Innehållsförteckning för #246 December 2015 från PC Powerplay

It’s not hyperbole to say that PAX 2015 has been the best yet. After a busy but rocky first year in 2013, the move from the previous event space to the Melbourne Convention Centre has allowed the organisers and the patrons alike to do and see more over the three day event. This year more tech vendors than previous years made their presence known on the show floor. Microsoft, in addition to having a massive Xbox booth, also had a series of high powered, extremely expensive gaming PCs specifically made for PAX on display. When we say high powered and extremely expensive we’re not blowing smoke – one of the machines featured triple SLI with 980 Ti cards and was valued around the 10k mark. Running games like Elite Dangerous,…

The Flame in the Flood DEVELOPER THE MOLASSES FLOOD PUBLISHER STEAM DUE MARCH 2016 www.themolassesflood.com/the-flame-in-the-flood Not so long ago, games were all about mechanics and graphics. Last decade, a generic shooter could get rave reviews by virtue of new-fangled rag-doll physics or custom shaders alone. An old-school sprite-based RPG could score big thanks to an unusual third faction or streamlined resource-gathering system. Games were, with some exceptions, clever contrivances to facilitate play. Now we’re in a new age. An age where the actual gamey part of the game might not be the most important thing about it. Like a short film or a piece of sculpture, or a minimalist novel, or any of a hundred other kinds of art, a game can simply evoke a sense of... something. Raw emotion,…

DEVELOPER N-SPACE, DIGITAL EXTREMES PUBLISHER DIGITAL EXTREMES PRICE $39.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM Swordcoast.com The whole purpose of Sword Coast Legends is to hearken back to classic RPGs of the past. It’s billed as something of a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, earlier gold box games and even more modern but still respected fare like Neverwinter Nights and its sequel. In the single player campaign it puts the emphasis heavily on party dynamics and an epic quest line that could decide the fate of the world. It also features a GM mode that allows players to asynchronously play a campaign created by a dungeon master. It’s all very ambitious and definitely very tempting on paper, but unfortunately in practise all Sword Coast Legends succeeds at doing is reminding…

DEVELOPER STILL GAMES PUBLISHER STILL GAMES PRICE $9.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.still-games.com For every Kickstarter success story there are more Kickstarter failures. The original pitch for Animal Gods was great - an Old England style Legend of Zelda puzzle RPG featuring a Link like character by the name of Thistle travelling the world aiming to set the ancient gods free and rid the land of the bronze industry curse that has transformed animals into horrible beasts known as husks. Initial screenshots showed images Thistle using multiple abilities to take on creatures and free the gods, and an early game map showed multiple fascinating locations with names like The Coast of Teeth, the Gleaming City and the Moors of Skye. Originally slated for release in October 2016 but available now, it…

DEVELOPER DONTNOD ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER SQUARE ENIX PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.lifeisstrange.com Life is Strange is a game in the Telltale mould, with decisions or conversational gambits the player makes having an effect on later elements of the game, but French developer DONTNOD has taken this style in an even more effective, somewhat meta direction thanks to the abilities of the protagonist Max Caulfield. After five years absence, Max returns to Arcadia Bay to attend a prestigious art academy and in short order discovers four key things. One - a girl named Rachel Amber has gone missing and nobody knows if she ran away, was kidnapped or murdered. Two - Max’s best friend from years past, now estranged because of how rapidly Max left Arcadia Bay five years ago, was…

PRICE $199 www.asrock.com • M.2 and SATAe • Type-C USB • Excellent onboard audio • No overclocking While most boards in this roundup utilise the exceptionally cheap B150 chipset, it’s nice to see that a couple managed to squeeze the better H170 chipset in. This board is one of them, so we were keen to see if it had to cut back on other features to offset the more expensive chipset. Unlike the other ASRock board, a single M.2 port is included for your speedy SSDs. There are also twin SATAe connections if anybody ever releases a hard drive that uses this connection – we’ve yet to see one cross our testbench. The six SATA 3 ports can be run in RAID modes 0, 1, 5 and 10, making this…

