Indholdsfortegnelse for issue 274 i PC Powerplay

The first pictures to come out of the Monster Hunter film adaptation were not particularly reassuring, with Milla Jovovich posting Monster Hunter set photos of her hanging out with fellow cast members decked out military uniforms. There wasn’t an oversized sword in sight. The latest photo, however, couldn’t come from anything other than Monster Hunter. It shows Jovovich as Natalie Artemis, this time no longer decked out in modern military gear, accompanied by Tony Jaa, who looks almost exactly like Monster Hunter: World’s Field Team Leader, right down to the ridiculous Giant Jawblade. Artemis’ gear is equally inspired by Monster Hunter World, and you might recognise the swirly pattern on her top from the Odogaron chest piece, specifically the male version, from the game. And yes, that’s a slinger that…

G.Skill has gone all fancy with its newest DDR4 memory kit. The company just launched its Trident Z Royal series, and what sets it apart from other RAM is a full-length crystalline light bar plopped on top of a polished heatspreader, with 8-zone RGB lighting, naturally. It’s unique enough that G.Skill filed for a patent on the design, which it says is currently pending. “The patent of the crystalline design on PC components has been applied for across major countries,” G.Skill says. The new memory kit is available with gold and silver heatspreaders, depending on your preference. Both versions sport the crystalline light bar, which is “meticulously crafted to display just the right amount of light refraction.” G.Skill also includes a microfiber cloth with these kits so you can wipe…

THE DARK ROOM DEVELOPER STIRFIRE STUDIOS • RELEASE EARLY ACCESS • PRICE US$14 www.thejohnrobertson.com/thedarkroom/ The Dark Room is the stern scolding we all deserve. For older gamers, like me, who have grown soft, feasting on morsels of modern design. For new gamers, who have never known endlessly, meaninglessly, unfairly starting over. For the gamer sitting next to me, wincing as I make choices. For the man, in the other seat next to me, who was merely in Melbourne to see his favourite horse win a race. “I have a friend who might play DOTA, I think. Do you know that one?” I mean, yes, but not really. As he watches me play, he seems to oscillate between abject confusion and physical pain. And so, I find myself traveling home from…

Hamurabi was a strategy precursor that could be found in schools and on mainframes in the ’60s. Originally known as The Sumer Game, it was rewritten in BASIC and spread to microcomputers in the ’70s. Unfortunately it was more like maths homework than a game. Hamurabi proved to be popular with prospective programmers. After being published in BASIC Computer Games, a collection of type-in programs, people started making custom versions. These programmers included Walter Bright, who was originally working on a Hamurabi game before creating the Civilization progenitor, Empire.…

Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t smile when they think about this turn-based romp. Worms has thrown in classes and physics, and even had a brief misguided dalliance with 3D graphics, but ultimately it’s always been about one thing: murdering worms. It’s an all-time great multiplayer game and developer Team17 continues to get a great deal of mileage out of its clumsy invertebrates and their ever-expanding arsenal. Exploding sheep, holy hand grenades, concrete donkeys, missile strikes, even Street Fighter’s dragon punch – the only issue is how long it takes to pick one. Luckily Worms also kept things ticking along, letting you set some much-needed time limits.…

King of Dragon Pass, released in 1999, put you in the shoes of a clan leader and left it up to you to completely mess things up. Do you slaughter some intelligent ducks and steal their land? Will you pay a neighbouring clan for a slight made by one of your clansmen? Trade, warfare, farming, diplomacy and religion all fell under the purview of clan chief. Watching your own clan develop and the consequences of decrees play out is a singular delight, and where King of Dragon Pass really excelled, much like Crusader Kings II which arrived over a decade later, was in generating brilliant, unexpected stories.…

