Innehållsförteckning för Issue 276 från PC Powerplay

It began with an intensive shortlisting process, creating finalists for the best-of-the-best gear that was released through 2018. Then, we opened up the voting for the Awards to the Australian public — you — the real experts with the most valued opinions. You had your say, and at the end of the voting period the winners across all the important PC categories rose to the top, and now it’s finally time to reveal the champions. On a glorious March night in Sydney, the big moment came and throughout the night the winners were announced and trophies claimed. And, there was much joy as the hard work and innovation of the winners was rewarded with an Australian PC Award, as voted by you. Every company that was a finalist has every…

Here are three words I never thought I’d write: Bloodlines is back. It’s been almost 15 years since Troika Games’ vampire RPG first launched, winning and breaking hearts in equal measure. Bloodlines remains one of the most stylish and intricate first-person RPGs ever made, with a truly remarkable amount of depth and dynamism baked into its dark and seedy Los Angeles. But Bloodlines’ premature launch also meant it was riddled with bugs. After years of community support, it is still a challenging game to grapple with. Bloodlines is one of the great ‘what ifs’ of PC gaming. What if Troika had been given another six months to sharpen Bloodlines’ fangs? What if the game hadn’t launched on the same day as Half-Life 2? What if the likes of Leonard Boyarsky…

DEVELOPER CODEMASTERS • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE codemasters.com/game/dirt-rally-2-0/ Most people don’t know how it feels to flick the back end of a rally car out on the approach to a blind turn. As a result, Dirt Rally 2.0 requires a greater level of abstract thought to assess its ‘simulation’ cred than, say, Project Cars 2. You might not have sent a McLaren P1 up Eau Rouge, but you still know how a road car feels on a road. Snarling Group B rally cars speeding across loose surface? Not so much. That’s why Dirt Rally 2.0 exists. Since its earliest outings under the Colin McRae banner, Codemasters’ rally series has traded on ‘feeling’ just right. The way its cars squirm and shift through corners, the way you can keep them just about under…

DEVELOPER UBISOFT MONTREAL • PUBLISHER UBISOFT far-cry.ubisoft.com/game/en-gb/home You’d think a nuke being dropped on Montana would have changed it somewhat, but Far Cry New Dawn’s post-apocalyptic version of Hope County is essentially the same one we know from Far Cry 5. New Dawn adds a couple of new twists to the series’ formula, but nothing to make it feel like a wholly different game. This is Far Cry 5 again, just on a smaller scale, and with a lot more pink flowers. It’s years after the nukes fell at the end of Far Cry 5, and your nameless character has been traveling the country by rail, helping survivors rebuild the post-apocalyptic United States. A group of highwaymen (not that cleverly called the ‘Highwaymen’) derail your train, and leave you stranded.…

DEVELOPER FAILBETTER GAMES • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE failbettergames.com/sunless-skies We have a Marvel Cinematic Universe, so why not a Failbetter Interactive Universe? The third game in the world of Fallen London also has its share of daring heroics in the face of impending doom, but instead of saving the world you’re usually trying to save yourself. In a place where time comes in barrels and souls in jars, where the horrors of the skies can cause you to lose your marbles, it’s probably easier to lapse into villainy. Not least when food supplies run out, and your crewmates begin to look awfully tasty. The follow-up to Sunless Sea is in keeping with Failbetter Games’ fondness for putting players into crisis management mode from minute one. As second in command to a dying…

PRICE $4,898 dell.com Alienware has always had a reputation for offering high end laptops with the most premium components and this year’s m15 is no different. Like a poisonous creature this laptop has a powdery red skin on the topside of the clamshell that bleeds into a soft black keyboard surround. The keyboard and trackpad (much like the well worn angular chassis design) aren’t anything revolutionary but they both feel nice enough to use to forget about that. The 15.6inch screen on this unit has a 144Hz refresh rate, lining up with most of the offerings in this year’s roundup. The screen however does have a decidedly blue tinge to it and it’s probably one of the worst in the roundup when it comes to cutting glare. In general work…

