It works as advertised, including (as far as I know) all the user mod's that can be applied. For me, I was looking for a SC2000 with updated graphics, and better and nicer playability. The deal breaker for me was the *odd* look of the simulation: you would see cars, trucks and whatever zooming along the road, and, then, at some point, they would just kind of fade away. I imagine the talk during development at EA/Origin went something along the line of: o "doesn't look realistic, even SC2000 *looked* like a city grinding away..." - "doesn't matter, look at those *buildings*, the *detail*..." o "but what are we simulating? Our vehicles and peeps look like a bunch of fancy cut-scenes, all kind of pasted together." - "no one will notice, trust us." Sim City/Sim City 5 sort of addresses some of these problems, but, based on my limited play, there are some serious bugs which currently look like they will *never* be fixed. (It's hard to comment on a review, so, I will reproduce this review in the forum to allow anyone who has something to say an opportunity to do so.)
Banished looks interesting (just did the first tutorial), but it took a *long* time to get there. The requirements are: “512 MB RAM, DirectX 9.0c compatible video card with 512 MB VRAM (Shader Model 2.0 support required).” I was (up until a few weeks ago) running a vanilla WXP system on an Asus netbook (yep, just 2 tiny little atom processors) and it ran Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and SIm CIty 4 (albeit occasionally slowly, but without problems.) How much VRAM is available, and is Shader support available?--beats me, and even this semi-expert nerd was stumped. Dealing with Gog support was an exercise in futility. It was not entirely their fault, but rather the medium (email.) After a few days, I would get something like: run dxdiag and send us the results. I would run dxdiag, and after a while they said: you aren’t running Shader Model 2.0. It took me a while, but eventually I found an obscure Microsoft post that detailed a C# trick for finding that out, but it took days to find and implement. (Mind you, I have other things going on in life besides trying to run Banished.) After I said: yeah, 99% sure I am running Shader Model 2.0, support said: you don’t have 512 MB VRAM. I haven’t the slightest idea how to determine what the amount of VRAM available is, and, I would bet, neither do most of us. So, the Gog 30 day guarantee is mostly worthless, especially considering the slow pace of feeding me (or you) things to check or verify (assuming you are able to check.) My netbook was having hardware problems, so I’ve upgraded to a W8.1 laptop, and all is well, but it was a long, unpleasant journey. Still and all, Banished looks like it will be fun, but, if you have an older machine (and I mean more than an year or so), good ruck. ;-)
Get 'em while they're hot. Buy it while the sale is on, it's worth it with the 60% discount, not so much if you have to pay the full price. Have just started playing it, so cannot say for sure, but my current recommendation is buy it now. Cheers, pjm
