Innehållsförteckning för Issue 257 från PC Powerplay

RAZER GIVES SOME LOVE TO THE 17.3” BLADE PRO GAMING LAPTOP Big gaming laptops are in fashion right now, so Razer has updated its large, yet svelte, 17.3” Blade Pro gaming laptop. It’s got all the bits you expect in a top of the line gaming rig in 2016 – Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU, Intel i7-6700HQ CPU, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, two PCIe M.2 SSDs you can place in a RAID-0, Killer E2400 Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.1 Type-C Thunderbolt 3 and a glorious 17.3” 4K IGZO IPS display with G-Sync, 100% Adobe RGB coverage and multi-touch support. To top it all off, there’s Razer’s new ultra-low profile mechanical keyboard switches with per key RGB Chroma branded lighting. It manages to fit all this in a 22.5mm thick chassis weighing 3.54kg,…

DEVELOPER LARIAN STUDIOS PUBLISHER LARIAN STUDIOS DUE 2017 divinity.game Back in the dim mists of ancient time (1993), my school friends used to tell tales of the adventures they had in such AD&D ur-RPGs as Curse of the Azure Bonds and Eye of the Beholder. They made it sound like these games contained vast universes full of possibility and promise. Of course, in reality these early games were a jumble of sprites, largely incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t already have deep knowledge of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons lore and ruleset. Original Sin 2 though... this thing is going to be the source of stories. Many, many stories. This RPG isn’t big – it’s vast. This Early Access version only contains Act 1, but even that is hugely, almost endlessly…

 DEVELOPER FIRAXIS “It makes you think hard about where to settle a city and what to do with each tile” PUBLISHER 2K GAMES PRICE $69.95 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM civilization.com DAVID: Civilization VI takes Civilization V as its base platform and then tweaks it in both major and minor ways. It’s the same set of principles – discover technology, expand your empire, spread your religion, awe with your culture and shock with your stealth bombers – but remixed rather than revolutionised. Less the Great Leap Forward, more the New Deal. Almost everything that is in Civ V today (including the Gods & Kings and Brave New World expansions) is in Civ VI at launch, only different and, to my mind, better executed. Would you agree? DAN: Definitely. My favourite parts…

 DEVELOPER OSMOTIC STUDIOS “Big brother may be watching, but if I was him I would have switched off from boredom” PUBLISHER SURPRISE ATTACK PRICE $9.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM orwellgame.com Do you hate animated graphics? Do they give you a headache with all their spinning shapes and morphing colours? Then try this! An episodic indie game where a government operative must read a lot of newspapers and don’t-call-it-Facebook feeds, and click and drag highlighted chunks of text from the right of the screen to the left. No really, that’s about it. Orwell is a vast interconnected computer system that allows The Party to maintain control of a made-up country by invading everyone’s online privacy and making operatives mine data for useful chunks. Because someone bombed Freedom Plaza! And people died!…

 DEVELOPER LINCE WORKS “Aragami’s cloak changes colour as you move into shadow, letting you know how stealthy you are” PUBLISHER LINCE WORKS PRICE $19.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM aragami-game.com Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A girl trapped by evil forces casts a powerful spell to summon a saviour. Salvation comes in the form of undead ninja Aragami, a vengeful spirit capable of controlling the shadows. It’s not exactly an original or interesting premise, but it is the foundation of a fun stealth action romp. The core gameplay loop of Aragami is a throwback to binary stealth games of yore with some fun new mechanics thrown into the mix. As a ninja, Aragami is a character based around stealth. In the shadows he is all but invisible and…

PRICE $2,799 msi.com Pascal is taking over the laptop world, and this laptop is no exception. At its thumping, beating heart is the low-end GeForce GTX 1060, though to call it low-end is a bit mean. This is basically a full-blown desktop GeForce GTX 1060, but with slightly adjusted frequencies. It’s got all the CUDA cores, ROPs, and Texture units of the desktop part, but the speeds have been toned down just a tad. At normal speeds, the mobile unit drops to 1405MHz instead of 1506MHz in the desktop part, while the boost speed drops to 1671MHz instead of 1709MHz. As you can see, the difference is minimal, which is why this laptop turned in such excellent performance numbers. It’s tied to Intel’s 6th Gen Core i7-6700HQ, which is arguably…

