Table of contents for Issue 248 in PC Powerplay

2016 isn’t starting off like most years do. It’s just hit February and already the year is hot with releases. Instead of the slow trickle of games and tech until the year hots up around April, we’ve instead had some pretty huge titles drop already, with X-Com 2, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak and Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen (to name but a few featured in this issue) arriving in within the first month or so of the year. February and March see the slate of AAA and high profile indie titles continuing, with Far Cry: Primal, The Division, Firewatch, Dying Light: The Following, Street Fighter V, Grim Dawn, Superhot, Hitman, Day of the Tentacle: Remastered and many, many more appearing on a very regular basis. And…

> Matthew Schmidt: Enjoyed it, good broad break down on things - I’d like to see a bit of expansion about audio in the future though. Pros / Cons using the GPU HDMI vs dedicated sound cards and that sort of thing. > Victoria Fournel Strudwick: Loved it > TrigrH: this issue is awesome, one of the best so far imo. > Kondrakin: I got mine today - woo - looking forward to sitting down with it and a big glass of rum once the little tykes are asleep :} MAKE YOURSELF HEARD! facebook.com/pcpoweplay www.pcpowerplay.com.au…

One of StarCraft II’s best players, Lee Seung Hyun - screen name Life - has been accused of match-fixing recently, and has been arrested by Korean authorities. January 29 saw the announcement that Life had been arrested, although the Korean e-Sports Association (KeSPA) had not yet made an announcement on the matter. This morning however one such statement was released revealing the match fixing allegations and their zero tolerance stance. KeSPA has agreed to work with Korean authorities to resolve the issue as fast as possible. The incident was also confirmed over twitter by another StarCraft II competitive player Kwanghee Woo “Waxangel” who has been providing updates via his twitter and providing match videos that have been put under the microscope (https://t.co/jHkenN70YY). Life has been competing in StarCraft II for…

PC PowerPlay may not have liked it much, but there’s still a lot of charm to Blood Bowl 2. Admittedly brutal and bloody charm, but charm nonetheless. And the game does have its fans, and if you’re a fan - and rank your skills on the pitch - than you may want to sign up for the Blood Bowl 2 World Cup 2016. Qualifications for the big bash start this month, and you can sign up now. If you can make it through qualifiers, you can be one of 64 top coaches in the Play Offs, where you’ll be competing for kudos... and a handy $35,000 prize pool including the following. • US$10,000 cash prize pool• One of three hard-core gaming computers from our partner ASUS• Top-tier gaming equipment by ASUS (monitor, graphic…

“Fargo dismisses all criticism of his foreign adventure. “Hell, everything is legal in Mexico. It’s the American way!”” JANUARY. Like something out of Thunderbirds, Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard rocket soars into space before gracefully descending back to its launch pad. To commemorate this successful mission, Elon Musk offers Derek Smart a complimentary ride on a surplus Falcon 9 rocket, as a reward for all he’s done for the games industry. “Please, Dr. Smart. I insist.” Jonathan Blow reveals an item that helped him during the long, long hours he spent coding The Witness: what appears to be a catheter-equipped piss bottle. When a reporter asks him about his personal hygiene, Blow calls him a ‘Chad’, and abruptly terminates the interview. “Get out, normie! REEEEEEEE!” FEBRUARY: DICE attempts to rekindle consumer…

“I wanted to know how far I could push the game and I sure found out” VOID AND MEDDLER - EPISODE 1 DEVELOPER NO CVT, BLACKMUFFIN PRICE $5 voidandmeddler.com So, there was this guy playing some kind of VR experience called Spit on Me and I think I tried to crack onto him ironically. I told him I like gamers. And I asked him if he was hardcore. He wasn’t into me. His friends said he’d been sad ever since his girlfriend dumped him. I went back and chose maybe six taunts about his appearance and personality. What did he do? Well, seems my actions caused him to damage himself further. Irreparably. I wanted to know how far I could push the game and I sure found out. Then, having…

2015 was a pretty great year when it came to games of all genres, with at least one outstanding game being released for every gaming mood. These are our pick for 2015 - we'll be publishing yours in issue 250. MOST INNOVATIVE GAME/TECH JOHN ROBERTSON > PRISON ARCHITECT Was a toss-up between this and Football Manager 2016, but the fact that Prison Architect manages to provide an excellent take on the overlooked prison management idea makes it the standout strategy game. TIM COLWILL > EVOLVE A game where 4 players fight against one monster and it’s actually insanely well balanced, super competitive and loads of fun? I wouldn’t have believed it either, but it’s true. Fuck you for pricing this game out of the market, 2K. Fuck you. JOHN ROBERTSON…