DEVELOPER OWLCAT GAMES • PUBLISHER DEEP SILVER www.owlcatgames.com If you’re familiar with Infinity Engine RPGs, playing Kingmaker is like slipping into an old pair of boots. The muscle memory I developed playing Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale came straight back to me: backspace to select the party, space to pause combat, R to rest, tab to highlight objects in a room. The game wears its influences on its sleeve, and even has lauded scribe Chris Avellone on writing duty – but, hey, what Kickstarter-funded RPG doesn’t these days? Kingmaker is based on Pathfinder, a tabletop RPG released in 2009 as a response to the divisive D&D 4th Edition ruleset. This means the combat, like Baldur’s Gate and its ilk, is based around rolls of virtual dice. On lower difficulties you…

DEVELOPER PLAUSIBLE CONCEPT • PUBLISHER RAW FURY www.badnorth.com Do not let the adorable isometric sprite artwork, endearing character portraits and cute sound effects trick you into feeling safe. Bad North is not a lovely new friend. It’s here to rob you of your time, beat you up and possibly even burn your house down. Certainly I wanted to burn everything down in a fiery fit of rage after I lost all my hard-earned progress to a silly mistake for the third time. It’s a simple strategy game, almost closer to being a puzzler. You have to defend a little island, or more specifically the cottages dotted around it. You have up to four units to hold off waves of Viking invaders. Bad North is about shuffling units around to make sure…

PRICE $999 www.nvidia.com.au High end graphics cards have generally trended upwards in size. Triple slot cooling and PCBs protruding well above the PCIe bracket are the norm. With this in mind it’s a real surprise to see just how compact the RTX 2070 Founders Edition is. Small doesn’t mean cheap and ineffective though. We were pleasantly surprised at how much of a jump in quality the RTX 2080 and 2080Ti Founders Edition cards were over their predecessors. At a glance the RTX 2070 Founders Edition looks like a good step forward too. From the outside, the RTX 2070 Founders Edition looks like a compact version of its big brothers. Gone is the old noisy blower cooler. In its place is a totally redesigned cooler featuring twin 8.5cm axial fans blowing…

PRICE $1,069 www.au.msi.com Comparing the RTX 2070 Founders Edition next to the MSI RTX 2070 Gaming Z is almost like comparing a Tonka truck to a Hummer. The MSI is a huge card that positively dwarfs the Founders Edition. The Gaming Z is MSI’s highest tier of Gaming card, surpassed only by the limited edition OC focused Lightning series. It comes with an out of the box boost clock of 1830MHz. This is a big jump over the Founders Edition card, though it does come with a power consumption penalty as MSI states the 2070 Gaming Z can use up to 225W. To put that into perspective, that matches the RTX 2080 Founders Edition power consumption. The PCB is a fully custom design featuring an 8+2 phase VRM all cooled…

PRICE $169 www.razer.com/en-au The Razer Mamba Wireless ($100) keeps everything that made the original Mamba work — the flawless wireless performance, the comfortable textured grips, the gorgeous RGB lighting — but streamlines and refines it. The needless LED strip is gone, as is the bulky dock. The battery lasts much longer, and Razer’s installed a more precise sensor. In short: The Razer Mamba Wireless has kept pace with the times. Although the mouse isn’t quite as good as wireless gaming peripherals get, it’s still near the very top of the pack. If you ever got some hands-on time with the previous Razer Mamba, the new model’s refreshed design will look and feel familiar. The mouse is fairly large and it’s ergonomically designed for right-handed players. There are textured grips on…

Once again we’re updating one of our key builds with a new video card, though the reasoning is slightly different this time around. We would have been quite content leaving a GTX 1080 card in the Performance build, given that the GTX 2070 - reviewed this issue - is not quite on the boil when it comes to price/performance ratio. However, you just can’t get GTX 1080s at the moment, so that means MSI’s new card slots in, bringing the Performance build up near $5,000.…

A big investigative report on “the past, present, and future of Diablo” on Kotaku recently dug into the development history of Diablo 4 and also the state of things at Blizzard. It was presumably spurred by the backlash against Diablo Immortal, a mobile game announced- to great derision - at Blizzcon. And hidden in its midst is a reference to another mobile game in the works, based on a different Blizzard game that you may have heard of: Warcraft. Diablo devotees were disappointed by the Immortal announcement, but a source told Kotaku that Blizzard employees are generally very enthusiastic about it, and about mobile games in general. “The reaction inside the company to Immortal is very different than the reaction outside the company,” the source said. “Part of the thinking…

