"You've all had it too easy for too long. Sitting there, building your prisons, not caring about deaths or insolvency. Well NO MORE! We've introduced failure conditions and now, if you f**K up it's game over.

We've also graded all prisoners on four scales: Punishment, Reform, Security and Health. You can check these out in the rap sheet and when summed over the whole prison you end up with a score. Lefty-liberal reformist paradise or super-right super-max super bad ass punishment amplifier - you go ahead and max those stats. The Punishment Inspector shall be pleased."

Really enjoy seeing this latest batch of Prison Architect updates. Introversion has added endgame failure states which are pretty interesting. Too many people die in your prison? You get in trouble for criminal negligence and become a prisoner in your own prison. Have a riot that goes on too long? The national guard will come in and take over your prison.

Introversion also added a scoring system for the chance your prisoners will reoffend. With all these new changes, it seems they are getting closer to the final game. Unsure what else they plan to add to the game but it is pretty awesome to see all they have added to it till now. I started with a pretty early alpha build but it was already loads of fun and it just keeps getting better.

You can nab Prison Architect on Steam for Linux, Mac and Windows right now for 66% off so get it now if you are interested.

In this episode of the Cheerful Ghost Roundtable we talk about what we are playing, drinking and dive right into talking about Star Wars Episode VII and the recent E.T. dig. What horrible games would you bury 50 feet under the ground to never be played again?

We talk about all of that. So yay for you.

What We are Playing & Drinking

• 0.52m Travis: Diablo III: Reaper of Souls


• 2.45m WhiteboySlim: Diablo III, Knights of Pen and Paper +1


• 5.30m Scrypt: Risk of Rain & Road Trip


• 7.19m jdodson: Wayward Souls & Age of Mythology Extended Edition

Star Wars Episode VII

• 12.45m Star Wars VII Intro.


• 14.11m What are our thoughts on the Star Wars Extended Universe? http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/2005


• 26.10m Episode VII Cast Announced: http://starwars.com/news/star-wars-episode-7-cast-announced.html

E.T. Landfill

• 36.15m Recently a dig has unearthed E.T. and other Atari games. What horrible games would we bury for all time if we could? http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/28/atari-et-video-game

You may have noticed that most shooters only enable you to play them in one way. Run and gun. Looks like the new Wolfenstein game has considered this and is designed to allow you choice in how you approach it. Not only can you run and gun, causing mad amounts of carnage and also paint the world with the blood of your Nazi foes. It seems Machine Games is also enabling people to play with a stealth mode style.

If you are the more "hang back and slit throats while taking some sniper shots at the Nazis" type of person, they seem to have you covered. All told I enjoy the "run and gun carnage" but I also really loved the stealth aspect of the recent BioShock Infinite DLC Burial At Sea Part 2.

Excited to try my hand at both styles when the game drops.

Nekro is a pretty cool game i've been following since I played it at PAX Prime last year. DarkForge Games will bring it to Steam Early Access on May 2nd so you can sink your teeth into the evil for yourself.

But don't take my word for it, peep the new trailer above.

Nekro will drop on Steam for Linux, Mac and Windows and will be 25% off at launch so if you are interested, you should pick it up while it's on sale.

If you are interested, check my beta review of Nekro:

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/1923

Can't seem to go far these days without hearing about a new Indie Rogue-like and this post is no exception. RocketCat Games, the company that brought us such greats as Mage Gauntlet, Punch Quest & Hook Champ just released Wayward Souls for iOS. It launched a few days ago and has made some pretty big waves in the Indie scene and since I am always in the market for fun mobile games, I decided to give it a shot. To date, my list of fun mobile games is very small but some games really shine and Wayward Souls is one of the best yet.

In Wayward Souls you start out by picking one of five classes, the Warrior, Mage and Rogue. Not all of the classes are unlocked from the start. You can unlock the Adventurer, Spellsword & Cultist classes by completing in game zones. Part of the fun of Wayward Souls is learning your enemies so you can avoid death. Each enemy has a very different mechanism for attacking you and it's fun to find a new one and learn the particular pattern to take it down. Wayward Souls also features totally random dungeons so no play through is the same.