DEVELOPER FIRAXIS GAMES PUBLISHER 2K GAMES PRICE $89.95 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL Xcom.com There’s probably a handful of really hardcore XCOM players who’ll feel a total disconnect with the start of the sequel, XCOM2. If you managed to beat XCOM on your first playthrough, that victory is now part of your personal gaming legend – but for most of us, the beginning of XCOM2 seems like a perfectly natural extension of most of our efforts. XCOM, and humanity, loses. The aliens win. Earth is theirs now. That’s the starting premise of XCOM2, and in the ensuing 30-odd years between XCOM and XCOM2, the aliens have done a good job of integrating and dominating the planet. We live now in a gleaming future of bright metropolises, complete with new and exciting…

We recently caught up with Intel’s Graham Tucker – who’ll be delivering the keynote speech at our next Upgrade event – to ask what he’s excited about in the year ahead for Intel. When we spoke to Graham, it really wasn’t that long after CES, so one of the things getting him hyped about Intel’s future was small form factor computing. “At CES we were showing off NUCs with Core i7 processors, that can be used as real gaming machines,” he told us. “That small form factor, with Iris Pro Graphics – sure it’s not a discrete solution – but we’ve basically had a 30-year gain in performance over only five years, in terms of graphics. Iris Pro, with EDRAM, gives you the power envelope and the level of performance…

BUDGET The perfect entry-level gaming PC CPU AMD FX-4300 Quad Core 3.8GHz 4 Core Black Edt. $145 www.amd.com We’re sticking with AMD’s budget beauty. MOBO ASRock 980DE3/ U3S3 AM3+ $85 www.asrock.com.au Our CPU needs a new ASRock home. RAM GeIL 8GB Kit DDR3 Evo Veloce C9 1600MHz $85 www.geil.com.tw In with the cheapest we can find VIDEO PowerColor R9 380 PCS+ 4GB $330 www.sapphiretech.com AMD’s new 960 killer POWER Cooler Master Thunder 500W $75 www.coolermaster.com The budget beast doesn’t need a lot of juice SOUND Sennheiser HD201 + ASUS Xonar DG $38 + $33 www.sennheiser.com www.asus.com.au Headphones plus soundcard – yes! OPTICAL LG GH24NSB0 DVD-RW $40 www.lg.com We’d happily retire the…

“who is better at a particular skill will dictate their path or their task” Strategy in videogames isn’t limited to a single genre. You’ll find it in almost anything with a certain amount of freedom; Counter-Strike, Battlefield, League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Angry Birds - they all require strategy. A big problem in gaming is the confusion between strategy and the very different concept of tactics. The differences are vast, but they are inextricably tied to one another for one very important reason: one dictates the other. Strategy is the overall. It is the staring at a war map and deciding what needs to be done, what is required to do it. Tactics are the details. Let’s go with Counter-Strike for a moment - a hostage scenario. Your strategy…

DANIEL WILKS Died of hayfever @drwilkenstein MALCOLM CAMPBELL Booked a holiday BENNETT RING Let off some Steam @bennettring JAMES COTTEE Cast the bones @j_cottee MEGHANN O’NEILL Fought against the machine @firkraags JAMES O’CONNOR Didn’t do anything @jickle BEN MANSILL Did a happy dance NATHAN LAWRENCE Fought the plague CHRIS PIRINA Offered Reece’s Pieces DAVID HOLLINGWORTH Led a revolution ALEX MANN Reacclimated to Melbourne CAMERON FERRIS Sent his kid to school @pcpowerplay SEAN FLETCHER Had ear troubles…

Here is my clutter free, wireless supported Nerd-cave. FOUR IMPRESSIVE FEATURES: • An i5 4670K with a big old Noctua cooler which I haven’t bothered to overclock yet.• Gigabyte GTX 780 ti Ghz Edition.• 15m boosted HDMI cable from GPU to 55” screen.• Amazing feng shui.• Favourite feature:• My beloved XBone controller and PC wireless receiver so I can race from anywhere. LAST UPGRADE: A blisteringly quick ASUS PCE-AC68 wireless card and Nighthawk R7000 router. DREAM UPGRADE: Oculus rift for sim nirvana. WHY SO SPECIAL: I started building a basic steam machine which kind of evolved into a Corsair 540 box carrying full sized hardware. It sits at the back of the room and doubles as a study. It’s capable of maxing most games at 1080p on my TV which suits my Saturday afternoon racing needs…