PRICE $2,399 asus.com/au The Zephyrus has been one of the more innovative gaming ultrabooks we’ve seen in the past couple of years, pioneering a pop up rear ventilation system alongside the launch of Nvidia’s Max-Q mobile cards and fundamentally altering the keyboard layout to have a vertical trackpad that sits to the right of the keyboard and doubles as a number pad. These features have both been well received, on balance, and continue to give this year’s models a much thinner profile and the ability to use reach the WSAD keys without having to rest your palm on a hot laptop chassis. The Zephyrus S GX531 is running the same Intel Core i7-8750H / 16GB RAM combo as all the other units here, but the model we looked at was…

PRICE $2,768 aftershockpc.com.au We’re a little on the fence about Aftershock’s Apex 15X. In many ways it’s a reasonable entry level gaming laptop, but when you consider it costs $2,768 on special it’s a bit of a hard sell. See as this goes to print there will still be a number of retailers trying to get through laptops with Nvidia’s 10 series GPUs. We saw an Aorus X5 v8 with an i7-850H CPU and a GTX 1070 going for $2,599 and a 2018 Razer Blade with a GTX 1070 going for $2,859, and while these units are older, they perform as well, if not better than, the Aftershock Apex 15X. That said, if you are really keen on Nvidia’s new ray tracing features then you’re going to side with this…

ASUS is a market leader in PC gaming hardware and devices. Whether you’re after a powerful new laptop for gaming on the go, or the ultimate tower to dominate from home, ASUS has you covered. By partnering with AMD, ASUS can offer unique features to push your gaming rig further, with potential for overclocking, easy drive management, the best sound system possible, as well as full Aura Sync support. Here are some of the best features available from ASUS and AMD, and how to get the most out of your rig with them. ASUS PROCLOCK TECHNOLOGY REVEALS THE TRUE POWER OF THE AMD RYZEN PROCESSOR ASUS’ ProClock is a base-clock generator that lets you push the frequency of your CPU to new heights, allowing you to experiment with overclocking your…

PRICE $79.95 www2.razer.com Take about $50 off Razer’s old Basilisk and you arrive at the Basilisk Essential. It still has Chroma, it still has the exact same design, removable paddle and Razer’s mechanical mice switches. You don’t lose a lot, either. You only have a single removable paddle, there’s no choice in length anymore, but it’s still customizable. My personal favorite for this is as a push to talk shortcut for Discord chat, but FPS fans will appreciate applying DPI shift to it, slowing your DPI right down for those sniping situations. The gaming-grade sensor has a lower DPI at 6,400 compared to 16,000 on the regular model, but for most that will still be plenty for most. It’s not Razer’s 5G optical sensor, but it’s still very good. It…

These days of course, there are basically two types of personal computer - PCs and Macs. And in 2006, Apple embraced Intel’s (near) monopoly on PC architecture and switched away from PowerPC CPUs to Corewhatevers. The phrase “IBM PC” might have become socially obsolete years earlier, but its victory over end-user multipurpose desktop computing was now absolute. What’s interesting about Steve Jobs’ 2006 announcement is that it implies Apple probably made the decision at least a year earlier... and 2005 marked the 20th anniversary of the release of the Intel 80386. Also known as the i386 (after various copyright courts ruled that Intel could no longer register numbers as a trademark) or colloquially to the likes of us as the 386, this 32-bit CPU dropped in October 1985 and changed…

A new report from Kotaku on the history and current status of the next Dragon Age game reveals old plans for an ambitious and intriguing RPG, code-named Joplin, that would have prioritised “choice and consequence,” rather than simplistic fetch quests, in a game world smaller than DA:I, but deeper and more reactive. Alas, that vision of the game allegedly fell victim to the ol’ double-whammy of Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. In its place, according to the report, is a rebooted game intended to be a better fit with Electronic Arts’ mandate to develop “games as a service,” which evolve — and can be monetised — for years after their initial release. Instead of using the tools and pipelines established for Dragon Age: Inquisition as was originally planned, the rebooted…

For anyone who can afford it, the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the best graphics card for gaming, offering comparable performance to a Titan RTX for around half the price. That depends on the specific model, though. Case in point, EVGA launched its GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Kingpin Gaming card last month, a premium GPU with a price tag to match — US$1,899.99, if you’re an EVGA Associates member. If you’re not an Associates member, you can’t buy it. The Associates program is a new thing that incentivizes EVGA customers to peddle its products by sharing a unique code. The buyer who uses the code gets a discount on most items, and the “Associate” gets a kickback in the form of EVGA bucks (in-store currency). Apparently one of the perks…

