Table of contents for #244 October 2015 in PC Powerplay

I just want to point out this shot is not in any way staged or uses shameless sucking up. My lounge room totally looks like this ALL the time.* 4 MOST IMPRESSIVE ELEMENTS: Fire, Water, Earth, Wind (always wanted to make that joke) SERIOUSLY THOUGH; 1. 3940XM Mobile Processor 2. 2x 7970M mGPU 3. It’s an Origin System 4. It actually IS portable. LAST UPGRADE: A USB hub for at the desk so pedals / joystick / headphones etc can be permanently plugged in. FAVOURITE FEATURE: It’s portability - seriously - it’s big for a laptop - but still really easy to move around and on the go. WHY SO SPECIAL: It’s a gaming powerhouse, a media powerhouse (as you can see we hook it up to the AV system),…

One of the co-founders of Oxide Games, Tim Kipp is in charge of engine architecture and development on Ashes of the Singularity, the first RTS to make full use of Windows 10 and DirectX 12. Even when describing his work in layman’s terms, he found it difficult to contain his enthusiasm. “The main thing to keep in mind when you’re looking at DirectX 11 versus DirectX 12 is that DirectX 11 is fundamentally a serial API. Even though you can try and optimise it, and optimise it, and optimise it, eventually what you’re going to wind up with is one of your multiple CPU cores bounding your entire frame. Meaning that’s what dominates and determines how fast you can run. By contrast, DirectX 12 allows you take that previously serial…

ANGELS FALL FIRST DEVELOPER STRANGELY INTERACTIVE PUBLISHER STRANGELY INTERACTIVE DUE 2016 www.affuniverse.com Not to be confused with the first album by Finnish metal band Nightwish, Angels Fall First is a massive, hugely ambitious upcoming first person SF combat game that allows players to fight on any front of the war, from infantry FPS all the way through to commanding massive capital ships in space. The game will feature coop, competitive team based multiplayer and full bot support so people with no friends can wage intergalactic war all alone. 1979 REVOLUTION DEVELOPER INK STORIES PUBLISHER INK STORIES DUE 2015 www.1979revolutiongame.com Ever since 1979 revolution was announced there have been claims that the game is nothing but propaganda or dark tourism, but it really looks like anything but those two things. Players…

DEVELOPER SPIDERS PUBLISHER FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE DUE 2016 www.thetechnomancer-game.com As a studio, French development house Spiders has a track record of making games that show great promise but ultimately fail to deliver. The developer’s last two games, the action RPGs Mars: War Logs and Bound by Flame both lived down to this reputation, the former being a glitch, uneven mess that started with implied prison rape and ended with a whimper, and the latter bogging down its simple but fun combat with every fantasy cliché you could possibly think of. Hopefully The Technomancer, the game Spiders announced at Gamescom this year will be the game to change this. Although the game is unrelated to Mars: War Logs, The Technomancer is also set on the red planet, albeit a vastly different…

DEVELOPER TURBOGUN PUBLISHER TURBOGUN PRICE $9.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.masterspygame.com If espionage is all about deception, then Master Spy is at the top of the game. Everything about this indie title - the name, the design of its eponymous protagonist, and his signature invisibility cloak - evoke the sense that you’re about to play a stealth game. But that’s not exactly the case. Master Spy is instead a precision platformer wrapped in stealth’s clothing. It’s the kind of game where you die instantly, and reload from a checkpoint just as quickly - with all of this happening so fast that you stop counting deaths-per-minute and start tallying deaths-per-second. That invisibility cloak is Master Spy’s main stealth mechanic. At the tap of a button, you can wrap yourself in it and…

DEVELOPER MORGONDAG PUBLISHER MORGONDAG PRICE $11.95 AVAILABLE AT STEAM Rydmresa.com Rogue-like games are usually known for their difficulty, the constant threat of permadeath and the tension that comes with that. RydmResa is an entirely different kind of Rogue-like. It’s slow and meditative, introspective and melancholy. The only enemies are time, distance, the attrition of resources and your own patience. The two person development team describes the game as a “poetic, roguelike space odyssey”. That about sums it up. It’s a slow sad poem told by a lonely survivor from a destroyed Earth. It’s also kind of wonderful. RydmResa isn’t the most active of games. Player input is slow and methodical, clicking in a direction to fire your ship’s booster rockets, firing short bursts to change direction or dodge asteroids, occasionally…

As the owner of a dual-GPU gaming beast, I’m not exactly enamoured by entry-level GPUs. When NVIDIA flew me up to Sydney for a product launch and revealed the new GTX 950 to me, I was rather underwhelmed to say the least. Yet the visit turned out to be worthwhile for an entirely different reason – GeForce Experience has been expanded with one of the coolest game-sharing techniques PC gamers have ever seen. Before I delve into it, I should probably discuss the main reason I attended the launch. Welcome to NVIDIA’s new entry-level GPU, the GeForce GTX 950. MAXWELL GETS THE CHOP Once again NVIDIA is using the same GM206 GPU as the one found in the GTX 960, which is based on the Maxwell 2 architecture. It’s been…

PRICE $279 www.corsair.com • Clean power supply• Digital Link rocks• Solid pricing• I’m sick of perfectPSUs from Corsair If you’re in the market for a PSU that can handle multiple GPUs, several SSDs and a CPU that has been overclocked to within an inch of its life, you’re looking at a Kilowatt of power. This used to be an insanely high amount for a PC, with 1KW PSUs costing a bucket-load, but they’re now relatively common. Corsair’s latest entry at this power level is as affordable as it is efficient, and brings Corsair’s proprietary advantages to the table. Unfortunately our PSU tester is currently in the shop being repaired after the last torturous PSU roundup, but the 80 Plus Gold certification proves that this thing is energy efficient. It’s also got very low ripple…