“This card has the power to handle most mid-range graphics at 1080p without dropping below 60fps” PRICE $209 msi.com Pascal doesn’t get much cheaper than this. At just $209 it’s going head to head with AMD’s RX 460, which can be had for just $15 cheaper. We’re not sure how the price will compare against other GeForce GTX 1050s, as MSI has added a few niceties that are bound to increase the price slightly, but we can’t see it being outrageously overpriced. MSI has gone for twin-fan design instead of the single fan found on the usual design. It uses the Torx 2.0 fan blades we’ve seen on other recent MSI products, which uses special blade designs to deliver “up to 22% more air pressure”. These are part of the…

“Galax has the GeForce GTX 1060 EX OC on the market for just $2 more, and it’s much better constructed” PRICE $397 galax.com Back in the day, Galax and Palit were known as being the most affordable variants of Nvidia graphics cards on the market, often by a significant margin. Apparently thats not the case anymore – at almost $400, this is around $100 more expensive than the most affordable 1060s. Even worse, it’s far inferior to the Galaxy GeForce GTX 1060 EX PC... yet costs just $2 less. Good luck explaining that. Galax has gone for a twin fan cooler on this card, as compared to the standard single fan cooler on reference GeForce GTX 1060s. It uses a plastic shroud to keep the price down, while twin copper…

PRICE $169 gamdias.com The Hermes RGB is one of the heaviest keyboards that we have ever received for testing, tipping the scales at around 1.2kg, despite the chassis being made of plastic. This weight comes from a massive polished steel mounting plate that the Kailh/ Gamdias Blue switches sit on. This plate is a fine example of the quality of construction of the Hermes RGB – the plate is rock solid and negates the flex or bounce that heavy gaming sessions might produce, and the polished surface helps refract light from the RGBs, making them extremely bright. The lighting can be controlled either through the fairly decent drivers or via functions on the six keys above the arrows. If RBG is your thing then the range of basic options, as…

SUGGESTION BOX Hi Daniel, I just wanted to say thanks for giving me some of your time at upgrade 4.0, as I mentioned to you there I have a few ideas for articles for the magazine and I just wanted to pass these on, so feel free to use, modify or ignore as you please. Please add modem AND routers to The Menagerie as often my mates and I look to PCPP for guidance on good bang for buck upgrades for our PC’s but we don’t see anything listed for modems and routers. A series of articles covering online security and the various aspects of online security. What I’m getting at with this is cover things like: • VPN usage for day to day use for enhanced security, cover the…

SLEEPING DOGS DEVELOPER SHUTS DOWN They’re not just sleeping Sleeping Dogs Developer United Front Games has shut down. The motive behind the Vancouver-based studio’s closure is unclear, but the announcement came shortly after the release of the early access brawler, Smash+Grab. The game, which pitted teams of five or less in underground class-based arena-style matches, was free to play the weekend prior to the studio’s announced closure. Smash+Grab was also discounted by fifteen percent, encouraging many to purchase the game that would soon be cancelled, leaving some frustrated. “As we will not be doing any further development or support, we have asked Valve to make refunds available to any owners who request them, regardless of how many hours played,” said the studio on the game’s Steam page. The news first…

“Preppers were stocking up on food and rations and are ready for the end of days ... and now it’s come and they’re in charge” WHO BRIAN FARGO & CHRIS KEENAN WHERE INXILE ENTERTAINMENT WHY WASTELAND 3 After decades in the wilderness, the grand-daddy of all post-apocalyptic game franchises returned in 2014 when the Kickstarter sensation Wasteland 2 finally launched. A Director’s Cut soon followed, and inXile isn’t waiting another 25 years to bring us the next instalment – Wasteland 3 raked in over US$3 million in its Fig campaign this October. When we caught up with inXile founder Brian Fargo he was eager to tell us why the Desert Rangers were moving from the dusty Southwest to icy Colorado. “Visually, we wanted to do something that was different, than…