As easy as it is to poke fun at licensed games like the infamous Aliens: Colonial Marines, looking at them from a different perspective raises a fascinating question. The process of making a licensed game involves a maze of stakeholders, scheduling concerns, and legal maneuvering. Why do good creative opportunities and good developers release projects that are less than the sum of their parts? Tom Forsyth is an industry veteran who spent years at Valve and Oculus, among other companies. Once upon a time, though, he was a programmer on Blade 2. “For arcane licensing reasons,” Forsyth recalls, “we only had permission to use Wesley Snipes’ likeness in one place — the box cover — but Mr Snipes could not appear anywhere in-game. Of course, Blade had to be in…

OBJECTS IN SPACE DEVELOPER FLAT EARTH GAMES • PRICE $28.95 http://objectsgame.com/ Objects in Space could not be further from an idle game, yet that’s the way I most often play it now. I’ve road-tested it at conventions, and it certainly attracted attention at Play Fare, but I love it even more, as a simple part of my everyday. Typically, I’ll be enroute to a new station, with cargo pods full of components, computers, or other gear that I’ve been contracted to haul across the galaxy. Autopilot is handling my ship’s systems, pirates are unlikely, so I’ll switch to the scene that is my space bedroom and I’ll start doing (in real life) household chores. If I hear the ship taking damage, or that I’m being hailed, I’ll quickly return to…

DEVELOPER UBISOFT MASSIVE • PUBLISHER UBISOFT www.tomclancy-thedivision.ubisoft.com After 25 hours of wrestling with BioWare’s looter shooter Anthem, it’s funny how grateful I am for the little things in The Division 2—stuff like being able to switch my loadout on the fly, without exiting a mission or sitting through a loading screen. No one’s tried to make me and three other players sit through a boring mid-mission cutscene, either. In fact, The Division 2 barely makes me pay attention to its barely-there story at all. The Division 2 presents a much stronger campaign experience than the first game, with fewer filler missions, and better open world side activities. Its endgame, too, is a satisfyingly different offering to the preceding hours, remixing levels, making the world feel more alive, and escalating the…

DEVELOPER CAPCOM • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE www.devilmaycry5.com Devil May Cry 5 is a 16-hour exploration of the hundreds of ways a magical man might hit a demon. Nero hits demons with robot arms like a hyper-aggressive Inspector Gadget. Dante hits demons with two halves of a haunted motorbike. V lets demons do the hitting for him. All things considered, Devil May Cry 5 is one of the best games about hitting demons ever made. You switch between Nero, V, and Dante across DMC5’s 20 missions. A demon called Urizen is using a bad tree called the Qliphoth to drain the city of all its blood, and it’s up to the trio to fight through his minions to stop him. The story is preposterous, genuinely funny at points, and supported by earnest…

DEVELOPER MEGA CRIT • PUBLISHER MEGA CRIT www.megacrit.com The joy of a singleplayer card game like Slay the Spire is that it puts absolutely and utterly brilliant broken combos within your grasp. It feels good to deal 50 poison damage to something. But it feels even better when you drop a series of cards that sextuples that amount of poison, kills an enemy, and triggers a corpse explosion that cascades splash damage to all of the other things that are trying to kill you. Slay the Spire’s achievement is the way it makes this feeling of power simultaneously so potent and elusive. This is an intricately designed deck-building game grounded in deliberate balance, populated by confounding enemies, steady rewards, and tactile decks of cards that play like efficient, beautiful machines…

PRICE $5,099 razer.com Razer’s 2018 blade 15 was one of the best gaming laptops of last year and the subtle chassis tweaks and a hefty set of RTX GPU upgrades definitely don’t hold it back. While of course the new graphics cards are the centrepiece of the update, the chassis has a re-honed squarer shape that will annoy anyone who likes the palm rest to be rounded. There’s been an update to the RGB lighting, which minimises light bleed from underneath the chiclet keys and makes this flashy feature look far more sophisticated. This marries with some of the best feeling membrane keyboards available and a sleek, nicely sized trackpad. While this unit was more than 20% behind the top units in Cinebench’s Multi-threaded CPU benchmark and HWBot’s x265 media…

