Innehållsförteckning för Issue 291 från PC Powerplay

This issue we’re taking a preview look at... a new Warhammer 40,000 game! I know, right? I mean, they’re so rare these days... Not. I’m actually kinda curious about this one myself. I’m bit of a 40K fan (I’ve just started a new Craftworld army!), and I played a bit of the previous Chaos Gate back in the day. It was a pretty challenging game, but the most challenging part? Quitting. Yep, every time you’d finish a mission and want a break, you’d hit Quit, and – like many games maddeningly do – it asked you if you really, truly wanted to quit. Only, it did so by asking you this simple question: Betray the Emperor? Yes/No? Yes, to quit out of the game you had to betray the saviour…

FINAL FANTASY VI: THE INTERACTIVE CG GAME 1995 This Silicon Graphics demo seemed like a precursor to a Nintendo 64 Final Fantasy. FINAL FANTASY VII TECHNICAL DEMO 2005 Square recreated FFVII’s opening to show off what the PS3 would be capable of. UNREAL ENGINE 3: SAMARITAN 2011 Epic made Samaritan to show the power of new DirectX 11 tech. THE MATRIX AWAKENS 2021 This staggeringly detailed city environment shows off the potential of UE5’s Nanite geometry system.…

When contemporary developers revisit the design conventions of gaming’s past, they face an inevitable challenge. Authentically capturing the feel and look of older titles can be a tricky thing to balance with innovation. That’s something the team that brought us Shovel Knight seems to be working through with their coming creation, Mina the Hollower. Yacht Club Games’ crowdfunded release openly evokes a very certain type of gaming experience. Mina the Hollower wears its action adventure influences on its sleeve, with the team happily pointing to Castlevania, 2D Zelda titles, and the Game Boy Color’s crisp 8-bit visuals as sources of inspiration. Playing the early demo, Mina the Hollower absolutely evokes a sense of those titles. Tonally, it leans into the eerie and gothic, and as has become expected of Yacht…

The Steam Deck is one of the most versatile, most intriguing gaming PCs I’ve ever played with. It’s a handheld device that will draw immediate, probably unfair comparisons with Nintendo’s Switch, but is 100% PC in both the best and worst ways. It’s important to note I’m writing this before launch, with a 512GB version of the Steam Deck that still has to be considered unfinished. But that’s only in relation to the software side of the equation and, while that is absolutely vital to the smooth running of the device, the hardware itself is final. And really impressive. Core to the whole thing, and the piece of the puzzle most responsible for the Deck actually being a genuine gaming PC, is the AMD silicon sizzling away at its heart.…

The subject of the names sheep give themselves is not one that has often troubled the minds of PCPP, but it turns out some sheep are called Bah. Others Byyh. Still more take the name Boh, or even Baah. And don’t get us started on the chickens. Then there are the humans. Meet Vuk, who is 27 years old and has seven children. Vuk is a member of the Ulygash Hegemony, and lives in its capital of Ashombe (current size: one hut). It’s all been generated by the game since Vuk was placed, with some sheep, chickens, and two other humans, around a beehive in the centre of an island. They were then left to get on with it, the expectation being that, humans being humans, a large honey-glazed barbecue…

2012 Mistranslations for the Modern Gamer writes: “The most recent blow is the announcement that Diablo 3 will be released on consoles… What Diablo’s console debut means is that its developer, Blizzard, has left PC exclusivity, and that, internet, is a monumental blow.” Nah, it wasn’t. 2015 Wired writes: “No, Really, the PC Is Dying and It’s Not Coming Back,” after fewer PCs are predicted to ship that year, and Apple sells loads of iPhones. Hundreds of millions of PCs continued to sell every year, and sales even increased year-over-year in 2019. Turns out people like both computers and phones. 2019 Marketwatch writes: “PC gaming is in a decline,” arguing that PC games aren’t good anymore, unlike old Amiga games that “had only one goal: to entertain”. And yet PC…

SLAY THE SPIRE OK, it’s not really testing the limits of the hardware, but the Switch version has already proved that this enduring deckbuilder is the perfect game to dip in and out of on the go. RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 There you go, here’s a test of the hardware. If the Steam Deck can run RDR 2 at a decent framerate, it’ll be a game-changer – one of PC’s biggest, richest open worlds in your pocket. CRUSADER KINGS III Will the controls be able to handle CK III’s dense UI? That’s still in question. What isn’t in question is my desire to rule a medieval empire while I wait for the bus.…