One annoying aspect of perma-death rogue-likes is that you start fresh from game to game. Wayward Souls does something different in that you earn in game gold you can use to permanently enhance the classes you play. You might have a spectacular failure during one session but if you collected enough gold you can upgrade the class to do better the second time. Whereas most games make these upgrades useless, in Wayward Souls the class upgrades really effect your next game.

One gripe I have with hack and slash phone games is that the controls usual suck. Wayward Souls breaks out of the this tradition with a really great use of phone gestures to make the gameplay smooth. I'd rather play this with a traditional controller for certain, but after some time with the game found the touch controls to be perfectly acceptable substitutes.

The overall art in the game looks like a love letter to Secret of Mana and as such totally love it. The music is fantastic and really brings it's unique style to make the game that much better. The game score is so imaginative I was finding myself in awe of what was happening musically. With that, I hope they release it as a download in some form as i'd love to add it to my personal collection.

Wayward Souls is a great game if you are looking for something pickup and play that offers a deep PC like experience. One huge complaint I have with most phone games is that they are trite and devoid of fun and Wayward Souls really breaks out of that and offers up a real "meat and potatoes" experience.

Wayward Souls is available right now on iOS for $5 and will be ported later to Android and PC. RocketCat plans on increasing the price over time as they add more content to the game so if you are interested, best to pick it up now.

**EDIT**: Looks like we can all nab the Wayward Souls OST from Bandcamp for only $3.

http://joeygrady.bandcamp.com/album/wayward-souls-ost

"For over 35 years, the Expanded Universe has enriched the Star Wars experience for fans seeking to continue the adventure beyond what is seen on the screen. When he created Star Wars, George Lucas built a universe that sparked the imagination, and inspired others to create. He opened up that universe to be a creative space for other people to tell their own tales. This became the Expanded Universe, or EU, of comics, novels, videogames, and more.

While Lucasfilm always strived to keep the stories created for the EU consistent with our film and television content as well as internally consistent, Lucas always made it clear that he was not beholden to the EU. He set the films he created as the canon. This includes the six Star Wars episodes, and the many hours of content he developed and produced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. These stories are the immovable objects of Star Wars history, the characters and events to which all other tales must align.

Now, with an exciting future filled with new cinematic installments of Star Wars, all aspects of Star Wars storytelling moving forward will be connected. Under Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy’s direction, the company for the first time ever has formed a story group to oversee and coordinate all Star Wars creative development.

“We have an unprecedented slate of new Star Wars entertainment on the horizon,” said Kennedy. “We’re set to bring Star Wars back to the big screen, and continue the adventure through games, books, comics, and new formats that are just emerging. This future of interconnected storytelling will allow fans to explore this galaxy in deeper ways than ever before.”"

So basically we are learning what seemed real enough since the new Star Wars films were announced, they are taking an entirely new direction. All told this doesn't bother me and I look forward to the new stories the new films will tell.

That said, not all fans are happy about this news at all. I'll admit, I grew up considering the Timothy Zhan's Heir to the Empire books to be cannon. Now that they are not, I am a bit sad but it's not like Lucasfilm is taking them away.

What do you think, is Lucasfilm doing right by the new direction Disney is taking the franchise or is this something else?

http://starwars.com/news/the-legendary-star-wars-expanded-universe-turns-a-new-page.html

Wanted to share some Cheerful Ghost fan art from one of my friends and local PDX artist Hagen Deloss. I love seeing this stuff, so if you have seen someone make something or have made something yourself please share it with me.

https://twitter.com/thedelossopher/status/459872880054923264/photo/1

Follow him on Twitter @thedelossopher

Like many of you, I excitedly boarded the Starbound hype train. After a few weeks of reading the nearly daily updates, watching the update videos and talking to friends, I was hooked. I wasn’t alone as many people on Cheerful Ghost and all over the internet were really excited to see play Starbound. In April of 2013 the Starbound beta hit and over the next few months the Starbound fans funded the game at 4 million dollars! We sailed through the three pre-order bonuses of the new race, collectable fossils and starter pets. My excitement level was crazy. Clearly this game would be the answer to my prayer for an awesome open world building game in space that took the best elements from Minecraft and Terraria.