Few moments are as memorable in all of World of Warcraft history as the Corrupted Blood Incident. On September 13, 2005, a player returned from the grueling new Zul’Gurub raid and summoned his pet in one of Azeroth’s capital cities only to find that, due to a bug, the pet had acquired a debuff that wasn’t supposed to exist outside of the raid. Called Corrupted Blood, this negative effect would deal constant damage to its target until they died—but even worse was the fact that it was highly contagious. Anyone within a certain range of an infected player automatically contracted the disease and soon died. In a matter of hours, World of Warcraft’s capital cities had become ground zero of a deadly plague, and they stayed that way for over…

One of the highest pieces of praise I can give any creative work is this: “Wow, I wish I’d thought of that.” With Ashen, it’s not because I’m a game dev, but rather at just how atmospheric and enthralling the game’s story is, and how simply and elegantly the world is built around you. At its simplest, Ashen is a game with stamina-based combat that will be familiar to any fan of Dark Souls, but it’s the world itself that grabbed me, and it did so in the first five minutes of my hands-on session at PAX Australia 2018. Visually, the game’s stunning art style reminds me of Absolver, with a muted colour palette and simple but expressive character models. It’s a smart move for an indie studio aiming to…

Strategy games and RPGs have long been chummy, perhaps thanks to them both originating on tabletops. 1984’s Lords of Midnight could be played like an RPG or a wargame, with the hero either going on an adventure to destroy a magical MacGuffin or raising an army of warriors and wizards to storm the Witchking’s citadel. The ’90s had the likes of King’s Bounty and its successor, Heroes of Might and Magic, where heroes led armies across fantasy lands, fighting tactical battles, besieging castles and levelling up. There was a hint of city-building and empire management, but the character progression and exploration owed everything to RPGs.…

Every soldier in Close Combat, Atomic Games’ real-time wargame, was an individual. They were part of a squad, but each had their own simulated mental and physical condition that changed their effectiveness in combat. In extreme cases, they’d become incapacitated or fly off the handle. It was a focused version of a wargame, inspired by Squad Leader. While C&C and Warcraft had accessible interfaces and units that did what they were told, Close Combat was dense and full of badly-behaved soldiers. The series persists, marching to the beat of its own drum. The upcoming Close Combat: The Bloody First will be the first in the series to use 3D graphics.…

Myth: The Fallen Lords, developed by Halo and Destiny studio Bungie, was an astounding technical achievement when it launched in 1997. It was a 3D real-time tactics game with a 3D camera to match. That alone made it worth notice, but Myth also proved just how game-changing 3D battlefields could be, particularly if they were supported by physics. If an archer missed an enemy, for instance, that arrow still had to go somewhere. Weather, range and elevation all exerted their influence over the tactical scraps, which made it more than a bit tricky, but also unlike any other strategy game around. It’s a great shame that Bungie moved onto other pastures.…

DEVELOPER MODE 7 GAMES • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.frozensynapse2.com The action in Frozen Synapse 2 plays out in perfect five-second bursts, as soldiers carry out orders with precision. It’s great to watch. Your team might breach a room from multiple entrances at once, or duck behind cover just as a grenade explodes on the other side. It’s flawless and meant to be enjoyed, because these moments take plenty of planning on your part. Let’s say you find yourself controlling a soldier armed with an assault rifle facing an enemy unit holding a shotgun. Between these units lies some basic cover. Should you tell your soldier to stand their ground and take a shot, or move to the cover and open fire? Which is safer? What happens in either case? Unlike most…