Was Sifu’s final cutscene worth the frustration I endured to see it? Not really, but at risk of sounding like I’m quoting some misattributed kung fu aphorism, the experience of mastering Sifu’s combat is what mattered and I couldn’t get enough of it. That’s down to some of the most enjoyable melee combat ever – fluid, funny, improvisational – and a devilish structure that taunted me with its contemptible fairness. Sifu is a singleplayer-only brawler with just five levels, each of which ends in a two-stage boss fight. Except for the final boss’ annoying immunity to certain attacks, there are no tricks. The bosses can all be defeated just like any other opponent, and the opening credits even show you how to fight them. When you make it to the…

It’s all over... Wheels Turn your Steam Deck into a skateboard deck and make yourself more portable than ever! May void the warranty. Bungee Cord Perfect for Elden Ring players – every time you throw your Deck at the wall, it’ll bounce back to your hand! Hats Honestly, how long is Valve going to be able to resist selling headgear for their hardware? Portable Crowbar A miniature tool that snaps onto your Deck! Perfect for prying open tiny crates, or killing ant-sized Antlions. Games for Windows Live Emulator Relive the magic of Microsoft’s lost gaming platform! Come on Gabe, you know you loved it. VR Conversion Kit Strap the Steam Deck to your face for a cheap alternative to a VR headset! The perfect way to play Half-Life: Alyx.…

RIMWORLD HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM STEAM IN AUSTRALIA Well, shit. While space colony sim RimWorld has been available digitally in Australia since 2013, it was recently put in front of the Australian Classification Board due to a potential physical console release. The Board gave RimWorld a rating of “Refused Classification”, making it illegal to sell in Australia, due to the way it deals with “matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults”. At the time we assumed this probably wouldn’t affect the PC version. So did RimWorld’s developers, Ludeon Studios, who wrote in a news post, “We did not expect this to affect…

DEFEND THE ROOK DEVELOPER Goblinz Studio PRICE $25.95 AVAILABILITY Released WEBSITE https://goblinzstudio.com/game/defend-the-rook/ Defend the Rook is like a candy store; the kind where you fill a paper bag with brightly coloured treats, those that catch your eye, both familiar and curious. You can’t choose from everything, all of the time, but limitations (arising from randomness and linear progression) lead to flexible and interesting builds. Gameplay is an intriguing mix of turn-based strategy and tower defence. Most of the candy I initially chose was offensive, despite the game’s name and premise. I began playing actively and strategically, but eventually enjoyed prioritising passive defences more. How does it work? You control a rook (with light bombardment abilities) and three heroes; warrior, mage, and rogue. Three kinds of towers can be placed on…

Arrakis. Dune. Desert Planet. We’ve seen it before in books, movies and games, but the desert planet of Shiro Games’ upcoming Dune: Spice Wars takes its own approach to the world. While Spice remains key to gameplay, Shiro’s approach tackles the broader galaxy of Dune in a way that most prior games haven’t attempted. I got to see Spice Wars’ blend of 4X and RTS gameplay in a hands-off gameplay demo, and it’s looking very promising. It included the broad outline of the start of a singleplayer Dune campaigni as House Atreides, as the player ventured out from their single starting territory to explore the surface of Arrakis. Dune: Spice Wars shares a lot of design basics with Shiro’s critically acclaimed Northgard, an RTS cantered on capturing and controlling territories…

How does it play? There’s going to be a whole cottage industry of Steam Deck accessories – the versatile USB-C dock, the fastest micro SD card, the most convenient travel keyboard and mouse – but I’m here to tell you that the single best Steam Deck accessory is a throw pillow. It turns out that the small, overly firm decorative pillows have been on our couches all this time just waiting for a higher calling: a Steam Deck to plop down on top of them. After hours of gaming on Valve’s new handheld PC I’m amazed by how capable it is, but that power comes at a heavy price. As in, like, the Steam Deck is really heavy. It’s inescapably a bulky device, weighing 68% more than the Nintendo Switch…

The faint remnants of The Matrix Online still radiate somewhere in the ether. I’m not saying it’s possible to jack in, but… well, do some Googling and you may or may not find a website dedicated to emulating this beloved, doomed MMO long after its funeral. You may or may not uncover a hyperlink that downloads a preserved version of the game client and a crack designed to jailbreak it from Sony’s rigor mortis grasp. You may or may not be asked to fabricate login credentials, and you may or may not watch your computer seize up as it attempts to render assets that have been left to atrophy since 2009. But if you follow the white rabbit far enough – if you take the red pill and slink past…

