Innehållsförteckning för #243 September 2015 från PC Powerplay

4 MOST IMPRESSIVE ELEMENTS: 1. 3 monitors. This triangle formation is awesome for multitasking (I would have them side by side, but my computer isn’t powerful enough to run games at that resolution...) 2. Dual Gigabyte Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition 1GB GPUs. 3. 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz Corsair memory. More than enough RAM for me. 4. Cooler Master Storm Stryker Case. I love people’s reactions when they see this case. LAST UPGRADE: My last upgrade was the case. I originally had a cheap Antec case, but I upgraded to the Stryker because the case had poor cooling performance, and was very loud. DREAM UPGRADE: My dream upgrade would be a new video card. As of now, my video card of choice would be the GTX 980 Ti, as I…

Mechwarrior Online is okay fun, but we’re really excited about the new Battletech game that’s just been announced (or that we maybe just noticed). Harebrained Schemes has revealed it’s going to be launching a Kickstarter later in the year for a turn-based Battletech game, and we are so in for that action. Even better, Jordan Weisman, the creator of the original miniatures and roleplaying games (and a myriad of other titles) is on board. “Harebrained Schemes is pleased to announce their return to Kickstarter this Fall to partner with Backers in co-funding the creation of BATTLETECH. Jordan Weisman, the creator of BattleTech and MechWarrior, is back with the first turn-based BattleTech game for PC in over two decades. Steeped in the feudal political intrigue of the BattleTech universe, the game…

The name “Day9” is easily recognisable to anyone familiar with the eSports scene – and even to some who aren’t. The seemingly random name is the online handle used by Sean Plott, widely recognised as one of the nicest and most helpful personalities in professional gaming. Plott is a StarCraft man. Most of his good reputation comes from the amount of effort he’s put into teaching new players the ropes for this incredibly complex game – a game often jokingly referred to as South Korea’s national sport. Plott has built his entire happy-go-lucky personal brand around StarCraft, which has allowed him to leverage himself into a media network with new types of shows. His personal website sells shirts with his logo. But Plott isn’t as much of a StarCraft man…

DEVELOPER TIGER & SQUID PUBLISHER SURPRISE ATTACK DUE 2015 www.beyondeyes-game.com Beyond Eyes initially started as a graduation project for a bachelor’s degree in game design but transformed into a three and a half year solo labour of love for designer Sherida Halatoe before the title was picked up by indie games publisher Team 17 last year and given a budget and team. Much like the majority of development, the game is a solitary affair. The game’s protagonist, Rae, is a 10-year-old girl. When Rae was younger, an accident involving fireworks left her blinded and scarred physically and emotionally. Stripped of her sight, Rae began to fear the world outside of her comfort zone, avoiding public places and quivering at loud noises. She became socially isolated and withdrawn, preferring to stay…

DEVELOPER TENDERSHOOT PUBLISHER DEVOLVER DIGITAL DUE SEPTEMBER dropsytheclown.com Dropsy is an old fashioned term for oedema, a medical condition that sees people retaining fluid to such a degree that they become bloated. It’s also the name of a creepy as hell, touchy feely clown who can talk to animals and likes to hug everything, inanimate or not. After a lethal fire at the family circus at which he performed, nearly toothless and horrendously obese clown Dropsy lives in the stitched together remains of the tent with his sick father and a dog. He sets about to uncover the truth about the fire and discover the secrets of his past in a new take on the old point-and-click formula. Rather than having a single narrative thread to follow, Dropsy is instead…

DEVELOPER ZANDEL MEDIA PUBLISHER ZANDEL MEDIA PRICE $3.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM Zandelmedia.com/games/ FMV games were a blight on the 90s. For every Tex Murphy game there was umpteen monstrosities unleashed upon the world that contained nothing but slumming actors hamming it up in front of a low budget green screen interspersed with some poorly animated shooting, flying or fighting sequences. A quarter century or so on from that dark time, FMV makes a brief comeback in the form of Missing: An Interactive Thriller. In many ways it’s very different from the FMV games of old, but in others, unfortunately, it’s all too similar. The production quality is testament to how far camera technology has progressed since the 90s. The FMV is crisp and shot on location, giving the adventure of…