DEVELOPER ZACHTRONICS • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.zachtronics.com/exapunks My EXA, a digital bug-looking thing made of code, scurries out into rooms representing nodes in a factory’s network. Following the program I painstakingly wrote for it, the EXA disrupts this network with precision before running the HALT command to self-destruct. There is no trace of the fact I have hacked this factory, except that the snack bars it produces no longer contain peanuts. It’s the little victories. Later I hack a street sign so it reads ‘WAKE UP SHEEPLE’ and want to punch the air in triumph. Exapunks is the latest game from Zachtronics, creator of tricky puzzle games such as Opus Magnum and Infinifactory that are all about moving things from one place to another, and hacking games such as TIS-100 that…

DEVELOPER LUCAS POPE • PUBLISHER 3909 www.obradinn.com The merchant vessel Obra Dinn drifts its way into port, crewless and abandoned, having disappeared some years earlier. You, an insurance investigator, climb aboard the derelict sailing ship and begin to try and make sense of what happened to the crew – with help from a magical pocket watch. This curious artefact lets you visit the moments before a person’s death in an attempt to establish what happened to them. But with the fates of 60 sailors to determine, this is no easy task – especially as Return of the Obra Dinn, a few lean tutorials aside, steadfastly refuses to hold your hand. This is a first-person puzzle game from Lucas Pope, creator of Papers, Please. It’s rendered with a bold art style that…

PRICE $1199 au.msi.com The MSI GF63 8RC has to be our top choice for budget friendly gaming laptops. Priced as low as $649.99 on sale, the GF63 comes equipped with Intel’s i5-8300H, 8GB of DDR4 ram, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1050 and one of the thinner bezels we’ve seen in this price range. The only obvious downside is the lack of an included SSD. The laptop comes loaded with a 1TB HDD which means you’ll probably want to upgrade the storage fairly quickly. When it comes to performance, the laptop is tough to beat at $1199. The GF63 already scores respectable benchmark results out of the box, but a couple of inexpensive upgrades will stretch that performance even further. The GF63 is also one of the more portable gaming notebooks we’ve…

PRICE $1,199 www.asus.com.au The ROG Strix 2070 is the flagship Asus 2070 offering. The bar is always set high for any ROG product and if you take one look at the ROG Strix 2070 you’ll know it’s a premium offering. It packs in a premium PCB, a beefy cooler and plenty of unique ROG features. The competition is tough though and the Asus has a significant price premium that needs to be justified. The Strix 2070 is outwardly similar to the other Strix RTX cards. The build quality is superb with a large brushed aluminium back plate that’s enhanced by an RGB lit ROG logo. There’s also a large PCB baseplate that helps to cool the components while offering additional rigidity. The shroud features some RGB highlights around the fans…

PRICE TBC www.asus.com Asus is not the first brand I think of when it comes to high-end gaming audio. The company’s been releasing some strong game headsets for years, but it’s never been able to overcome a fondness for overaggressive design and some complex, almost gimmicky hardware solutions. But the ROG Delta cans are a massive step forward. In fact, they make a case for being one of the more versatile set of gaming headphones we’ve seen in a long while. The big draw card is not one but four DACs, each dedicated to a separate frequency range, which delivers a remarkable 127dB signal-to-noise ratio. Matched with a 20-40kHz frequency response, the Deltas offer some of the clearest and sharpest audio we’ve ever heard from a pair of gaming headphones.…

01 PC Classic $150 • Unit-e unitetechno.com The mini console lineup is soon to include a mini DOS PC, assuming its upcoming crowdfunding campaign goes well. POWERED UP: Plug in to TV, plug in your controls, and play 30 DOS-era games, just like you could 30 years ago! PLAYED OUT: WOW is this thing hideous – like unless you have a bunch of actually old, yellowing beige boxes in your house, this will look absolutely terrible. We’re not sure this is answering a real world need either, with retro games compatible with modern systems up on Steam and other distributors. 02 My Skin Track UV Sensor $90 • Apple www.apple.com Slip slop slap slide seek is a weird alliteration, but Australians have grown up with some variation of it for…