BEAT COP DEVELOPER PIXEL CROW PUBLISHER 11 BIT STUDIOS DUE NOVEMBER 25 beatcopgame.com A point and click time management/adventure game, Beat Cop places players in the very 1070s/80s shoes of Jack Kelly, a former detective demoted after he is framed for murder. Players must balance investigating the frame up with doing day-to-day police work while walking the beat. The game was inspired by 70s and 80s American cop shows. Expect a great soundtrack. FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE VIDEOGAME DEVELOPER ILLFONIC PUBLISHER GUN MEDIA DUE NOVEMBER 29 f13game.com The developers of Breach & Clear are trying to bring a horror legend to life through the medium of asymmetrical multiplayer. The game revolves around eight-player multiplayer events in which seven people play camp counsellors while the eighth plays Jason Voorhees, the hockey…

September 29th saw the return of Upgrade Australia with our 4.0 event in Sydney, and what a night it was. Tech giants from around the world came to show off their latest wares, VR was everywhere, prizes flowed thick and fast, and food and drink were abundant. In addition to the tech stands, Upgrade Australia 4.0 also featured two new additions, with the Power Arena and Case Modding exhibition, both curated by former Atomic staffer Josh Collins. The Case Modding exhibition featured some of the best mods from the top case modders in the country, whilst the Power Arena gave attendees and exhibitors a chance to have their systems benchmarked to prove who had the most powerful machine of the night. ASUS Asus impressed attendees with a live demo of…

DEVELOPER DROOL PUBLISHER DROOL PRICE $19.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM thumpergame.com “You are a space bug battling a giant evil head from the future in a constantly moving hellscape” When the first trailers for Thumper dropped it was billed as a “Rhythm Violence” game. While that description kind of encapsulates the experience, a more appropriate categorisation would be something more along the lines of “Existential Rhythm Horror”. It’s a game that boils down the mechanics of the rhythm action game to its barest bones, limiting player input to either the spacebar and arrow buttons on keyboard, or the A button and left thumbstick on a controller. You are a space bug battling a giant evil head from the future in a constantly moving hellscape, all set to a brutal electronic…

DEVELOPER HANGAR 13, 2K CZECH PUBLISHER 2K GAMES PRICE $59.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL mafiagame.com “Lincoln is despised, not for who he is but for what he is – a bi-racial black man in 1968” Like its protagonist, the returned soldier Lincoln Clay, Mafia III is a game caught between two worlds. Lincoln wants to escape his past and leave his criminal roots but is pulled back in to a spiraling disaster of revenge and power struggles, and Mafia III wants to be a heavily narrative game with a social conscience that is also an open world action game in which interaction ultimately boils down to shooting people and driving cars. One of these two approaches works fantastically. The other, not so much. The story of Mafia III could…

CALL OF BOOTY! To go with our cover feature this month, the cover disk is full of pirate (or at least nautical) themed games, with all of the things that are synonymous with the pirate life – sailing, pillaging, gambling, and the only natural predators of the pirate: zombies and ninjas. Enjoy. The PCPP Team. 31 FREE GAMES AND DEMOS! • A Date in the Park• AirBuccaneers• Angel Express [Tokkyu Tenshi] Demo• Beholder Demo• Choice of the Pirate Demo• Deadstone Demo• Disturbed• Dungeon Fighter Online• Epic Battle Fantasy 3• Faeria• Freedom Planet Demo• Grimm• Half-Life: A Place in the West• Hunger Dungeon• Kaptain Brawe - Demo• LoveBeat•  Magical Otoge Ciel• Napoleon Total War Demo• New York Mysteries The Lantern of Souls Demo• Pirates of Black Cove• PRICE• Salt Demo• Sisyphus Reborn Demo• Smugglers 5 Demo• Space, Pirates and Zombies Demo• Star Vikings Demo• The Pirate: Caribbean Hunt• The White Laboratory Demo• Trick & Treat• You Have 10 Seconds 2• Zombie…