Got a spare $5 a month? Want to get relatively super-awesome access to EA games? Origin Access is what you’ve been looking for. For the dozen or so of our readers really excited about this, Origin Access is pretty much what Xbone EA fans have been using for a while now. It gets you access to early trials of upcoming games, and free full game downloads of previous released games. Right now, that means Dragon Age: Inquisition and Battlefield 4 to name a couple, as well as the non-EA This War of Mine. More titles are incoming, but that gives you an idea of the time-lag involved. Origin Access also equates to a 10% discount across all Origin games. The bad news? Well, Mac gamers are left out in the…

The votes are in. Each member of the extended PCPP crew (all the contributors past and present we could contact) nominated their games of the year and the results were somewhat surprising, not just for the inclusions but for the games that didn’t make the cut. Despite being a hugely anticipated and much loved game there were only a scant few votes for Fallout 4, with the majority of them coming with the caveat that the world grew dull before exploration was done. Anyway, that bombshell aside: here we go with the top 5. #5 > WORLD OF WARSHIPS WARGAMING REVIEWED IN ISSUE 245 - 9/10 World of Warships is much slower than the hugely popular World of Tanks or the all but forgotten World of Warplanes but for our…

RELEASE VALVE Things are definitely getting Steamy Nobody could accuse Valve of being anything less than a juggernaut when it comes to software sales and game development, but its initial foray into the world of hardware hasn’t been quite so impressive. With the long-delayed Steam Machines still only available from a handful of vendors, and early reports criticizing these gaming machines for having low-specced GPUs, the first generation of machines at the heart of Valve’s hardware push aren’t exactly setting the gaming world on fire. While I’m still waiting to test one of these, with Alienware’s offering likely to land in the next month or two, I was finally able to get my mitts on both the new Steam Link streaming console, as well as the Steam Controller. As you’ll…

PRICE $899 www.acer.com.au Acer has two interesting new gaming monitors worthy of your attention. Both use Nvidia G-Sync to smooth out the frames, but each takes a very different approach. The XB1 XB271HU, which David has reviewed in this issue on this same page, is a 27in 2560x1440 screen running at 144Hz, which can be ‘overdriven’ to 165Hz. While the 28in Acer Predator XB1 XB281HK offers a far higher 4k resolution of 3840 x 2160, but at a more pedestrian 60Hz refresh rate (and thus, maximum FPS). I had the 4k XB1 XB281HK for the Xmas holiday game break to review, paired with an MSI 980Ti, which really is required for 4k gaming to keep frames steady at 60 at all times. The gaming experience at 4k with rock-steady frames…

If too much RAM is barely enough for you, G.Skill’s new kit will be right up your alley. The new DDR4-3200MHz 8x16GB kit adds up to a massive 128GB of RAM. It’s designed from the ground up for high-performance, X99 systems, capable of taking up the entire memory capacity on an X99 board. The kit’s high speed combines with very efficient timings of CL14-14-14-34, running at 1.35 volts. The kit comes complete with XMP 2,0 profiles ,and feature a striking heatsink design for those who like their RAM to look as a good as it performs. We don’t have Australian pricing as yet, but the kit will retail for $US1069.99 in the US, and be available by the end of this month.…

If you fancy yourself as a gun casemodder, you need to pay attention to Cooler Master’s latest global competition, the Case Mod World Series 2016. This is the seventh year of the event, and Cooler Master has partnered with Asus, Dremel, Avexir, Nvidia, and OCZ to help make the event bigger and better than ever before. “Modding has exploded in recent years and is taking root in every corner of the globe. The Case Mod World Series is about fuelling that growth. It’s about igniting the modding spirit - the maker spirit - on the web and right in your community” said Michelle Wu, Global Community Manager, in today’s release. “This year, we will be running local events to involve modders everywhere. Together, with the generous support of our sponsors,…

“it won’t be long before you’re weighing the relative virtues of a BF-109 F-4’s climb rate and top speed against a Spitfire mk.V’s superior firepower and turn rate” It is now time to write about my favourite game of all time, and why I love and hate it. It is War Thunder, from Russian bastards Gaijin. It is an online WWII - to roughly Korean War-era flight and tank combat masterpiece, run by a company which hates its players, but loves their wallets. I play the planes, and do so most days and weekends. Tanks were launched about a year ago and from all accounts that part of the game is at least equal to World of Tanks, but because Gaijin wilfully avoids promoting, marketing and advertising their incredible game…