Company of Heroes 3 RELEASE: 2022 2022 is the year the RTS returns from the grave, as genre veterans Relic Entertainment bring back the iconic WWII series. We’ve been hands-on a couple of times now, and it’s blown us away each time. It’s a good year to be a strategy gamer. Starfield RELEASE: Nov 11, 2022 It’s been a decade since Skyrim and seven years since Fallout 4. In other words, it’s been a long wait for a new Bethesda open world, but 2022 is finally the year – and with its intergalactic setting, it looks like the developer’s most ambitious project yet. Marvel’s Midnight Suns RELEASE: 2022 You know it’s going to be a good year for PC gaming when there’s a big new release on the way from…

There are two things we are confident about seeing in 2022. The first is that the silicon shortage will continue well into the end of the year, making graphics cards still the most sought after, most expensive part of any gaming PC build. That’s rather depressing, and I’m sorry to have to kick off the year confirming the ongoing technical torpor of PC gaming hardware. But the second thing we’re confident about seeing is far more positive, and means that maybe we shouldn’t care about chasing that ephemeral upgrade and love the rig we’re with. Because there are some things happening in 2022 that mean you’re likely in line for higher frame rates and improved gaming fidelity from your existing gaming PC without having to change a single chip. A…

DEVIL MAY CRY The creators of the Castlevania show are already working on giving Devil May Cry the same treatment, with an eight episode season to come and further seasons planned. Dante, Vergil and Lady are confirmed as the leads. HALO After a long wait, the Halo TV series should finally be debuting this year. Pablo Schreiber (American Gods) is playing the Master Chief himself, while Cortana will be played by Jen Taylor, who’s portrayed her in the games. ASSASSIN’S CREED News has been quiet on this one since it was announced at the end of 2020, but in theory Ubisoft is still bringing a live-action series to Netflix – and presumably hoping to wipe away the stain of the film adaptation. CUPHEAD A full TV show based on the…

I land a flying kick into a bandit and send him screaming off the edge of a roof and onto the zombie-filled streets below. In Dying Light 2 this has become my singular goal: kick dudes off roofs. The city is in peril, I have a half-dozen unfinished sidequests in my journal, and my map is littered with icons imploring me to scavenge resources, discover new locations and undertake parkour challenges. Apologies. I can’t actually deal with any of that right now. Somewhere in the city another bandit is standing too close to the edge of another rooftop and he needs booting off it. And reaching that rooftop is just as much fun as kicking someone off it. To get there I slide down ziplines and bounce off jump-pads, swing…

Intel’s 12th Gen processors are stuffed with loads of new features, but they’re also fit to burst last generation’s motherboards, courtesy of their larger footprint. That means you need a new 600-series motherboard to put Alder Lake to use in your gaming PC, and we’ve tested the latest and greatest to help you narrow down your search. You have a few motherboard chipsets to choose from: Z690, H670, H610, and B660. The most fully-featured of the lot are the Z690s, though they’re also likely to be the most expensive. If you find they’re out of your budget, you may want to look towards more gaming-focused B660 boards. These offer a tighter specification but maintain PCIe 4.0 support from the chipset, which means you can still utilise fast PCIe 4.0 NVMe…

Once or twice a decade we get one of my favourite treats: a new game engine tech demo. These are not actual games. They’re better: they’re promises of what games could be, pure spectacle showcases for the majesty of a million more polygons on screen and bumpy tessellated surfaces and lifelike ray-traced lighting. Tech demos are raw power and unhinged artistry mashed together, gleefully disregarding pesky problems like ‘writing’ and ‘design’ that have to go into proper videogames. Maybe the best of them was 2011’s Unreal Engine 3 Samaritan demo, a three minute slice of gritty sci-fi (still more evocative today than playing Cyberpunk 2077 in 2021 turned out to be). In 2005 Square Enix created a tech demo of Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation 3 that ended up…

I‘ve always loved the idea of virtual reality, yet I’ve never bought a headset in order to experience VR at home. Why? I suppose I (incorrectly) believe that most VR “games” don’t fully explore the mechanical, storytelling and immersive potential for the medium. I’ve played lots of “serious VR games” that do, like Rhett Loban’s Torres Strait Virtual Reality, which engages the player in cultural practices. My recent journey inside the investigative documentary, A Clever Label, was both thought-provoking and a reminder not to discount the specialness of VR so easily. Creator, Michela Ledwidge, became interested in why it had taken so long for marriage equality to be realised in Australia, given that the population was supportive for perhaps a decade prior to the 2017 plebiscite. During the introduction, “Virtual…