DEVELOPER PUNY HUMAN PUBLISHER PUNY HUMAN PRICE $9.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM galici.de The first time I sat down to play Galacide became, unbeknownst to me, became something of a spectator sport. The rest of the office apparently gathered around to watch me play due to what was described as a “hilariously serious look” and the sweat on my brow during those fateful 11 minutes. I say apparently because I was unaware of my co-workers. Hell, during my first play session I was unaware of time passing, the outside world or my own mortality. Galacide took up all of my brain and there wasn’t enough left to pay attention to reality. Games combining elements of match three style mechanics (or match four in this case) with another genre aren’t all that…

While the Serial AT Attachment (SATA) interface continues to deliver extremely fast read and write speeds for a standard SSD, those seeking the next level of extreme performance now have a very appealing option. There are several new storage standards available, but delving into those can be confusing, and there’s really no need to explore those alternatives when the fastest technology is already here. INTRODUCING NVME The Intel 750 Series is the first solid-state drive (SSD) specifically built for consumers that takes advantage of the brand-new Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) technology. Compared to SATA, NVMe has impressive performance improvements. Random and sequential read/write speeds are significantly improved, latency is reduced, and storage parallelism is boosted. On top of this, a drastic upgrade to the command queue, compared to SATA’s Advanced…

PRICE $72 www.coolermaster.com • Basically silent • Affordable • Decent stock performance • No good for overclocking • Fiddly install CoolerMaster has delivered an affordable, simple air cooler in the Hyper 612 version 2. Unfortunately its performance leaves a little to be desired if you’re pushing a CPU, but it’ll handle stock CPU frequencies with ease. Six copper heatpipes join side-by-side to make the base, a method patented by Cooler Master which should help with heat absorption, as most other coolers attach the heatpipes to a separate cooling plate. These pipes then run up through the rather large stack of aluminium fins; this is a big cooler, measuring 139 x 102 x 160.4 mm. It’s also rather weighty, tipping the scales at 732 grams, so make sure your mobo is…

PRICE $149 www.corsair.com • Solid performance • Link monitoring software • Easy install • Rather pricey If your case doesn’t have the room to squeeze in a large 240mm radiator, Corsair’s H80i GT might be a better option. It still has twin fans, but they’re strapped either side of a 120mm radiator. Despite the radiator being much smaller than its 240mm brother, the H110i GT, we were quite surprised to see the price of this model being very close to its larger relative. Still, it seems Corsair has adopted the same pump and heatblock as its relative, which is where most of the cost lies. This means it shares the unique Corsair Link monitoring features, and it too can be set to operate at either quiet, balanced or performance modes.…

PRICE $115 www.noctua.at • Excellent performance • Easy installation • Not too loud • Huge • Heavy • Expensive This is the latest version of our favourite air-cooler of all time, the NH-D14. You’re absolutely going to have to measure how much room you’ve got in your case, as this is insanely large, measuring 165mm tall by 150mm wide by 161mm deep. Despite the size, Noctua has recessed the lower fins to allow it to fit over tall memory heatsinks, an issue that its predecessor suffered from. However, if you run it in twin fan mode like we did for our tests (two fans are included in the box), Noctua suggests sticking with standard 32mm height memory. Weighing a whopping 1.32kg, this cooler puts some serious strain on your motherboard.…

PRICE $2199 www.lenovo.com/au • Well built • Decent specs • Big SSD • Horrible display • Overpriced • Average touchpad It’s been a while since I’ve seen a gaming laptop from Lenovo, so I jumped at the chance to check out its refurbished Y50 model. Given how tough the gaming laptop market is at the moment, with MSI and Aorus offering killer laptops, I was very interested to see how the Y50 would perform, especially with its rather friendly price point. Despite the low-ish price, the Y50 exudes a premium air. It’s got a very sleek, minimalist approach to the case, and the brushed metal exterior suggests it’ll handle a beating. A nice soft-touch rubberised surface is used around the keyboard. The 15.6 inch display is a standard 1080p jobbie,…

Armello, in the words of its creators - League of Geeks - is a “fantasy board game come to life”. It’s a game of evil lion kings, heroic animal clans, and the struggle to claim the throne and save a terrorised population. It’s pretty intense, adorably cute, and really, really good. It’s also Australian, and League of Geeks has just announced its release date - the game will be hitting PC and PS4 on September 1st this year. The Geeks have also announced two new heroes: Zosha the rat and Barnaby the rabbit. Both will be playable at PAX this year.…