“Currently, I teach instrumental music in a primary school one day a week” Last issue, I wrote up twelve out of eighty-two independent games from PAX Australia, almost all of them being made locally. Having contributed to it, I had to skip over Mallow Drops, which won the Australian Game Developer Award for design at GCAP2015. In fact, when I heard it had been recognised thusly, my first thought was, “Oh no, which version of my music is John (Kane) using?” It wasn’t, “Congratulations, John,” which is totally what it should have been. Amateur/indie game dev is weird for a bunch of reasons. Firstly, when I was working alongside Sunless Sea and testing my music in combat, I reckon I spent more hours killing one Auroral Megalops, over and over…

The Division DEVELOPER UBISOFT MASSIVE, UBISOFT REFLECTIONS, RED STORM ENTERTAINMENT, UBISOFT ANNECY PUBLISHER UBISOFT DUE 8 MARCH, 2016 tomclancy-thedivision.ubi.com/game It is, perhaps, a smidge dramatic to suggest that twice-delayed Ubisoft open-world action title The Division was flirting with vapourware categorisation, but it feels like it’s been a long time coming. Originally announced at E3 2013 as a multiplatform console title, the “vocal and passionate PC community” convinced Ubisoft to also announce later that same year it would release the game on our beloved gaming platform. As is the trend of many a recent Ubisoft title, development of The Division is split across multiple studios. Ubisoft Massive is in the lead role, with support from Ubisoft Reflections, which is focusing on map and character design, and online features; and Red Storm…

It may well say a lot about the state of the games industry that there is only one original game in this month’s reviews. Darkest Dungeons is the only title that isn’t a sequel, a reboot, a prequel, or even a sequel to a reboot. My head hurts. I think it goes to show just how risk averse the industry is at the moment, at least when it comes to AAA titles. I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that the only original game is an indie title - that seems to be where the real clever thinking is happening. Which is of course a very rude thing to say - there are some very smart people working in AAA dev, and it’s certainly not their fault that the…

COLOUR! Now that we include the DVD with every copy of the magazine we can do this page in colour! Ok - that may not be all that exciting, but the fact that this month’s disk contains 10 free games and 22 demos should be. Champions Online is a great FTP superhero MMO with excellent character creation. Keep an eye out for Wilks’ heroes if you jump on; The Electric Wimple, a cyborg nun with the strength of an entire convent and Issues, a gun toting vigilante with a vendetta against clowns. Enjoy. The PCPP Team. 32 GAME DEMOS, FREE-TO-PLAY GAMES & UTILITIES! • A Story of the End demo • Apotheon Arena free game • Battle Islands free game • Boogeyman demo • Brawlhalla free game • Cally’s Caves…

Several years ago overclocking lost some of its luster, as Intel locked down this feature on all but its K-series CPUs. The old fashioned way of overclocking by increasing the front-side bus died, and instead we just had to bump up the voltage and multiplier to max out a CPU. While the new method was easier, some would argue that it took some of the skill out of the process, as there were far fewer settings to juggle. There was also the issue that Intel only let us play with a couple of its CPUs, limiting the K-series to upper end chips that weren’t exactly affordable. Half of the fun of early overclocking was getting a budget $200 chip to outperform an $800 model, but those days seemed over. Not…

PRICE $1049 www.acer.com.au There are product that cross our desks and are forgotten. That thing you looked at that time? Yeah? No idea. Then there are products that come into our lives, make an amazing impression, and are all too soon ripped away, only a memory of greatness remaining. Acer’s new Predator XB1 is just such a device, a display that seems like it costs wayyy too much only until you sit down in front of it and bask in its smooth, smooth glory. And we mean smooth – the stock 144Hz refresh rate can be ‘overclocked’ to a staggering 165Hz, and the monitor’s Gsync hardware lets your video card crank out as many frames as the monitor can handle. The result is a smoothness that is nearly uncanny. Once…

“I may be left behind in the VR game, but I have to let go of my old technology and start embracing the future” 2016 is set to be something of a transformative year in terms of gaming as a whole, and for myself in particular. In many respects when it comes to gaming I am something of a fossil, still clinging to the same tech, or variations thereof that I have been using for decades. At home I’ve been using the same 1080p monitor I’ve had for the past seven or so years, seemingly in defiance of the huge swathes of new display technology that has come out over that time. The monitor may still be functional and without a single dead pixel, but when compared to the models…