Ahead of Star Citizen’s free week, the space sim’s very first planet has gone live, along with VOIP and the fancy face-tracking integration. Everyone will be able to check out Hurston and the city of Lorville on Friday, but for now only people who have bought the game can start exploring. Hurston is much larger than the moons that players have previously been able to explore and contains multiple biomes, mining centres and a single city. When you land in Lorville, you’ll be using the city’s transit system to get around, letting you sit back and soak in some flashy views. If you’re stuck waiting until Friday, you can still watch Chris Roberts’ guided tour of Lorville and Hurston from CitizenCon. Players have already started posting their own videos, like…

HTC confirmed there is a “compatibility issue” between its $299 wireless adapter accessory for its Vive VR headset and some Ryzen PCs, but it’s not sure what exactly is causing the problem. Affected users can request a refund if they don’t want to wait for HTC to figure things out. “We have seen and are actively looking into multiple reports of Ryzen incompatibility with Vive Wireless Adapter. Our current data shows this is occurring with a subset of Ryzen-based PCs. Our investigation will take time as we are working with multiple component manufacturers to identify the root cause,” HTC said. HTC has been investigating the issue since at least the end of last week. There has been no update on the situation as of this writing. However, HTC said it…

DEVELOPER AMANITA • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE • RELEASE 2019 www.amanita-design.net Atonal swerve takes Amanita Design from the comedic daftness of Chuchel’s cherry-based point-and-click and into the mysterious Gothic platform puzzles of Creaks . This is a game about lights and ladders where you must lead your pullover-wearing character through a labyrinthine house while avoiding monsters. You use light to convert snarling beasts into household objects which you can clamber on or use to press switches. It’s a way of using childhood fear as a game mechanic: a terrifying shape in the corner of the room is definitely a wolf right up to the moment you switch on the light and reveal... an innocent dressing gown.…

SSI’s Panzer General did away with the notion that wargames had to be complicated artefacts from tabletop gaming’s past. It was actually accessible. There was still much to get stuck into – it was no less of a wargame just because it was welcoming. On top of logistical conundrums and combined-arms assaults found within each scenario there was a campaign layer that threw some persistence into the mix. Units gain XP and battle performance had an impact on the state you’d be in when you started the next scenario. The game led to sequels, an excellent spiritual successor, Panzer Corps, and the even more accessible, but also simpler, Unity of Command.…

God simulators and management games have been a frequent source of inspiration for strategy games. Populous and SimCity, 1989, are partly responsible for an astonishingly broad array of games, from Civilization to Dune II, and there hasn’t been a time where there wasn’t some intermingling going on. With games such as Anno, Age of Empires, The Settlers and Dungeon Keeper the lines continued to blur. There was city-building and economic management, but there were troops and real-time battles, too. And it was a formula that worked extremely well: all of them spawned sequels and, in some cases, are still around today.…

DEVELOPER UBISOFT QUEBEC • PUBLISHER UBISOFT www.bit.ly/acodysseypc Of all the Assassin’s Creed games, Odyssey is the most aptly named. It’s a roleplaying game of mythic proportions, a world so vast and intricately detailed I feel lost in it all. This isn’t just Ubisoft’s usual style of open world draped over the Aegean Sea, either. Odyssey’s various activities weave into a satisfying web of interlocking systems. Many of Odyssey’s zones could host a smaller RPG on their own, but together they form an incomparably large world full of things to do. Odyssey sheds so much of what Assassin’s Creed is known for to fully embrace the concepts of a roleplaying game – and it’s all the better for it. Unlike previous Assassin’s Creed games, dialogue options now let me influence quests…

DEVELOPER GREG LOBANOV • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.wanderso.ng If you press ‘alt’ at any time while playing Wandersong, you’ll do a little dance. As you travel across the world, you’ll repeatedly run into a character who teaches you new dances – new ways to rhythmically gyrate. There is no reason for this. At no point are you required to dance. But you will – and I did – because in Wandersong you’re encouraged to just… go for it. To express yourself and have fun interacting with the world and with your character. Wandersong is charming from the off. I was walking to-and-from the main village of the first act, and, without really needing to – without there being a puzzle to solve or character to impress – I started singing. Wandersong…