The chances are good that if you’re a Fallout fan, you already own every game in the series. But that’s unlikely to stop you from being tempted to buy them all over again, if only for the admittedly cool collectable mini-nuke container. Surprisingly, this cool piece of Fallout swag is a PC-exclusive collection, and Pete Hines, VP or marketing and PR at Bethesda, said it’s “super limited” during the announcement of the collection at the QuakeCon introduction. As for non-swag things, the mini-nuke case contains Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout Tactics, Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition, and Fallout New Vegas: Ultimate Edition. In the spirit of DVD boxed collections, there’s even a spot for Fallout 4 to slot into the mini-nuke container once it launches on the 10th of…

DEVELOPER OFFWORLD INDUSTRIES PUBLISHER OFFWORLD INDUSTRIES DUE 2016 joinsquad.com Over the last decade, Project Reality has grown to become one of the most popular mods for Battlefield 2. The incredibly strict and brutal portrayal of modern infantry and mechanised combat has made it the thinking person’s shooter, and it became so popular that there’s even a standalone version that doesn’t need BF2. Unfortunately BF2’s base engine is starting to look a little like Minecraft compared these days, but the good news is many of its developers have moved onto a new project powered by the latest Unreal Engine 4. Called Squad, it promises to be the spiritual successor to Project Reality, and we went hands-on with the pre-Alpha to see how it’s shaping up. Considering how early the code is,…

DEVELOPER PSYONIX PUBLISHER PSYONIX PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM rocketleague.psyonix.com I am rubbish at Rocket League. Genuinely terrible. Most of my matches are something akin to watching an under six soccer team play. There’s a lot of running around in random patterns trying vainly to touch the ball with whatever flailing limb has the longest reach interspersed with moments of stillness and confusion. Of course, I’m playing a game of PC car football but you get the picture. I’m genuinely terrible at the game, so much so that I think with enough practice and time I could only progress to being really bad. But it doesn’t matter. There is a competitive spirit at the core of Rocket League but so far that doesn’t seem to boil over into the actual…

DEVELOPER PDW HOTAPEN PUBLISHER NYU MEDIA PRICE $14.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM yatagarasu-ftg.com Yatagarasu has had a long road to release. Created by three former King of Fighters developers, Yatagarasu has existed in various forms since 2008 until finally reaching its current form thanks to a successful Indiegogo campaign. Intended for hardcore fighting game aficionados and the professional scene, Attack on Cataclysm features a roster of diverse and solid characters, amusing in game commentary by a number of real life shoutcasters and fighting game commentators and a view to optimized online play. How does it all stack up? At the core Yatagarasu is a tight, well put together fighting game. Although the roster only extends to 11 characters there is a good variation available with no two playing quite alike, no…

DEVELOPER ROLL 7 PUBLISHER DEVOLVER DIGITAL PRICE $12.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.roll7.co.uk You’ll want a controller to play OlliOlli 2: Welcome to Olliwood. There’s no two ways about it. The PC port of the Playstation 4 indie does have keyboard controls but they are sadly inadequate when it comes to the intricacies of pulling off skate tricks and long, combo-building lines. Thankfully the developers are pretty honest about this - as soon as the game boots it tells you it’s best enjoyed with a controller, and enjoyable it definitely is. Boiling down the appeal of skating games like the Tony Hawk series to its basics, OlliOlli 2 is a game all about that one perfect skating line, making an epic combo that lasts an entire level, or at least as…

PRICE $139 www.coolermaster.com • Excellent performance • Great price • Very noisy • Fiddly installation It’s amazing how affordable All-in-One coolers have become. Take this model for example; with a large 240mm radiator and twin fans, it’s exceptionally priced. It’s also quite the performer, provided you don’t mind dealing with higher than average fan noise. At the heart of this kit is the 120 litres per hour pump, which uses a proprietary design to bring water into the centre of the water block, and then pushes it out to either side. The water block uses a copper base to improve heat absorption. Twin FEP tubes feed the water in and out of the block, and Cooler Master claims they offer better water flow with fewer kinks than competing tubes. The…

PRICE $149 www.deepcool.com • Looks slick • Excellent Performance • Affordable • Insanely loud • No fan control Want the ultimate in performance yet don’t mind a PC that sounds like a Black Hawk taking off every time it boots up? Look no further – the Captain 360 smashed the competition in every area, including how bloody loud it is. We love the look of this thing, as the water pump has a slick transparent connection that shows the water flowing past your CPU, and the bold red/ black design will look great through a Perspex side. While the water pump is nice and small, the huge radiator most certainly is not, measuring 390mm in length. It’s built big to accommodate the three 120mm fans Deep Cool includes in this…