PRICE $3,099 dell.com Dell’s white Special Edition G5 15 has one of the most innovative gaming laptop chassis designs we’ve seen in the last few years. While it doesn’t compete on footprint or overall thickness, it embraces a boxier aesthetic by riffing on last year’s DeLorean-inspired G5 vent design and adds a little flair by throwing some ultramarine blue thermal-management components behind a perspex undercarriage vent. There’s a bit of back and forth in this unit, which seems torn between wanting to be one of the most premium devices available and trying to meet market demands. See while the G5 15 unit we tested had just a Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU, it had also been fitted with a pair of 512GB NVMe drives in a RAID 0 configuration for 2700+MB/s…

PRICE $1,999 acer.com.au Acer’s had a good run with its Predator displays, releasing some truly excellent gaming monitors to the market such as the X34 and X34P. The 27-inch XB273KP is Acer’s latest addition to the Predator range, packing UHD 4K, IPS, DisplayHDR 400 certification, Nvidia G-Sync and a 144Hz refresh rate, making it worthy of the Predator branding. Let’s start this review by looking at the exterior of the XB273KP, because it comes with a rather unique feature not normally seen on gaming monitors – a hood. If you’ve hung around professional photographers or graphic designers, you might have noticed a plastic frame around their displays to keep stray sources of light away and maintain colour accuracy. But on the XB273KP, Acer claims the hood is there so you…

PRICE $1,699 www.asus.com/au/ The prospect of reviewing a projector has not been particularly enticing for some years now. In a world where large, high-quality TVs are ubiquitous and low in price, the notion of having a tricky-to-setup, washed-out image delivered by a an expensive, high-maintenance device that’s not usable in daylight hours is something that only a Transylvanian Count might be interested in. But, Asus’ F1 projector turned our heads. Firstly, it’s a short-throw model, meaning that it can produce a large, undistorted image from close range. It also eschews an expensive, consumable lamp for an LED lighting array that’s capable of producing 1,200 LUMENs of brightness for 30,000 hours. There’s no need to awkwardly attach separate speakers thanks to a built-in Harmon Kardon-certified 2.1 system, and focusing and keystone…

Early in March, when the twitter account Can You Pet the Dog had just gotten going, the account highlighted Enter the Gungeon, noting sadly, “You cannot pet the dog in Enter the Gungeon.” New Blood Interactive CEO Dave Oshry noticed the tweet, responding with a weeping emoticon and tagging Dave Crooks, the designer behind Enter the Gungeon. “Hold my beer,” Crooks replied. Fast forward to this past Friday when Dodge Roll Games released its final update for Gungeon, titled A Farewell to Arms. It adds a bunch of wacky new weapons and items, new secret floors and bosses, and new characters. And you can now pet the dog.…

There are plenty of rumors pointing to Nvidia releasing a GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card in the near future, and just last week, we assembled them into a tidy article covering price, specs, release date, and everything we know about the GTX 1650, including the expected power requirements. Since then, a batch of press renders have found their way to the web, and it looks like the GTX 1650 might not require a dedicated power cable from your PSU, just as we surmised. The folks at Videocardz got their mitts on a batch of what look to be official press renders of a Zotac model. According to the box art, the GTX 1650 will indeed ship with 4GB of GDDR5 memory, as we had been hearing. What’s interesting though is…

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines was blatantly unfinished when it came out in 2004. Some of the staff at Troika Games scrambled to get a patch together as the studio was closing, but even after that there was still work to be done. It’s janky, but worth playing today, especially in the wake of the Bloodlines 2 announcement. If you’re revisiting Bloodlines or playing it for the first time, here are some tips that’ll help you get the best experience. DOWNLOAD THE UNOFFICIAL PATCH 1 A modder named Werner Spahl, aka Wesp5, took on the work left unfinished by the developer, and his Unofficial Patch is an essential fix. Now up to version 10.3, it has a changelog longer than some novels. Downloading the Unofficial Patch from ModDB (www.moddb.com/mods/ vtmbunofficial-patch/downloads/vtmbup103)…

