Indholdsfortegnelse for #245 November 2015 i PC Powerplay

“ No longer shackled by historical realism, Henrik’s team had the freedom to play with game concepts” One of the great success stories in Swedish games publishing, Paradox has captured gamers’ imaginations with the myriad intrigues made possible by Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings. But until now, Paradox strategy games have been largely rooted in history. So when we had the chance to interview Stellaris game director Henrik Fåhraeus, we felt compelled to ask: Why make a futuristic space strategy game? And why now? “We have always had a long-term ambition to cover the entire “human timeline” with our games, including the future. So, for us, making Stellaris feels like a natural step. It’s something we have both wanted to do internally and that our players have kept asking us…

PCPP: How does the melee system work? SJ: It’s not really a combo system. It’s more about how you combine your momentum, what type of move you’re using, and the environment with an attack. It’s feeding a lot better into the movement system, as well. It’s not as efficient to run up to a guy and start fighting as to try to get momentum, combine a skill move with an attack, then you will get a different outcome. Does Faith, once again, have unlimited sprinting stamina? The whole core mechanic is based around momentum. If you don’t time your moves correctly, you will lose momentum, and then you will slow down. Once you have momentum and if you manage to string the moves together and keep flow, you’re going to…

DEVELOPER CYANIDE STUDIOS PUBLISHER FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE PRICE $44.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL www.bloodbowl-game.com The biggest problem with Blood Bowl 2 is that it relies too much on virtual dice. Playing the game on the tabletop integrates dice into everything but there is a tacit understanding between gamers that everyone is playing against the fates, but in Blood Bowl 2 it just feels random and like the game is stacked against you. During the first few games of the campaign that serve as a tutorial, the randomness of the game isn’t present, leaving players free to execute plays and supposedly get a feel of how the game plays. Get a little deeper in and you’re thrown to the tender mercy of fate. Nothing in the game feels certain leaving the…

DEVELOPER WARGAMING PUBLISHER WARGAMING PRICE FREE TO PLAY AVAILABLE AT WARGAMING.NET Asia.wargaming.net The transition from open beta test to full ‘final release’ of World of Warships was really quite calm – almost boring, in fact. But for a game that already had thousands of players, and was about to get many, many more, a boring launch is kind of what you want. No servers crashed, nothing caught on fire, and veteran players even got to keep their precious warships. In fact, there wasn’t even that much new added to the game as the version-number ticked over. If you’ve not been playing, at the moment you can really only choose between two tech trees – American and Japanese – with a few Russian ships available if you want to start spending…

To get a better understanding of what you can actually do with a games-focused degree, we reached out to several former students who have, since finishing their degrees in Australia, been involved in the making of games that have received commercial release. MATT TROBBIANI Studied: Computer Science, Adelaide University (2011) Worked on: Hacknet In August, Matt Trobbiani completed work on the long-gestating Hacknet. It’s a game about hacking into computer systems to lift data, sort of like a modern Uplink. It’s clever and funny and fantastic, and is clearly the result of a lot of hard work. “Making games is really hard”, Trobbiani admits. “If you’re making something new or innovative, there might not be good answers out there for ‘how do I do this.” “A computer science degree helps…

PRICE $499www.msi.com Half a grand used to be a rather high price to pay for a gaming motherboard, but the introduction of Skylake seems to have changed that. Whether it’s the pathetically low Aussie dollar, or the inclusion of expensive features on these Z170 boards, we’re now seeing $350 as around the norm for a decent gaming board. Therefore this board from MSI isn’t quite the stretch it used to be. Also, it’s finished in a stunning silver colour, which was reason enough for us to review it. Hey, we like good looking things as much as the next person. We’re pretty sure the silver finish of this motherboard added around $2 to the cost of production, so we implore other manufacturers to do the same. It just looks great,…

PRICE $149 www.corsair.com There’s no denying that Corsair’s hit keyboards, the RGB K70 and K95, were both sweet pieces of kit, but when demand was so high it sent prices well north of $200, the price simply wasn’t justified. We’re mere mortals here at PCPP, so when we saw Corsair’s newest keyboard was a much more reasonable $150, we couldn’t wait to check it out. The Strafe sits smack bang in the middle of mechanical keyboard pricing, so how does it compare to myriad competitors? As expected, real Cherry MX keys have been included, in either red or brown flavours. Each is individually backlit, but the colour is fixed to either red, nothing, or somewhere in between. We went with a steady low red for our darkened gaming den. Sadly…