Back in September 2018, Nvidia’s RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti made their long-awaited debut. While we were impressed with the cards and their forward looking technologies, their high prices were definitely a downer. The GeForce RTX 2070 goes some way to addressing that, though the cheapest versions are still well over $800 leaving RTX 2070s priced too high to unequivocally recommend compared to the previous Pascal generation. For now though, The RTX 2070 is the cheapest way to jump onboard the Turing train. Nvidia has departed from its recent tradition of equipping the x70 card with a cut down variation of the GPU found in the x80 card like we saw with the GTX 970 and 980, and GTX 1070 and 1080. This time the RTX 2070 makes use…

PRICE $1,079 www.gigabyte.com.au The Gigabyte Aorus 2070 Xtreme really is a bit different. In addition to a custom PCB, factory overclock and hefty triple fan cooler, the Aorus Xtreme manages to pack in 7(!) video outputs and comes with a spectacular RGB implementation. We knew we were looking at something different the moment we took the Aorus 2070 Xtreme out of its box for a visual inspection. Gigabyte calls its new cooler the Windforce Stack 3x. It utilises three 100mm double ball bearing fans that spin in alternate directions. The cooler’s shroud is also interesting. Most GPU coolers are quite closed but the 2070 Xtreme features a wide open shroud that should theoretically be better for heat dissipation. Normally we wouldn’t devote too much time to talking about RGB, but…

PRICE $199 www.hyperxgaming.com The HyperX Fury RGB comes resplendent with a fully-controllable RGB light show and boasts up to 550/480 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput. But while the performance may seem impressive on paper, the specs don’t tell the entire story. Our testing found lackluster performance in real-world file transfers and productivity applications. Adding in a paltry three-year warranty and high pricing makes the drive hard to recommend, though some will probably find the shimmering RGB goodness too much to resist. The SSD comes in 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB models that are all rated for up to 550/480 MB/s of sequential read/write throughput. Kingston hasn’t shared the Fury’s random performance specifications yet, but we put them to the test on the following page. Kingston provides an Acronis True Image HD…

PRICE $849 www.razer.com/au-en This 2.1 sound system is so impressive — surprisingly good for one that is being sold as a gaming speaker — that we’ve forgotten the fact that it sets you back $849) That’s a high price tag for a set of gaming speakers, yes. But these are no ordinary gaming speakers. It starts with its design. Both its two satellites and its subwoofer boast a matte black finish and an overall gamer’s look that’s subtle while still making a statement with RGB lighting that’s not too flashy and not too loud. They’re also neither overly big nor heavy; in fact, it’s surprisingly light for a non-portable speaker system. The Razer Nommo Pro isn t packed with all the bells and whistles, but that’s the beauty of it…

Okay let’s sort this out once and for all. When IBM developed cheap, removable, secondary storage for computers in the late 1960s, the neologism “diskette” was born. It’s a play on disc and casette, see. Etymologically, “disk” is the older English spelling for a really flat cylinder and “disc” is the preferred medical spelling for bits of your spine. Today, “disc” refers to optical media - DVD, Blu-ray, and CD. While “disk” is used for magnetic storage. As for the word “drive”, well the original diskettes needed something to spin them and read the information - and any machine that imparts motion to something loaded into it is traditionally called a “drive”. Interestingly, the disc/disk distinction predates computers. At the BBC, transcription records (of interviews etc) were called “disks”, while…

Videogames have been controversial since the early 1970s. Ever since Atari decided to build an arcade cabinet where the joysticks were replaced by pink domes designed to look like boobs which the players... twisted around? (Fact-checks doubtfully... yep, it’s true)... certain types have made it their mission to tell us videogames will destroy the Earth. But grotesque torture game Chiller was a 1986 arcade cabinet, and Death Race only had stick-figures, so proper ranting-in-the-press controversy had to wait for 1992, which hit the moral majority with the double-punch of Doom and Mortal Kombat. One of the clearest signs of gaming’s coming-of-age as an art-form was when it took over from “violent movies” as the go-to scapegoat. You know, the thing to blame every time another American goes nuts with one…