PRICE $210 www.gigabyte.com.au • OP-AMP audio solution • Intel LAN • Healthy range of PCIe/ PCI slots • B150 chipset • High price Priced at just ten bucks less than the kick-arse ASUS H170 Pro Gaming, we fully expected Gigabyte’s board to include the more expensive H170 chipset. To our surprise, nay, disappointment, it turns out that this is actually another B150 board, albeit with a higher than expected price tag. For the money you get a full-sized ATX board that has six extension slots: two x16 PCIe, another two x1 PCIe, and two legacy PCI. Both M.2 and SATAe drives are accounted for, with a single slot of each, while six SATA 3 ports are standard. Sadly there’s no RAID option though. Intel’s new I219V LAN controller has been…

PRICE $999 www.sapphiretech.com • Keeps up with Fury X • Quiet cooling • Cool HBM memory tech • Much slower than a 980 Ti Hell hath no fury like an AMD engineer scorned, but that’s exactly what happened when NVIDIA released its spoilerific GTX 980 Ti product. AMD thought it had the performance market stitched up with its HBM-powered Fury X, but then along came the GTX 980 Ti, priced identically but with a noticeable performance lead. We truly feel for the folk behind the Fury X, but today sees their second chance arrive. The Fury is a cut-back version of the Fury X, though it’s not quite as affordable as it might once have been due to the weak Aussie dollar. Here’s where the problem lies. Stock of the…

PRICE $349 www.audio-technica.com • Incredible sound quality, rich with detail • Excellent microphone • Expensive • Requires sound card We’ve been long-time admirers of Audio Technica, a Japanese company that specialises in high-end headphones. Gamers have long been using their music headphones for gaming, a trend the company capitalised on a couple of years ago when after releasing its first gaming models. This month sees the follow-up products, in the form of the ATH-AG1X and ATHADG1X. With prices that firmly put these in the enthusiast category, can they deliver the additional sound quality such a premium price commands? These two sets of headphones are basically identical with one exception – the AG1X uses an isolation design. This means the padding around the ear is of a leather-like material, and blocks…

To say there is a lot to see at PAX AUS is somewhat of an understatement. I know a few people who had one-day passes, and saw only a small fraction of that they wanted. Personally, I had a three-day pass, and still didn’t see everything. There’s a wide variety of games on show, from soon to release AAA titles with their two-hour long lines, and private booths, to a swathe of fascinating indie games made by a passionate few who are just super-damn-excited to show off what they’ve been working on. There are huge LANs where you can come along and play on a high-spec PC, handheld gaming lounges, and even an array of classic pinball machines! But it’s not just about PC and console, either. The tabletop area…

ASHEN RIFT DEVELOPER PYROCLASTIC GAMES PUBLISHER PYROCLASTIC GAMES DUE TBA www.ashenrift.com › Ashen Rift is just the thing for people who like both survival games and dogs. It promises a deep and emotional experience, as you traverse an expansive and constantly changing wasteland with a canine companion. The game is clearly focusing more on its journey rather than the destination, having you testing your survival skills, while providing a different experience each time you play with its constantly shifting environment. Not to be confused with A Boy and His Dog. FIVE: GUARDIANS OF DAVID DEVELOPER KINGDOM GAMES PUBLISHER KINGDOM GAMES DUE NOVEMBER 24, 2015 www.fiveguardiansofdavid.com › Not all biblical games are Noah’s Ark 3D. Players have five different characters to choose from to fight their way through enemies in the…

DEVELOPER IRON TOWER PUBLISHER IRON TOWER PRICE $29.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM irontowerstudio.com The Age of Decadence (hereafter: AoD) is an ambitious, unapologetically hardcore, text-heavy RPG set in a post-apocalyptic world loosely inspired by the decline of the Roman Empire. The game is advertised as a return to the “golden era” of isometric RPGs, combining the openendedness of Arcanum with the heady dialogue of Planescape: Torment and the tactically rich turn-based combat of Fallout. Which sounds incredible, right? So what went wrong? Starting with the most significant issue, the fact is that AoD’s much-vaunted openendedness is kind of a sham. The idea is that you’re permitted a great deal of flexibility in how you construct your protagonist, with your chosen skills and traits opening up new ways of solving the various…