DEVELOPER HEMPULI OY • PUBLISHER IN-HOUSE hempuli.com/baba Baba is You, and its developer Arvi ‘Hempuli’ Teikari, found themselves in the spotlight after a build of the logic puzzler won over IGF Award judges in 2018. With nominations in four of the eight categories, Teikari beat out the likes of Into The Breach to take home the Excellence in Design award, as well as pocketing the Best Student Game prize. Now the full release is here, it’s easy to see what the fuss was about. Baba is You is a spatial word game, of sorts. It combines programming-style commands with Sokoban-esque block pushing to create hugely inventive and varied puzzles. By rearranging the blocks with words on them you can issue new rules for the world or find new ways to…

PRICE $4,799 au.msi.com MSI massively upped its game last year with the GS65 Stealth Thin, receiving full marks from a range of independent outlets, but the GS75 Stealth 8SG we have here may be an even bigger success. At just 1.8cm thick it’s almost as thin as its smaller sibling, despite packing an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 (Max Q) GPU and a whopping 32GB of RAM. The GS75 Stealth 8SG has the only 17.3inch display of the roundup, yet its tiny bezels and better screen to body ratio make it difficult to tell that the GS75 Stealth 8SG is actually a bigger unit. The 144Hz screen is powered by a generous 80Wh battery that gets 3 hours and 18 minutes in PCMark 8’s Home battery benchmark — 30% more than…

PRICE $3,169 lenovo.com/au When you consider its direct opponents are the ROG Zephyrus and the Gigabyte Aero 15, Lenovo’s Legion Y740 isn’t much to look at. Yes the rear interface hub is useful and the grey metal complexion would slip neatly into any workspace, but its appearance is so bland that you might lose this RTX gaming rig amongst the most drab workstations. On paper the 15.6-inch 144Hz screen looks the same as the other screens on offer here, it is however, significantly less vibrant with a peak nit brightness of 300 and a poor anti-glare coating that washes it out. It may be the dullest of the bunch but this screen goes some way to redeeming itself by including Nvidia’s G-Sync technology, which will allow you to prevent screen…

PRICE $2,203 metabox.com.au If you’ve read up on ray tracing then you’d know it’s a rather demanding technological leap. This might make it debatable about whether to bother looking at the lower end of RTX cards when you can nab an older laptop with a more powerful GTX card on a solid discount. We’re not going to argue with this logic, but if there was a device that made a compelling case for a budget RTX gaming laptop it’s the Metabox Alpha-X NH58ED. While this unit’s full RRP is $2,603, you can get it on sale for as little as $2,203, which is really just a couple of hundred more than what you would expect to pay for a light gaming laptop with a mid-range Nvidia GPU. For this you…

PRICE $159 www.msi.com MSI is not normally a name that I’d leap to when it came to choosing a PC case for a new build, but the hardware company is continuing to branch out, and while its new MGP Gungnir 100 case may not boast a name that rolls off the tongue, it certainly makes an impact. This is a roomy case, able to house an E-ATX motherboards if size really is your thing, but it also has a few other tricks up its rather expansive sleeves… Now, if you really don’t give a damn about the continuing dominance of RGB lighting as a feature of modern PC hardware, the Gungnir is going to be basically yawn-worthy, as many those tricks related to ARGB lighting effects. Inside is an addressable…

Sega Genesis Mini Price: $120 • Distributor: Sega gensismini.sega.com It had to happen, right? All these other minis. Gotta get on that bandwagon before someone ruins consumer goodwill. What? No! Shhh! We don’t talk about the Sony one! POWERED UP: A ‘first party’ product, unlike previous Sega mini consoles which were built by AtGames and generally fairly poorly received. Includes 40 games with expected titles like Sonic and Altered Beast, but also less common games like Castlevania and ToeJam & Earl. Comes with two wired, three-button controllers. PLAYED OUT: Some people pronounce SEGA like “say-gah”. Wild huh? HTC 5G Hub Price: $TBA • Distributor: HTC www.htc.com Say hello to this Pie-powered Android tablet that sits on a desk or bench somewhere and gives your home or business internet through a…