PRICE $75 www.thermaltake.com.au • Very cheap • Solid performer • Not too loud • Horrible bracket design • Woeful instructions Seventy bucks for an All-in-One cooler is ridiculously cheap, so we expected some major issues with this cooler from Thermaltake. Thankfully there wasn’t anything remarkably bad with this cooler, and it in fact offered rather decent performance for the price. If there’s one thing we have to take issue with, it’s the complex and archaic mounting bracket. When combined with rather horrible instructions, installing this cooler was definitely the most taxing of the lot, but that still meant it only took 20 minutes to install rather than 10. This All-in-One utilises a relatively small 120mm radiator, which should help it squeeze into smaller systems. The water block is tiny as…

PRICE $489 www.logitech.com/au • PS4 compatible • Better brake feeling • Lots of buttons • No shifter • Feels same as G27 • Costs $200 more than G27 It’s been six long years since Logitech introduced the popular G27 steering wheel, and a lot has changed since then. The PS4 has become the console of choice for serious gamers looking to supplement their PC addiction, while Fanatec and Thermaltake both shook up the steering wheel world with their monumental leap forwards in force feedback technology… and prices. Logitech’s answer to these changes is the G29, a revamped version of the G27. For five hundred bucks you get a wheel and pedal kit that is compatible with both the PS4 and PC. Note that PS4 compatibility is a bit of a…

01 Marshall Smartphone Price: $TBA • Distributor: Marshall www.marshallheadphones.com Known for high quality audio gear, Marshall is throwing its name at a phone, and naturally, is focussing on making the audio experience that much better. POWERED UP: Twin front facing speakers, a scroll wheel volume control, and two stereo jacks (two!! No more awful adapters when you want to share music!), and a separate Cirrus Logic WM8281 Audio hub codec included for playing music at high resolution, with FLAC support. PLAYED OUT: Audio focus means sacrifices in other areas such as camera, and… waterproofing? 02 Luna Smart Mattress Cover Price: $350+ • Distributor: Luna Lunasleep.com While it might seem we’re reaching for what can justifiably by tagged “smart”, this mattress cover from Luna actually makes a lot of sense. POWERED…

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 K65 RGB mechanical keyboard courtesy of the fine folks at Corsair! LETTER OF THE MONTH MISTY WATERCOLOURED MEMORIES I think I have to disagree with Mr Lundberg on his article in issue #241 about nostalgia. Often is the case when you talk highly about previous games, it’s easy for people to disregard it as nostalgia and perhaps the experience was not actually as good as we remember it to be. While it certainly might the case in some situations - I don’t believe it’s the rule. There is…

Doom is coming to a PC near you in autumn 2016. That’s a basic conversion of the “spring 2016” release date that was announced hours ago at the QuakeCon introduction, and means the reimagining of the daddy of the first-person shooter will hit sometime in March, April or May. Executive producer Marty Stratton took to the stage to share the release window, and to also talk about the beta and the upcoming alpha. For those who pre-ordered Wolfenstein: The New Order, you probably noticed that the game included access to the Doom beta. While Stratton mentioned the beta won’t be ready until closer to release in 2016, he did mention a couple of interesting points. The first is that it’s a multiplayer beta, which means that story details will be…

LIFE IS FEUDAL DEVELOPER BITBOX LTD. PUBLISHER BITBOX LTD. DUE EARLY ACCESS www.lifeisfeudal.com Life is Feudal is a crazy ambitious game. It’s not a game that can be labelled simply under a category like “sandbox” or “survival” because it’s aiming to be all that and more. It’s aiming to be a whole Feudal history world, with mechanics for everything - farming, bunting, crafting, building, physics based combat, sieges, cooking, mining, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Bitbox Ltd. are essentially trying to create a living world populated by players doing anything and everything they have to exist in a medieval world. THE SEED DEVELOPER MISERY DEVELOPMENT LTD. PUBLISHER MISERY DEVELOPMENT LTD. DUE 2015 mdtseed.com Falling somewhere between a visual novel, an RPG and a survival simulator, The…

DEVELOPER THREE PHASE INTERACTIVE PUBLISHER THREE PHASE INTERACTIVE DUE 2015 sdkgame.com When you’re the captain of the most powerful ship in a sector of space you are, by default the most powerful person in that sector, so it’s not surprising that there is a long line of mutineers willing to eject the captain into space for a chance to sit in the big chair. This conga-line of mutineers forms the crux of Defect, the Australian made ‘Spaceship Destruction Kit’. Build a ship to complete a combat mission only to have it taken from you by the crew at the end of the mission, build a new ship to tackle the next mission only to face the last ship you lost. It’s this idea of having to face your last ship…