PRICE $999www.epson.com.au I’ve been a vocal proponent for projectors for almost 15 years now, ever since I fired up my first 720p model hooked up to an Xbox, and was blown away by the true big-screen experience. I’ve never gone back to gaming on a monitor since then, it’s that bloody good, with only VR tempting me away from its epic levels of immersion. Epson absolutely dominates the projector market here in Australia with over 50% of local sales, and its 9300 has been on our Beast page for quite some time. This month sees the arrival of its more affordable sibling, the TW5300. At a fraction of the cost, this is the perfect entry-level projector for gamers, and in some ways is even superior to its bigger bro. Like…

PRICE $189www.coolermaster.com As with almost all mechanical gaming keyboards, this one’s utility value extends beyond actual gaming. I’m typing on it now, and have been for a week, and can’t see any need to change back to what I was using before because the Quickfire XT ticks all the boxes. The look is refined, with none of the extraneous frippery that can make buying a keyboard a farcical style choice. It’s plastic, but the solid trustworthy kind, and because it’s $189 price puts it squarely against high-end metal-top choices like the Corsair K-range, I must say that not for a moment does the plastic feel less than properly premium, and that includes the key surfaces, which are UV coated and feel nicely grippy. Red, Blue and Brown Cherry models are…

We loved Plantronics’ previous RIG headphones, and we’re starting to get awfully fond of the new RIG 500, too. The RIG 500 is a modular headset. The whole thing comes apart, and is designed so you can replace the earcups, and remove the headband for easy customisation. Plantronics envisions the RIG 500 will be popular with pro-gamers, not only because it’s very light - it weighs only 200 grams - but because the band can be easily painted or treated with team colours or logos. It’s no slouch in the sound department, and our early hands on with the headphones delivered clear gaming sound via 40mm drivers with excellent low frequency notes. There are also two higher-end models - the RIG 500 HD with 7.1 Dolby sound, and the 500…

Dark Souls III DEVELOPER FROMSOFTWARE PUBLISHER FROMSOFTWARE, BANDAI NAMCO ENTERTAINMENT DUE TBA 2016 xxxxxxxxxxx.com When talking Souls, be it Demon’s or Dark, it’s hard to avoid the subject of difficulty. To the casual observer, frequent deaths followed by a taunting ‘YOU DIED’ screen makes player persistence seem borderline masochistic. Add this to the tantrums thrown when a Souls game aims to be more “accessible”, and it’s easy to misconstrue intentions. But those more experienced with Dark Souls as a series know better. So, to get this out of the way: is Dark Souls III difficult? You bet it is. In the five or so hours spent with the title I was stabbed in the back, burnt to a crisp, frostbitten and even torn apart by tentacles. But it wasn’t the…

Doom DEVELOPER ID SOFTWARE PUBLISHER BETHESDA DUE 2016 doom.com PCPP: Has any content made it over to this game from the scrapped version of Doom 4? MS: There was stuff going into [Doom 4] that went up on the whiteboard [for Doom]. There was an advanced melee type of system. There were some technical aspects of it and some gameplay things that were not completely dismissed. Even in the development of our execution moves, our glory kills, there’s still a seed of that work that still lives on. We’ve just taken a completely different spin on it. You get to a point like that and people feel like things are being quote/unquote scrapped. I would never put it that way because you’re always a combination of everything you’ve done in…

DEVELOPER AVALANCHE STUDIOS PUBLISHER WARNER BROS. GAMES PRICE $59.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL www.madmaxgame.com Max Rockatansky is an interesting anti-hero. He’s a good driver, maybe even great, but aside from that he has no other real skills aside from the fact that he just wants it more. He escapes situations because of bloodymindedness and wins fights because he’s too stubborn to quit. He succeeds through determination rather than skill, a fact that doesn’t really play out in Mad Max by Avalanche Studios. Left for dead in the desert after a run in with desert warlord Scabarous Scrotus, Max reluctantly teams up with hunchbacked mechanical prodigy Chumbucket to build a new vehicle in the hopes of being able to take revenge on Scrotus and reclaim the last of the V8…

DEVELOPER FRICTIONAL GAMES PUBLISHER FRICTIONAL GAMES PRICE $29.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM somagame.com Horror in games is usually predicated on jump scares - spring loaded cats launching out at tense moments, monsters popping up when you least expect them, screams shattering the silence and the like. Although SOMA does have its share of effective jump scares, Frictional Games has achieved something rather amazing with the new game - an existential sense of dread fostered both by the plot of the game and the environment in which the events take place. It’s a different kind of horror game that most people will be used to, one that relies of subtlety rather than cheap pops, but don’t let that fact be a barrier to you playing one of the most thoughtfully constructed horror…