Although still in its alpha stages, farming sim Roots of Pacha already has the potential to overtake its genre counterparts. At first glance, it’s easy to assume another duplicate of the much-adored Stardew Valley, but with more intuitive tool systems and a welcome, communal approach to farming, it has enough new ideas to stand out. Studio Soda Den, after a successful Kickstarter run and heaps of attentive tweaking, has begun to cultivate a serene setting and a wholesome, captivating narrative – one that even can be shared with friends in multiplayer mode. Through it, we follow the traditions, innovations and foibles of the peaceful, prehistoric settlement of Pacha – a fictional village inspired by a diverse range of cultures. In a genre where most games are set in the modern…

Setup The Deck can swap over to a Linux desktop, which includes a handy app store that can install loads of up-to-date emulators with a click – no terminal fuss! It makes the process of setting up emulators remarkably simple. I used desktop Steam to add them to my library for easier access and controller mapping, then just copied the games I wanted over on a USB-C flash drive. PCSX2 Detected controller mapping out of the box, so I jumped right into the infamously bizarre Mister Mosquito before playing five hours of Persona 3 FES with a widescreen hack enabled. The Deck never dipped from 60fps and projected six hours of battery life. KEY SETTINGS: 2X INTERNAL RESOLUTION, MTVU MULTITHREADING Dolphin I told myself I’d use the Deck to finally…

I’VE PLAYED RESIDENT EVIL VILLAGE ON THE BUS INTO THE PCPP OFFICE, THEN PLUGGED THE DECK INTO MY MONITOR 1 Plug and play Plug the Deck into a dock, connect a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and you’ve got yourself a whole gaming rig ready to roll. You can go with the standard SteamOS UI, like a modded version of Big Picture Mode, but there is also a desktop mode. This operates like a normal Linux desktop, and functions a lot like the Windows OS you’re used to. USB devices are plug and play, and most of your favourite apps can be loaded from its Discover software centre. The only issue I’ve had so far is lack of DisplayPort support and a complete refusal to output at the 21:9 ratio of…

In September 2011 I moved 2,500 miles from one side of the country to the other, leaving behind friends and family for a city where I knew almost no one. For some of those relationships the move meant a huge change: I went from seeing friends weekly to just once or twice a year. But for others it was an easy transition, because we already spent most of our social time playing games together online. In 2011 if we were conscious and not stuck at work, we were mainlining League of Legends like droogs with our eyes wired open. We later had trysts with Battlefield 3, Terraria, Smite and Dungeon Defenders, all games we could pay just enough attention to, to keep our main focus on why we were ultimately…

Apple isn’t a bajillion-dollar tech juggernaut today because it comes up with ideas first. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, but the iPod dominated because it had a better design, better aesthetics, and better ads. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but the iPhone crushed its nascent competitors with better hardware and a brilliant touch interface. Being first never mattered as much as flexing those brand and design muscles to make everyone else look old and busted. I think that Valve has a shot at its own iPod moment in 2022. The Steam Deck isn’t the first portable gaming PC, but it might be the one that changes everything. The pieces for a sea change moment for the PC, specifically, are all aligned this year. The Steam Deck isn’t just a…

Over the past few pages, we’ve laid out all sorts of exciting things in PC gaming’s future – but we reckon there’s even more to look forward to. Indulge us as we make our boldest predictions for the events of 2022, combining expert speculation, wishful thinking, and a glimpse into our crystal balls. Of course, this hobby is one of unbridled chaos – games rise and fall, technology constantly surprises us, and a global pandemic throws everything off its axis whenever it can. Nothing is set in stone. But we still feel pretty good about these predictions. If they come true, we’ll be vindicated, and lauded as the prophetic geniuses we surely are. If they don’t… well, you can enjoy making fun of us on January 2023. Bloodborne will come…

OlliOlli World isn’t like other skaters. It’s not shredding lines down some asphalt concourse, pissing off security guards and scaring passing shoppers as it slams a 50-50 into the kerb. Roll7’s series of sidescrolling skaters has instead travelled to the far-off shores of Radlandia, a skater’s paradise where the rails are always polished and aspiring shredders compete for the chance to become the next Skate Wizard. OlliOlli World is weirder and wilder than those who Olli’d before it – and it’s all the better for it. The third game in the series follows the template laid out by OlliOlli 1 and 2. You’re tasked with skating a line down a sidescrolling course, using A to push and the left stick to launch into kickflips and the like. As you go…