Banished, Rockband 4 and MGS5 aftermath.

Banished is an indie citybuilder that focuses on the logistics of maintaining a self-sustainable community. It's been around for quite a while and I've been playing it off and on, being both fascinated and frustrated by it. Banished can very well be the Dark Souls of citybuilders. Every adjustment that you make ripples through the community at various levels of devastation and maintaining a stable foundation of bannions, the name of the people in Banished, is easy only on paper.

There are interesting ideas powering Banished. The economic cornerstone is sharing and interegional trade is goods bartering. There's no monetary system to attach a value to a lettuce. Bannions are however greedy and needy and without a market that regulates the flow of goods, a single family might hoard hundreds of meat units.

Banished is a study in using renewable industry and self-sustaining closed circuits like the Zeitgeist movement envisions. It also shows that these ideals only work for a given amount of time, dependent on the number of souls and how quickly they accrue or decline. Self-sustaining closed circuits rely on a steady stream of labor and in order to maintain a steady stream it needs to expand. It needs to expand because in order to keep feeding everybody more souls are needed to drive the industry. Allowing the community to grow too old before the next generation enters the workforce will soon see the industry falter and collapse. Growing the community too soon and too rapid achieves another thing; the industry will no longer be able to support the community, introducing shortages, famine, disease and ultimately the death of most of your bannions.

Banished is hard and unforgiving, but when you get it right it's one of the more rewarding games that you can play. Find it on Steam when you're looking for a challenge that's a bit different than what you're used too.

I'm very disappointed with Rockband4. While the gameplay is still solid, plastic guitroller and a few hundred DLC songs I'll be able to use seven years more, the game itself is as barebones as a game can get. The entire meta is gone, the feel and atmosphere of the prior Rockband games lost. It's just playing make belief guitar-god but without eveything that made it cool.

I don't get it. I own $400 consoles for this? Someone at Harmonix working on this iteration went, "Yeah, this game shows the power of the console." There's less meat in Rockband 4 than you can find in the offering of a bored indie-studio. Rockband 2 was feature heavy, Rockband 3 was awesome with the SP challenges and the drop in/drop out multiplayer. Rockband4 is like a facebook clone-game put on a DVD.

If I hadn't had a small fortune in DLC-songs I wouldn't have bought Rockband4. The new songs are nothing to write home about and the only song that stands out a little is 'What's going on' by the 4Non-Blonds. Harmonix has done the absolute minimum to have Rockband4 qualify as a game. And it shows.

On the MGS5 front the honeymoon seems to be over. Gamers are screaming foul over the game's monetization and micro-transactions and Konami is the anti-christ again. But it is Konami who's having the last laugh. The profit Konami has made with an unfinished game costing a mint while introducing F2P-monetization proves that the gamers crying foul are empty vessels. The worst enemy to gaming are the gamers themselves.