DEVELOPER TELLTALE GAMES PUBLISHER TELLTALE GAMES PRICE $24.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.telltalegames.com/talesfromtheborderlands Tales from the Borderlands started strong, with a funny, action packed, well-paced episode that started a great story, introduced some very likeable characters and was written in a way that rewarded fans of the Borderlands franchise but was still welcoming to new players. The second episode, on the other hand was patchy at best, with some great moments but without the spark that made the first episode so good. This patchy nature went on through episodes three and four, with three feeling in many ways like it was just treading water to fill out the five episode arc and the fourth was just inconsistent. The final chapter starts as though it is going to follow suit, but after…

DEVELOPER DOUBLE DAMAGE GAMES PUBLISHER DOUBLE DAMAGE GAMES PRICE $19.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM, GOG rebel-galaxy.com Over the years that science fiction has portrayed space battles, the approach to framing these battles has changed wildly. The first battles were naval affairs, with heroic space sailors repelling boarders and fighting man to man and with cannons. Later came the age of the heroic starfighter, zooming around in space, pew-pewing baddies with lasers and enacting dogfights in the vast emptiness of space. In the modern era, thanks in part to television shows like the revamped Battlestar Galactica and the criminally under watched Space: Above and Beyond, space combat once again began to resemble naval combat again. Those shows still had nimble fighters zooming around in space doing the pewpew, but the larger…

Intel’s 6th Generation Core CPU, also known by the much cooler codename of Skylake, is a rather pricey upgrade option. As well as forking out for a new CPU, buyers will need to buy a set of DDR4 memory modules, along with a Socket 1151 motherboard. PC PowerPlay recently checked out the most expensive Socket 1151 motherboards, those based on the high-end Z170 chipset, and were surprised at the rather high prices we encountered. It seems that the combination of a weak Aussie dollar and the feature-laden nature of these products meant an average price point of just under $350. Thankfully there’s a cheaper way to get your Skylake on, as there are plenty of motherboards based on cheaper chipsets that’ll offer many of the same benefits as the Z170.…

PRICE $149 www.msi.com • Super cheap • M.2 and SATAe • CrossFire ready • Old audio chip Welcome to the cheapest board in our roundup, MSI’s Micro-ATX Mortar. The reduced size has obviously helped MSI keep costs down, yet it still packs many of the features of much more expensive options. Let’s see what MSI has managed to cram into such a small board. Twin PCIe x16 lanes sit alongside two PCIe x1 slots, allowing this miniature motherboard to handle a CrossFire solution if you feel the need for speed. Four DDR4 slots accept up to 64GB of memory, but they’re limited to 2133MHz speeds due to the motherboard’s lack of overclocking support. A single M.2 port is waiting for your high speed storage, while two of the six SATA…

PRICE $549 www.logitech.com • Mini-IR blasters are brilliant • Bluetooth and Wi-Fi controlled Hub • Works perfectly • Still rather expensive • Remote hand unit is obsolete As the resident geek in your home, you probably face the challenge that many geeks face – you’re the only one in the house who knows how to get the plethora of devices in your AV cabinet all set to the right mode to operate. In my place, watching streaming media over the PS4 requires far too many steps for my better half to remember, which is why I’m guaranteed a phone call every night I’m away on business trips. Universal remotes promise to solve this problem, but until now everyone I’ve tested has one niggling issue that stops something or other from…

PRICE $1499 www.acer.com.au • Strong in all tech specs • Decent vertical res • Stand doesn’t tax your desk space • 75Hz is nice, 100Hz would be better • No G-Sync Anyone who tells you that 2015 isn’t the Year of the Monitor needs rocks removed from their head. We have 4K, ultrawide, curved, all the syncs and refresh rates punching well above 100Hz. We know you’re probably thinking about an upgrade, but to jump in now, or wait as the revolution takes us even further into gaming perfection? The Acer Predator XR341CK is the best of the lot, right now, ticking more boxes than anything else. It’s not cheap, but look at what you get... at 34inches, with a resolution of 3440x1440 in an ultrawide 21:9 aspect ratio, it…

