 2 & 3 (3 is amazing), Streets of Rage. Then some Magic Sword, I took a break and he tried Mega Man 9. Then when he left I threw on some of my naughty 3DO games since the fam is out this weekend, so Virtual Cameraman 4 & 5 managing to get the first girls to take the first photo shoots for me failing miserably.. The on to Janken Paradise no luck there either so now I might watch TV, Surf the Web or play more Saints Row. I have till tomorrow afternoon till everyone's back so I better make the best of it. Lol

Shit almost forgot I found a 48hr trial card for the 360 so I hosted some of my old Far Cry 2 maps and managed to get roughly 4-6 people to join my matches for about and hour too, game is dead tho

Another almost forgot, uploaded 5 songs to my soundcloud today which were live, raw (pre mastered) and rushed but whatever it's soundcloud lol.

[Erik_Twice]

I built too many cheap wooden houses and tried expanding into other buildings too quickly. The result was a deficit of logs because of the massive need for firewood that created a bottleneck where I lack tools, thus reducing effectiveness of food production. This led to a death wave where my peak population of 86 workers dropped to 60 in less than a year due to mass starvation. This further hindered all of my production because I lost the required manpower to continue sustaining all of my farms, fishing docks, forester stations, and so on.

I hate when that happens. I've been playing Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (Same series as Caesar) and this also happens. Basically if you make a mistake like that, the only solution is to start over or drop tons of small houses to artifically get workers back. It's really frustrating

[Ack]

I built too many cheap wooden houses and tried expanding into other buildings too quickly. The result was a deficit of logs because of the massive need for firewood that created a bottleneck where I lack tools, thus reducing effectiveness of food production. This led to a death wave where my peak population of 86 workers dropped to 60 in less than a year due to mass starvation. This further hindered all of my production because I lost the required manpower to continue sustaining all of my farms, fishing docks, forester stations, and so on.

I hate when that happens. I've been playing Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (Same series as Caesar) and this also happens. Basically if you make a mistake like that, the only solution is to start over or drop tons of small houses to artifically get workers back. It's really frustrating

Yeah, I ended up just abandoning the entire town. I haven't deleted the save yet, but looking back at it, there are a lot of things I would do differently in that game. It's a shame though, it was a good map seed.

But Banished continues, and I have struck success! My current town, Podunk, had problems early on with not expanding fast enough, but after a few rough years of population constriction, I made it through and continued to grow. Podunk broke the 100-worker barrier on Saturday and then the 300-citizen barrier on Sunday, just in time to get the 300 people in 100 years achievement. The only other long term time-sensitive population achievement is 500 people in 200 years...I think that is doable, so long as my population doesn't have a death wave right before the time is up. This actually happened around the 97-year mark for me, and at year 99 I dropped down to 290. But thankfully a rapid expansion of housing in those years managed to bring me up to 305 right before the magic number.

Unfortunately I ran into problems with the resulting population boom outdoing my food storage, so I'm now frantically building my food production, and my population expansion has slowed. I expect I will begin seeing a contraction soon, but that is less important than the food crisis. I also finally built a trading post and have picked up another livestock type as well as diversifying my seed collection. And I have cleared a large section of the map and been hastily converting it into farmland. Podunk will survive, it will just take more work.

Currently I'm sitting at 39% of all achievements unlocked. Banished lacks a proper ending, so I guess achievements are the only real barometer for completion. Beyond that...well, I've built every structure possible and seen most of what the game has to offer. The majority of the remaining achievements I'll pick up with relative ease over the course of steady expansion. But with October looming around the corner, and the next Together RPG coming up, I'm not sure when I should consider this finished.

[Erik_Twice]

Now that Ack made me mention it, I'm going to cheat at Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom because I can't get my peeps to deliver the right goods to the emperor's tomb despite my stores being full of them.

On other news, I decided to boot up Streets of Rage 2. I don't think I ever got into it too much, I played it here and there but I mostly played other beat'em ups and I have forgotten about most of it. Some random thoughts:

- The game is easy! I made it to stage 6 on my first try. Given I couldn't make it past stage 2 in Final Fight, that's quite a surprise. It's long too, it probably takes more than an hour to beat.
- This is very noticiable when it comes to boss/miniboss design. I'm playing as the girl and I've found that jump+foward kick is an easy victory against most of them. The hitbox of that attack is huge and it has enough range that enemies keeping their distance are hit.
- Talking about Final Fight, the game is such a shameless copy in so many ways. I always knew it was, but until now I didn't quite realize how much. The art direction is the same, the characters are the same in both looks and playstyle, the weapon pick-ups are identical and the enemies work very similarly.
- That said, it's a better Final Fight than Final Fight. It doesn't have any of its rough edges and it takes many of the main concepts a little further. There are more moves, the enemies a fair bit smarter, bosses are more interesting...it's nothing groundbreaking but it's fun.
- In that sense, I would say that SoR 2 is a good, very well-made game even if I wouldn't put it on the same category as Capcom's brawlers.
- It is, however, far more approachable than any other beat'em up of its quality. By far. Anyone can enjoy Streets of Rage which I don't think is true for most of the genre.

PD: The sound punches make when you hit somebody is incredibly satisfying