The release of a new Operating System is usually accompanied by a feeling of nervous anticipation followed by outright dread amongst gamers. Compared to the general PC populace, we’re the most sensitive to software change, with our demanding games putting more pressure on the entire PC than nearly every other type of software. If something doesn’t work quite so, it can destroy the entire gaming experience. It could be as simple as a broken refresh rate thanks to wonky monitor drivers, or as drastic as multiple-GPU setups no longer working caused by a revised version of DirectX; we’re accustomed to the release of a new OS breaking something. With the recent release of Windows 10, many gamers have adopted the safe Wait-and-See approach, which usually equates to waiting to see…

PRICE $1249www.msi.com If you want the ultimate in performance for your PC, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics chipset is the one for you. Well, unless you’re bat-shit crazy and reckon 12GB of onboard RAM is worth paying $1500 for, in which case go right ahead and buy a Titan X. Despite attempts by AMD’s Fury X to unseat NVIDIA from the performance throne, the 980 Ti takes the lead in most real world examples, and that’s before it’s been given the Lightning treatment. This refers to MSI’s most exclusive range of GPUs, which have been sold under the Lightning brand for several years now. Put simply, Lightning products are built around the best GPU, strapped to the best components and cooler, delivering the most overclockable product on the market.…

PRICE $129www.corsair.com Gaming headsets make big bank for hardware vendors, with every man and his dog vying for your audio attention with their latest set. Corsair has just unveiled its brand new VOID RGB range, with three different models aimed at various price points. The USB kit here is the mid-range model, delivering the same sound quality and features as the $200 kit, but without wireless support. Let’s see what your $130 gets you. The new design of the headset is as iconic as it is comfortable. Corsair leveraged the help of the chaps at BMW Designworks to come up with its funky lines, which somehow looks supremely cool, while remaining easy to wear over long periods of time. The fold-down mic includes a couple of LED lights that should…

PRICE $340www.asrock.com Intel’s Next Unit of Computing hasn’t quite taken the world by storm, with these palm-sized PCs lacking the oomph necessary for meaty multimedia work, especially in this era of 4K video. However, several spin-offs of the basic NUC design have attempted to tackle this issue, and ASRock claims its BeeBox is the first that can reliably run 4K video. It does so by using a dual channel memory configuration, whereas other NUCs are limited to single channel. Twin sticks of 2GB DDR3 1600MHz are included in the version we were supplied, and we tested several 4K demo videos. Playback was smooth and judder-free, very impressive for such a small PC. It’s no doubt aided by Intel’s Celeron N3000 processor, a twin core chip that ramps up to 2.08GHz…

PRICE $149www.rhermaltake.com.au There seems to be a real habit for extraneous design elements to work their way into gaming keyboards – strange angular adornments, oddly shaped wrist rests or features that aren’t particularly useful to anyone. The Poseidon Z RGB forgoes all these extraneous bells and whistles and is all the better for it. That’s not to say the keyboard skips on functionality. The keyboard still boasts RGB LEDs, multimedia buttons and room for more than enough macros and profiles to fill all but the most extreme of needs. The keyboard utilises Kailh blue or brown switches. That’s right – it’s a keyboard that doesn’t use Cherry. That said, the blue and brown switches feel extremely similar to the more familiar Cherry keys of the same colour, with the blues…

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 sweet Tyon gaming mouse, thanks to Roccat! LETTER OF THE MONTH BAT DANCE I just read that after months of it being not available on Steam that Warner Bros. are finally going to make Batman: Arkham Knight available for sale again. Personally I don’t think it matters if Rocksteady have finally fixed all of the bugs with the game. It’s too late to make it available again. People have already been screwed by the game not only with how buggy it was on PC but also because…

DEVELOPER EUGEN SYSTEMS PUBLISHER FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE PRICE $44.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.actofaggression-game.com The Earth just can’t catch a break. In the mid-2020s, 3 factions – The UN-sanctioned Chimera, the US Army, and a coalition of private militia known as the Cartel – battle each other over resources, and try to wipe each other out with superior weaponry. Sounds familiar, right? Of course it does. Eugen Systems also made Act Of War: Direct Action over 10 years ago, and AoA is its spiritual successor. If you’re a little bit older (like me), it’ll bring back memories of Command and Conquer: Generals, which isn’t a bad thing at all. Like any RTS, it does take a bit of time to get into it. Resources are randomly spread throughout the rather large…

DEVELOPER WITCH BEAM PUBLISHER WITCH BEAM PRICE $14.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.assaultandroidcactus.com There a story to Assault Android Cactus – something about rogue AI and police androids and related fluff – but none of that really matters. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s ultimately an unnecessary layer of gloss on what is quite possibly the most hectic, enjoyable and polished twin stick shooter/bullet hell games to come along in quite a while. Developed by Brisbane based indie developer Witch Beam, Assault Android Cactus may feature cutesy characters but don’t let appearances fool you. Outside of character design, there is nothing soft about the game. It’s fast, extremely challenging and hard as nails. Broken into a number of nominally themed sections, Cactus sees players choosing from a number of assault…