Gearbox is one of the most well recognized game developers mainly known for specializing in shooters. There are not many who don’t hear this name and automatically associate it with series like Borderlands and the upcoming Battleborn. It wasn’t always this way, as Gearbox used to be known for making more realistic games. So how did Gearbox get from where it was to where it is now? Gearbox was first founded in 1999 by five former members of the now defunct studio, Rebel Boat Rocket. The company got its start by developing expansions for Valve studios Half-Life, and worked on every expansion and port in the Half-Life series, before Half-Life 2. They also worked on the Counter Strike series, and then proceeded to branch out to work with other game…

It’s a sim rig, used for playing simulation racing games and the occasional flight sim. The specs of the PC itself aren’t all that flash: • 16MB DDR RAM @ 1333Mhz• i7 2600K @ 4.2Ghz, watercooled• 1x128GB Vertex 3 SSD• 1x128GB Vertex 2 SSD• 1x2TB WD Black HDD• 2xR9 280X video cars in Crossfire• 1xXonar DG soundcard The sim gear is as follows: • Next Level Racing GTUltimate V2 “chassis” with triple monitor stand, keyboard tray, and desktop• Fanatec Clubsport V1 wheel with BMW Z4 GT2 rim + Formula rim.• Fanatec Clubsport V2 pedals• Fanatec Shifter SQ• Derek Speares Designs L + R Clubsport Button boxes• Derek Speares Designs hydraulic handbrake• Siminstruments Dashboard• Buttkicker Gamer w/Simvibe software I kept my old gear when I upgraded and built my 3 year old son his very own sim rig. • Intel Q6600 PC w/4GB ram• R9 280X video card• Logitech…

PC 1 MetaBox P650RE Price: $1899 www.metabox.com.au › Though not the best known gaming laptop brand in Australia, Metabox manages to astound us time and time again with their beautifull made, well priced and powerful machines. Inside the P650RE base model you’ll find a GTX 970M GPU, i7-6700HQ CPU, 8Gb RAM, a15.6” 1080p IPS panel and more. If that’s not enough for you, the P650RE is fully customisable with options available for pretty much every component. 2 Saitek HOTAS X55 Price: $159 www.pccasegear.com › With the huge number of serious space sims and flight combat games either coming out or already on the market, like Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen, isn’t it time you got yourself a sweet HOTAS (Hands On Throttle and Stick) setup? Although it’s nearly a decade…

When did you start development on the game? I was design producer on Borderlands 2 so I transitioned from Borderlands 2 to Battleborn. Back then we had a small team working on Battleborn immediately after Borderlands 2 but right now almost everyone working at Gearbox is involved. So let me ask you a question, what did you think of what you played today? The first time I played the game months ago (the E3 demo) I felt like it was a re-skinned Borderlands. The game shares a lot of DNA with Borderlands but it is different. They feel complementary side by side. That’s good to hear, with Battleborn we wanted to do a lot of things we were not able to with Borderlands, like the character variety, multiplayer which did…

DEVELOPER LARIAN STUDIOS PUBLISHER LARIAN STUDIOS PRICE $39.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM divinityoriginalsin.com Larian Studios seems to have taken a leaf from the CDPR book with Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition. They have taken an already great game - one of the very best games of last year and one of the best RPGs in recent memory in fact - and reworked it, fixing problems, tweaking the story and adding new features to create an even better experience. Like CDPR did with The Witcher and its sequel (an inevitably The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt), Larian has decided to release all the upgrades for free to people who already own the game. If you already own Original Sin, stop reading this and go play the game again. It’s even better than it…

DEVELOPER TELLTALE GAMES PUBLISHER TELLTALE GAMES PRICE $24.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.telltalegames.com/minecraftstorymode The open ended building of Minecraft is ripe with individual story potential. Each player building a castle, working computer, scale model of the Enterprise or simply walking from one end of the randomly generated world to the other has a story to tell. That said, Minecraft isn’t by any means a narrative game - the entire idea behind it is about freedom, so in some ways the confines of a set narrative run counter to the original aims of the developers. It’s testament to the mastery of the writers and developers at Telltale Games how well they have managed to bring together their trademark narrative drive with the building of Minecraft. Although not necessarily a kid’s game, Minecraft:…