PRICE $2,499 msi.com If the GS63VR 6RF Stealth Pro is the lightweight offering of MSI’s GeForce GTX 1060 mobile line, then the GE72VR 6RF Apache Pro is its bigger brother. You get much of the same interior, but from the outside it’s a very different beast, which may suit some gamers more than others. And in return, you manage to save $300 in the process. The internals of this machine are almost identical to that of its smaller sibling. Once again we see Nvidia’s wonderful new GeForce GTX 1060 mobile delivering desktop levels of performance, and it’s the real deal, fully stocked with all of the desktop part’s goodies minus a slight frequency increase. Again, MSI has wheeled out Intel’s 6th Gen Core i7-6700HQ to handle CPU duties, along with…

“It’s a great day for Nvidia owners on a budget, but we feel for AMD, who seems to be beaten at every price point” PRICE $245 msi.com We’ve just seen the GeForce GTX 1050 Gaming X 2G lay the smack down on AMD’s RX 460, so what does an extra $40 get you? Will it be a similar case of Nvidia dominating the budget end once again, or is that little extra not really worth spending? As we mentioned in the Speeds and Feeds section on the previous spread, the Ti version of the GeForce GTX 1050 is a slightly upscaled version of the GP107 GPU found in both cards. It’s got around 20% more horsepower in terms of the basic building blocks of a GPU, so we were expecting…

“Thanks to its large screen and 2.8kg weight, the P37Xv6 is not the kind of laptop designed for mobility” PRICE $3,999 gigabyte.com.au Testing hardware can be a weird job. For the most part, things work just as expected, but every now and then a product comes along that does something totally bizarre. Take this laptop from Gigabyte. It’s got a beautiful 17.3-inch 4k panel (optional – there’s a 1080p model if you want to save some dosh), but it caused some very strange testing problems for us. Powered by Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1070 mobile, we wanted to test all benchmarks at 2560 x 1440, which seems to be the sweet spot for this mobile GPU. Yet this laptop simply wouldn’t allow us to in half of our benchmarks –…

PRICE $279 benq.com.au BenQ’s new Zowie range focuses mainly on mice and keyboards, but the Vital is an external headphone and speaker amplifier. It’s completely driver free – just plug it into your USB port and away you go. All controls are accessed via a touch screen on the front, allowing the user to adjust volume, bass, and treble on the fly. Apparently it also has some sort of virtual 3D surround, but BenQ weren’t able to tell us which version they use, and there’s no way to disable it via the control panel. Dual 3.5mm stereo minijacks mean you can plug in both speakers and headphones, along with a microphone in. This makes switching between the two a breeze – just tap the headphone button and they’re enabled. Unfortunately…

“trying to build a game using a third party engine that’s still in Beta was more than a challenge” VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE - BLOODLINES DEVELOPER TROIKA PERSONALITY WERNER SPAHL RELEASED 2004 NUTSHELL After three years of development and wrestling with the Source engine while it was still in Beta, Troika was compelled to release their game early and unfinished. But then a German chemist decided to embark on a vision quest to see it restored to glory... Bloodlines was a disaster. Like so many Hagionaut games, it tried to be more than what the technology of the day made possible. Except not really - this time, the missing parts and broken scripting events were the result of the team at Troika running out of time. And they ran out of…

MOST IMPRESSIVE ELEMENTS: 1. Gtx1080 Seahawk watercooled 2. 37.25tb of storage 6x 6tb WD blue for movies and TV shows (all legally obtained of course) 1x Samsung 850 evo 1tb for games and 1x Samsung 850 pro 256gb for OS 3. 1x BenQ XL2720Z 27” full HD 1ms 144hz for games 1x BenQ RL2755HM 27” full HD 1ms for browsing and media 4. Logitech g9x mouse has been discontinued for god knows how many years and I’ve still got one plus another brand new in the box LAST UPGRADE: The whole system was built new but just recently i had the side panel and top panel hydrodipped with punisher skulls DREAM UPGRADE: MTwin 27 or 30” 4k gaming monitors WHAT MAKES IT SPECIAL: Since I first saw water cooling I’ve…