DEVELOPER SKYSHINE GAMES PUBLISHER VERSUS EVIL PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.gobedlam.com Take equal parts Oregon Trail, FTL and hatred and you have Skyshine’s Bedlam. It’s a game that seems to actively dislike you, trying at every turn to end your game in the most brutal way possible. The brutality of the game is fitting when you consider the brutality of the world in which it is set. A post-apocalyptic Rogue-like game, Skyshine’s Bedlam sees players trying to make their way from the walled city of Byzantine to the fabled safe haven of Aztec City in a massive armoured transport called the Dozer. Standing between the Dozer and Aztec City is the vast, hostile expanse of Badlam, an irradiated desert populated by hostile cyborgs, mutants, A.I. and marauders. The desert…

The combined forces of PC & Tech Authority, PC PowerPlay, Hyper and Atomic took over the UNSW Roundhouse and brought together technology vendors and tech savvy fans for a night of information overload, fun, prizes, food and drink. After a brief bit of mingling and checking out some of the tech on display, MC Steve Kiernan, Editor of CRN, got the show on the road. Graham Tucker, ANZ Technical Manager for Intel kicked off the talks, detailing the design process behind the new Skylake CPUs as well as the philosophy behind the Tick-Tock development and distribution cycles of CPUs. Mr. Tucker also spoke about the blazingly fast Intel 750 1.2TB PCI SSD, currently the fastest consumer SSD in the world. Intel are giving away three of these drives in a…

PRICE $49 www.cougargaming.com The Cougar 500M is a simple, to-the-point gaming mouse. It’s not adorned with any flashy features, nor does it carry an accompanying sky-high price point. At fifty bucks it’s right on the edge of budget territory, yet its solid build quality and excellent performance make it feel like it costs a whole lot more. If you’re looking for a mouse with more buttons than a rocket ship console, look elsewhere. The usual six are in place on this mouse, though the DPI switch uses a unique design, feeling more like a rocker and making it easier to adjust on the fly. Three small LEDs on the left side indicate which of the three DPI modes is selected. Lefties will be out of luck with this mouse as…

PRICE $95 www.corsair.com For less than a hundred bucks, the Stereo version of Corsair’s new VOID RGB range gives you the exact same 50mm neodymium drivers found in its $200 wireless range. You also get the same super sexy design, which looks like it’ll happily handle a few close encounters with your rear end, when you inevitably sit on them sometime in the near future. You even get the same quality microphone as the others in the range. So what’s different? Well, unlike the other two, the Stereo kit connects to your PC via a 3.5mm stereo minijack, and doesn’t include any form of audio processing. This is actually a good thing for those with sound cards or quality onboard audio, and it also means that you can connect these…

PRICE $1199www.asus.com.au Welcome to the world’s first 165Hz gaming display. Just when you thought 144Hz was fast enough, ASUS comes along and delivers an even faster speed. It’s not that the panel they’ve used in the PG279Q is actually designed to run at this speed. No, ASUS has caught on to the craze that monitor enthusiasts have been doing for years now, and have overclocked it at the factory. We’re not sure that’s such a big deal though, as we’re hard pressed to tell the difference between 120Hz and anything over and above that. What is a big deal is that they’ve once again used an IPS panel inside this display, which offers a vastly superior viewing experience to the TN panels usually found within high-speed gaming displays. As well…

Before we start to explain what an Solid State Drive (SSD) is and how it works we should first take a look at where we’ve come from. Older hard drives used technology not too dissimilar to a record player in that a rotating disc (platter) was read and written to by an arm (actuator) which moved back and forth across the platters surface. This meant that when your computer asked for some information the actuator had to locate the data and read it. This all works well but as a hard drive starts to age and data is constantly written to and deleted from the hard drive – not all the data ends up being stored in a continuous stream. Data soon starts having to be written to “best fit”…

Crowd funding is a strange thing. In the last month or so, crowdfunding has been at the centre of both a number of phenomenal success stories and controversies that have really shown both the strengths and weaknesses of the concept. On the one hand, you have Harebrained Schemes, a developer that has proven on multiple occasions to be able to successfully crowd fund a game, release on time and score both critical and commercial success having their base pledge goal for BattleTech smashed in 53 minutes. On the other you have the feud between Chris Roberts, The Escapist, Derek Smart and others about Star Citizen and whether or not it has run out of money (amongst other allegations). I don’t want to dig too far into the ongoing shitstorm that…