While much ado has been made about the wide availability of USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 with the launch of Intel’s 6th Generation Core processor, it’s not the only high-speed connection to become mainstream in 2015. The Thunderbolt interface has been around for several years now, but only now is it starting to become a common component on today’s performance motherboards. Like USB it offers incredibly fast data transfer speeds, but it’s even faster than the latest versions of USB, which allows it to do things that USB simply can’t. Thunderbolt 3 is the latest version of this high-speed interface, and is the version that will appear on new motherboards thanks to its blistering transfer speeds. The maximum theoretical speed of Thunderbolt 3 is an incredible 5 Gigabytes per second,…

PRICE $1200 www.amd.com • Ultra small • Full-sized performance • Quiet cooler • Very expensive • No HDMI 2.0 • Only 4GB memory Until now, Home Theatre PC owners have either had to settle for midrange performance in a small case, or deal with an overheating performance GPU in a bulbous HTPC case. The Nano changes all that. It’s the smallest graphics card to ever offer enthusiast performance, finally allowing for small form factor builds to truly deliver high-end gaming performance The Nano is a happy side-effect of the HBM memory used in AMD’s new R9 Fury family. Unlike a traditional graphics card, which requires up to a dozen postage-stamp sized memory modules to be placed on the PCB, HBM shrinks the memory to tiny stacks that are just a…

PRICE $399 www.asrock.com.tw • Top-echelon performance • Wi-Fi dongle • Solid interface design • Lacks extremely advanced Wi-Fi settings • IR-blaster is a gimmick Better known for their huge range of motherboards, ASRock is now dipping its toes into the Wi-Fi market with the release of the G10 gaming router. It definitely makes a strong first impression thanks to its striking design, but it’s the extras that ASRock has included that make this worthy of note. Unfortunately, not all of them can be considered useful. Before we look at the odd inclusions, let’s check out its Wi-Fi capabilities. It’s using Qualcomm’s new IPQ8064 dual-core networking chip, along with a hefty 256MB of flash and 512MB of DRAM memory. The latest 802.11ac standard is supported, with a whopping eight antennae. ASRock…

PRICE $99.95 plantronics.com.au • Great modular design • Light • Very Comfortable • Plastic components • A little bassy When Plantronics launched the RIG brand a few years ago they hit upon the right mix of prestige features and price point. With the new Rig 500, Plantronics has once again hit that sweet spot, albeit in a different manner. The Rig 500 headset is built for both value and comfort without compromising excellent stereo performance. Each of the ear cups sports a crisp 40mm driver that delivers solid sound from bass through treble with a small amount of accentuation on the lower register and the memory foam cushions don’t turn your ears into hideous sweat monsters within minutes. The use of cloth rather than vinyl or some kind of plush…

We’ve all been told that one of the quickest and easiest ways to increase your computers performance is to add more RAM (Random Access Memory). This can be true – especially these days with resource hungry Operating Systems and ever increasingly complex programs. But what exactly is RAM, and how does it work. Computer memory has one task – storing information as either a 0 or a 1 – it really is that simple. Think of you computer memory as a table with lots of paper cups on it. These cups represent the computer memory cells and can either be empty (0) or full (1). The computer constantly scans all these cups (cells) and can see if they are full or empty. The computer can then interpret all these 0’s…

At PAX this year I hosted a panel titled, “Tell Me a Story and I’ll Love You Forever”. It was a flowery title, to be sure, but it really does reflect how I feel about stories. I am a collector of many things – books, comics, movies, minerals, puppets, recipes… the list goes on – but if there’s one thing that unifies most of my collecting it is stories. I inhale plots, character arcs and developments. Hearing a new story excites me in a way few other things do. I’m a junkie and stories are my drug of choice. The idea behind the panel was to look at the way stories emerge from games rather than how stories are told in games. To be wanky and technical, I wanted to…