One of my very first Generation XX columns was a (hopefully) humorous rendition of what it was like to be inside a games retailer, as a woman, in and before 2006. There was the guy who proposed to me at the cash register (on behalf of his Ultima Online avatar) and my prepared speeches about Kangaxx the Demilich, for salesmen who thought that I may have wandered in accidentally. These days I mostly just write about what I’m playing, developing, composing and enjoying. I’m still here, being an example of a not-guy who games. It’s all good. As well as games retailers now employing lots of women, the desire for acknowledgement of all gamers is more noticeable in 2016. I Need Diverse Games is one initiative that advocates for thoughtful…

“The bones in my neck are grinding, I can feel the muscles in my spine locking up… and that’s before the motion sickness sets in!” Is there any way for VR to be for everyone? It’s a sad fact that there’s a lot of people who cannot enjoy computers, or games, like the rest of us. Perhaps they lack the motor control for WASD and mouse movements; maybe their vision isn’t sharp enough to pick up the action on a monitor. They may be deaf or blind, which is a pretty big hindrance, or perhaps it’s arthritis that stops some from enjoying long, fruitful, fragging sessions. That’s on a conventional PC setup. Virtual reality has even more barriers to entry. Virtual reality – as it stands – is an even…

SEA OF THIEVES DEVELOPER RARE PUBLISHER MICROSOFT STUDIOS DUE Q1 2017 seaofthieves.com At E3 2016, Rare released a gameplay reveal trailer of its high-seas pirate game, Sea of Thieves. Gameplay-wise, it looked like a tonne of fun, but the inclusion of streamer-like picture-in-picture player reactions tainted the overall impression for me. It looked fake. Canned. Jaded old me felt it was an unnecessary inclusion in an otherwise entertaining compilation of gameplay shenanigans. Fast-forward to my hands-on session with Sea of Thieves and I became, almost immediately, that same giddy fan, excitedly chattering to my crewmates, skolling grog, and getting into the kind of piratey merriment that would usually require real-world grog, despite being as sober as a landlubber. Despite the fact we were playing what felt like a very small…

 DEVELOPER DICE “the action is way too intense to even care that everyone looks way too handsome” PUBLISHER ELECTRONIC ARTS PRICE $79 AVAILABLE AT ORIGIN, RETAIL www.battlefield.com For many people the Battlefield series has always been about multiplayer. Bigger battles, more destruction, a wider range of weapons… Each new game has upped the scale of the franchise in one way or another. But with recent titles, DICE has tried to shoehorn in a single player element – with mixed success. In Battlefield 1 you get not just one narrative, but a whole war’s worth, with campaigns ranging from Europe to Africa. A lot of people seem to think that DICE has gotten the solo formula right this time around, but I still can’t stand the developer’s efforts at story-telling. The…

 DEVELOPER THE COALITION “It’s brilliantly polished, beautiful looking fan service with a few fancy new maneuvers” PUBLISHER MICROSOFT WINDOWS PRICE $99.95 AVAILABLE AT WINDOWS STORE, RETAIL gearsofwar.com/en-us It’s a pretty safe bet Gears of War 4’s new developer, The Coalition, wasn’t going to screw the pooch on this one. It cut its teeth on the stellar Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, aka the HD remake testing the waters. Its head honcho is Rod Fergusson. Yes, former Epic Games’ Rod Fergusson, them guys and gals who made every numbered Gears of War before this one. It’s named after the COG, The Coalition of Ordered Governments from the damn series. Even Vegas bookies weren’t running odds on this one. It’s been 25 years since the COG smoked the remnants of the Locust…

