PC Powerplay #244 October 2015

When I first started on PCPP, there was a fairly steady flow of games released throughout the year. The massive market that is modern gaming was only in its early stages at the time so the release windows for games seemed to be less regimented than they are now. Sure, more games were released just before Christmas than any other time of the year, but other than that the flow was pretty steady. As time went on, releases became more sporadic, with everyone trying to fit their games into some pre-defined, probably statistically derived time periods. Now with the exponential growth of digital distribution and the sheer number of indie and smaller budget games being made, even though the AAA publishers still stick to this rigorous release schedule, sometimes to…

DANIEL WILKS Got the dreaded lurgy @drwilkenstein MALCOLM CAMPBELL Avoided the dreaded lurgy BENNETT RING Moved in with a girl @bennettring JAMES COTTEE Yelled at Microsoft @j_cottee MEGHANN O’NEILL Resorted to cannibalism @firkraags JAMES O’CONNOR Started getting educated @jickle BEN MANSILL Went to America NATHAN LAWRENCE Went to Germany PATRICK STAFFORD Went home @pdstafford DAVID HOLLINGWORTH Went away ALEX MANN Almost wrote about Dark Souls 3 CAMERON FERRIS Gave Wilks the dreaded lurgy @pcpowerplay SEAN FLETCHER Started building a PC…

LETTER OF THE MONTH WINS! Write in to PCPP with your rants, considered opinions, and endless run-on sentences of pure awesome. The address is letters@pcpowerplay.com.au . Each letter read by hand! This Letter of the Month winner scores himself a headset, keyboard, mouse and pad prize pack courtesy of Tesoro! LETTER OF THE MONTH THROTTLED I’m a gamer and I live in the sticks. The two place me firmly between the proverbial rock and hard place. I live outside wireless range and while I’m less than 5km from the nearest exchange away (so I’m told) out here our phones are connected via party lines, so ADSL isn’t an option. So we connect via satellite and with a lot of patience; lag prevents us from online gaming and…

I just want to point out this shot is not in any way staged or uses shameless sucking up. My lounge room totally looks like this ALL the time.* 4 MOST IMPRESSIVE ELEMENTS: Fire, Water, Earth, Wind (always wanted to make that joke) SERIOUSLY THOUGH; 1. 3940XM Mobile Processor 2. 2x 7970M mGPU 3. It’s an Origin System 4. It actually IS portable. LAST UPGRADE: A USB hub for at the desk so pedals / joystick / headphones etc can be permanently plugged in. FAVOURITE FEATURE: It’s portability - seriously - it’s big for a laptop - but still really easy to move around and on the go. WHY SO SPECIAL: It’s a gaming powerhouse, a media powerhouse (as you can see we hook it up to the AV system),…

Turtle Beach make a lot of headsets. For PC, for all the consoles, for eSports, for specific games... you name it, Turtle Beach does it. And now it’s getting into the Star Wars swing, and we support the company wholeheartedly. The Sandtrooper gaming headset is designed after the desert-equipped Stormtroopers of Star Wars: A New Hope. These are the dudes who were getting about the desert killing Jawas, burning senior citizens to death, and look for droids. Their white armour was grimed by sand and wear, and the unit leaders wore specially coloured shoulder armour to set them apart. The headset has all of these features, with a dirty white earcup, coloured band to match the NCO shoulders. The Sandtrooper headset boasts 500mm speakers, a sensitive boom mic, and removable…

Orbitor does to the mechanics of orbital dynamics what Osmos did for the laws of gravity and attraction - that is, turn a physics simulation into a colourful, musically intense game that is easy to learn, but hard as hell to master. Essentially, you travel through various orbital systems, building up speed to travel from one planet to another, building up enough orbital momentum to destroy each planet and gather its energy. And it has a kicking soundtrack to boot. Even cooler, the game’s the work of two guys in Canberra. Evil Aliens is the studio of two Academy of Interactive Entertainment teachers, and Orbitor came out of AIE’s own Incubator Program. The game is out now on Steam Early Access.…