As the 2013 was nearing an end Chucklefish let us know the game beta would finally release. To be able to finally play Starbound was like a nerds dream come true. When the beta date hit, I refreshed the Humble Store got my key and frantically kept checking Steam to be able to download the game on my Mac. Later that day the game downloaded and I started a fresh character. The game was beautiful, the score was moving and the game was fun. I didn’t understand the weapon level system, the game was way too easy and the entire universe was really empty but none of that mattered because I was high on Starbounds glow. I sunk many hours into Starbound over that first week but as my play time grew the games flaws started to become more apparent.

Chucklefish mentioned the game would be buggy. They said the game wouldn’t be finished. I kept that information in the back of my mind as I played but as the games oddities increased, my excitement waned. I decided to walk away from the game a bit to give them a few months to fix the games biggest flaws. I came back to the game after Chucklefish said to expect no more player wipes. I figured that would be a good time as i’d have some permanence to my game. After a few days of playing a bug hit the game wiping out all my treasure chests. After this bug hit I also noticed how much the game hand’t really progressed in those few months.

Recently, Tiy posted something to the Chucklefish blog that I wanted to respond to.

"Tiy: The first reason is relocating the team. This is a complex and time consuming process that is (thankfully) almost at an end. We hope to have the entire team over here by the end of the month. Making this work has meant going through the visa process, setting up a work space, finding a new home for each person, team members driving for days to get legal documentation. It’s been a challenge.

Some people tell us that its a waste of time and there is no benefit to working in the same office when tools exist to work remotely. These people are grossly mistaken."

I am currently a Software Engineer that works for a very large company and we have developers distributed all over the world. My team consists of people spanning Oregon, Washington DC & Brazil. There is no question that having all development centrally located can be helpful. That said, working remotely in tech isn’t crazy. Having team members that span different timezones does take some organization and care. One mechanism is to have people flex work hours a bit to accommodate the team.

"Tiy: The other reason updates have slowed down was the community response to faster updates. People like to point out that we said we would deliver near daily small updates and have failed to do so. They do not however point out that we made the decision to go back to more substantial updates because we were criticised heavily for putting out small updates without much substance (though larger updates were ongoing behind the scenes). Critics argued passionately that updates containing one new sub biome, or new guns, or new structures, or new weather was just pointless fluff and they wanted real ‘game changing’ updates. So we listened and that’s what we went back to focusing on."

When you say you are going to do something and then later change your mind, I can see why people would be frustrated. I read the big update post where they said they were changing the way Starbound development happened to push out quicker updates and thought it was a good idea. That said, I don’t really care to much about HOW they update the game, there are lots of ways to develop software. Whatever works best for them, is totally fine.

Which I think is something worth considering. I don’t think Starbound fans care much about how Chucklefish makes the game, they just want the thing they love to be awesome. Enraged fans take to the message boards and Reddit to complain about Chucklefish relocating it’s staff to the UK or the update changes not because they ultimately care about how someone runs a company. People are complaining because the thing they lovingly funded isn’t the way they want it to be. Chucklefish could open a moon base to continue development and as long as the game was awesome, no one would care.

That said, development of the game has vastly slowed down since it’s beta launch and it's not entirely clear where development of the game is.

At the end of the day I think Starbound is a rad game and wish Chucklefish to an awesome final launch. Alongside that, it’s been a wild ride tempered by some disappointment felt by many fans. All that needs to be done at this point is to make Starbound awesome and I have no doubt it will be. Angry rage filled fans have a way of coming back to sanity when things turn around. And ultimately we all want the same thing, for Staround to be awesome.

http://playstarbound.com/starbound-progress/
https://twitter.com/Tiyuri/status/458210602021048321

I enjoy these game lore videos. Enjoyed the fake lore video playing up the hyper difficult and addictive qualities of Flappy Bird.

After watching this video I wondered what kind of faux lore would exist for Pacman?

A really great video showcasing the history behind Harvest Moon. Watching this video has me hoping that Stardew Valley launches this year!