We see a future in which all of us work together and we’re excited by the possibilities that might entail. So we’re reaching out to people across our community and beyond to see how we can help them achieve their goals. Whether it’s through sponsorship or promotion, components or know-how, Cooler Master is coming your way. And if you have an idea you think will work, using anything we have to offer or something we haven’t thought of yet, just fire away. Moving forward, the maker spirit is going to be apparent in all the things we do: cases, cooling and components. You’ll be able to tell it was there during their design, lurking like a newbie fanboy, peering over shoulders. Just when our product designers sat back to rest,…

DEVELOPER HAEMIMONT GAMES PUBLISHER HAEMIMONT GAMES PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.haemimontgames.com At first glance Victor Vran looks like another entry in the Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing series of action RPGs, but in reality it’s a very different kind of animal. While there are similarities when it comes to the faux-Gothic seriousness of the story, the overall look of the game and the reliance on pop-culture references for humour, the way the two games play is very different. Victor Vran is about combat, not about character building. There are no classes, no skill trees or unlockable abilities. All skills are tied to equipment. What the eponymous character wears, wields and equips directly affects the way he functions. Victor Vran is an itinerant demon hunter, visiting the town of Zagoravia…

DEVELOPER STARDOCK PUBLISHER STARDOCK PRICE $US39.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM sorcererking.com There’s a lot of games that follow a similar path, one well-trodden by many a classic fantasy novel. Struggling loner saves desperate kingdom from impending doom at the hands of a mighty dark lord. Sorcerer King starts as most of these tales, and changes the basic premise to something a little bit darker. Basically, the free world lost, the Sorcerer King won, and now the nations strive to throw off his evil rule. And, to make matters worse… the mad bastard isn’t content with merely ‘ruling the world’. He’s planning on casting a mighty spell that has the upside of turning him into a God, but with the annoying downside of, well, destroying the world. This simple inversion of the…

One of the least reviewed components in today’s PCs is the CPU cooler. We’re not sure if it’s simply because they’re not very glamorous, or users think they’re all much of a muchness, but finding definitive data on which cooler will keep your CPU calm and chilly isn’t easy. It’s strange, as there’s nothing worse than an overly loud cooler buzzing away to ruin the immersion of your favourite game, and overclockers need every spare degree they can get to extract the maximum performance out of their chip. It’s been a long time since PC PowerPlay has conducted a cooler test, so we’ve rounded up eight coolers to see which one is worthy of your PC, with an emphasis on performance coolers to be used on overclocked chips. First though,…

PRICE $179 www.corsair.com • Easy install • Link monitoring software • Easy to adjust pump and fan speed • Performance is worse than the Nepton 240m at balanced mode At $40 more than the Cooler Master Nepton 240m, yet adopting the same 240mm radiator with an Allin-One design, the Corsair H110i GT has a lot to prove. Unfortunately its performance isn’t quite the leap ahead we were expecting. The pump of this setup connects directly to your internal USB header, allowing you to monitor the temperature, fan and pump speeds. It also makes changing the speed of both fan and pump a cinch, with three predefined profiles of quiet, balanced and performance. Creating your own custom profiles is also easy, and you can set the software to log performance. However,…

It’s been over a year since we covered the first Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) technology to hit PC displays, in the form of NVIDIA’s G-Sync. A lot has changed since then, first with the Video Electronics Standards Association (better known as VESA) announcing that its own version of the technology, Adaptive-Sync, would become an optional part of the DisplayPort 1.2a specification. AMD then utilised Adaptive-Sync to launch FreeSync, its direct competitor to G-Sync. While we covered both technologies at launch, many of the issues that plagued Adaptive-Sync and FreeSync seem to be getting solved, and we’re now in a position where there are around double the number of FreeSync displays on the market than G-Sync. There’s also the confusing issue of where Adaptive-Sync fits into the picture – will it…

A friend and former co-worker was recently forced to make a hard decision – continue working on the game they have been developing for a long while or remain employed. It wasn’t a case of his passion taking over their working life and affecting their output or that they had hidden his game development and their employer found out, but rather that, after the best part of a year of knowing about the game being developed, the employers finally decided that it somehow constituted a conflict of interest. I’ve heard a number of reasons why this ultimatum was given, and none of them make much sense to me. I’ve heard that they found the game a conflict of interests because it would somehow prohibit the developer from writing about other…