 DEVELOPER FLYING WILD HOG “I really, sincerely hope you like dick jokes, because this game is full of them” PUBLISHER DEVOLVER DIGITAL PRICE $39.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM shadowwarrior.com Shadow Warrior 2 is many things. But one thing it is not, is boring. It’s crude, and it’s funny; it plays heavily of 80s action films, and does not take itself at all seriously. And it’s also a fast-paced shooter that plays like a mix between Doom (of the old-school variety) and Borderlands. It is, to cut a long story short, hella fun. But we have a page to fill… The game is technically a sequel to the original Shadow Warrior – the ‘2’ kinda gives that away – but because it’s barely mentioned, it’s hardly necessary to have played the…

 PRICE $235 “You’ll need to ensure your PC has four spare PCIe 3.0 lanes to make the most of this drive, which may be an issue” intel.com Intel has had fits and starts when it comes to releasing SSDs. Its first batch took out the performance crown with ease, but was soon surpassed by the likes of Samsung. Then last year it released the 750 with NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification), a way of controlling the flash memory within SSDs that did away with the old HDD standards of the past, and it blew the competition away. The Series 600 is a very different drive to that though. Instead of trying to blast the competition away with performance, Intel is going for the mainstream affordable market. Can they…

“We know that Nvidia owns the upper end, but can Pascal extend the company’s dominance to the cheap end of town?” We haven’t hidden the fact that we’re huge fans of Nvidia’s latest GPU architecture, Pascal. By moving to a new manufacturing process of just 16nm, along with numerous other changes, they’ve absolutely destroyed the frequency ceiling of past GPUs. Where the last generation of GPUs were quite happy to chug along at 1.2GHz, Nvidia’s new masterpiece is a 2GHz mean machine, smashing performance records along the way. Nvidia rolled out the red carpet when introducing Pascal, in the form of the high-end GeForce GTX 1080. It delivered performance improvements of between 30 and 40% compared to the prior generation, all while doing so with minimal power requirements, low heat,…

We tested all of our benchmarks at 4K resolution with Ultra detail, and it pounded them all into the ground PRICE $6000 alienware.com.au When it comes to desktops, Alienware prides itself on delivering over the top, supremely expensive mega-towers for the rich and powerful. The Aurora changes all that. The starting price for this range is a mere $1599… but of course Alienware sent us the top-end unit priced at around the $6,000 price point. We have to give them points for the gorgeous new chassis, which is definitely unique. It’s not too big, at around 14 inches deep by 18 inches tall and 8 inches wide, with unique tri-glo neon lights on each side. It’s a totally tool-less design, and Alienware has managed to deliver a case that is…

PRICE $220 asus.com.au You know a product is high-end when it arrives in a beautiful felt cover, as with the Claymore. There’s also that $220 price tag, one of the highest on the market. Given there’s so much competition in mechanical keyboards, what makes the Claymore stand out? Asus has gone for the frameless chassis that is now becoming so popular with gaming boards, making it a breeze to clean out the keys with a quick blow of compressed air. It’s fully RGB enabled of course, and synchs with Asus’ Aura colour-matching scheme, which makes all of your Aura-devices pulse in the same colour, and react to certain sound effects which you can program. Built from aluminium, this keyboard feels nice and strong, though we’re not huge fans of the…

PRICE $92 galax.net Galax might be better known for their graphics cards, but they also do a handy little trade in SSDs. The new Galax Gamer SSD L 120GB is its latest, and we can’t help but feel it’s a little… quaint. It’s tiny in terms of capacity, relies on the old SATA 3 interface, and uses the most affordable MLC memory. Let’s just say we weren’t expecting mind-blowing results from the tests on this drive. Galax has gone for PS3109-S9 SATA III controller, made by Phison and found in competing brands such as Corsair. However, Corsair first debuted this controller last year, showing that’s not exactly cutting edge. We’re betting Galax has picked up some older stock at a rock-bottom price, making this SSD one of the cheapest around.…