PRICE $65 au.creative.com • Super cheap• Versatile• Good surround effects• Only has 106dB SNR• Clunky volume slider It’s nice to see that most gaming motherboards now come with a decent onboard audio solution, but the best way to stop all those EMF emissions from corrupting your sound source is an external headphone amp. Creative’s E1 is arguably the cheapest one on the market, yet it’s as versatile as it is useful. This thing can be hooked up to your smartphone to deliver a performance boost, but we’re most interested in its gaming performance. The matchbox sized amp plugs in via a USB port, and can then drive two sets of headphones via the twin 3.5mm outputs. Each one has its own amp, so using both doesn’t compromise on sound quality, which is rated at 106dB…

PRICE $299.95 www.edifier.com/AU • Great design • Excellent bass • Powerful • Lacklustre Bluetooth • Cable mess The stylish, curved design of the Luna Eclipse speakers belies the power and solidity of the unit. Each of the speakers is deceptively heavy, thanks to the number of drivers they house. The front of the unit features a 3” (7.6cm) woofer and a 19mm tweeter. Housed in the back of the unit are two 3” passive bass radiators that deliver bass response far greater than you usually expect from stereo PC speakers. The sound quality is excellent overall, with clear high, mid and low range tones, making them great for music, gaming and movies alike. The speakers are Bluetooth compatible, but due to the fact that there is no kind of connection…

There’s a lot of stuff I never want to hear about ever again. Like Bluetooth speakers. I hate Bluetooth speakers. Ok. Not hate hate, but at a minimum a warm dislike, because every day, (I’m exaggerating a lot here, in line with my faux outrage over small things that don’t actually matter) someone has a Bluetooth speaker they want us to review. Ha! Go away, Bluetooth speaker. You are not interesting. Also, gaming headphones. They’re everywhere. By the million they come, landing on our desks, demanding some love. Most are crap, too. Here’s how it goes when checking the boxes: are they comfortable? And that’s where most of them fall down. This time I’m not exaggerating. Most gaming headphones are shit. Truly. It’s one of those things that justifies our…

DEVELOPER CLEVER PLAYS STUDIO PUBLISHER CLEVER PLAYS STUDIO DUE EARLY ACCESS www.clever-plays.com We’re not sure but we have an inkling that Australian developed indie game Hand of Fate may have slightly influenced the development of Leap of Fate. Leaving aside the obvious similarities in the names of the games, both titles also feature a mechanic in which the randomly generated levels and the overall mission structure are conjured using a pack of game specific cards featuring enemies, shops, loot and the like. Aside from the fact that Leap of Fate is a twin stick shooter and Hand of Fate is a hack and slash action game, the other major difference between the two Fates is that whereas Hand of Fate utilised cards for all aspects of the game from structure…

DEVELOPER LEAGUE OF GEEKS PUBLISHER LEAGUE OF GEEKS PRICE $19.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM armello.com At time of writing, Armello is just out of Early Access, and days away from its final, actual release. The game has been tweaked and tuned to a state that League of Geeks is happy to stand back and let reviewers do their thing. So, for the last week or so we’ve been traipsing about a small but perfectly formed fantasy world, one not populated by grim Starks and greedy Lannisters, but clans of rather playfully and boldly drawn animals. There are wolves and bears and rabbits (oh my!), and a rat, of course, and they’re all questing around the countryside to overthrow the growing evil of the King. Who is, of course, a lion.…

Formerly codenamed Skylake, Intel’s latest CPU design sounds like an exciting title for the latest Bond film. It’s supposed to be a big step forwards for performance, as it combines a refined CPU architecture along with a new manufacturing process, and the end result is now on store shelves as the 6th Generation Core processor. So why am I finding it so darn hard to get even slightly enthusiastic about this new chip, which brings a massive platform update with it? THE INTEL CLOCK Intel works to a release schedule that is broken into two parts, which it calls the Tick/ Tock cadence. A tick CPU release refers to an existing CPU design being released on a smaller manufacturing process. The recent release of Broadwell is one such example –…

PRICE $289 www.galax.net • Large factory overclock• Looks pretty• Sturdy backplate• Too expensive• Costs more than a 960 Cards like this always confuse me. The GTX 950 is obviously intended at the extremely price conscious, and then along comes Galax who makes a “premium” version of it that costs more. It’s plain bizarre, and I think misses the point of budget GPUs entirely. For the slightly higher price you get a rather good looking card, with its dashing white heatsink and accompanying white metal backplate. The 4+1 phase power is apparently a step up from the usual power configuration on GTX 950s, and it has allowed Galax to give this card quite a steep factory overclock. The Boost clock has increased from the default speed of 1188MHz up to 1405MHz. However, the memory speed hasn’t…

PRICE $769 www.msi.com • Excellent performance• Great cooler• Three modes• Slightly pricier than cheapest GTX 980s There’s no denying that the best GPU on the market is currently the GTX 980 Ti, unless you’re made of money, in which case the Titan X is a great way to blow your inheritance. But the popularity of the GTX 980 Ti has meant that prices remain sky-high, with the cheapest models still commanding prices of over a grand. This leaves products like this MSI’s GTX 980 in a very sweet spot, offering much of the performance for 30% cheaper. Once again MSI’s Twin Frozr handles cooling, as seen on the 950 in this issue, and I found that it didn’t even start up when first running several of our benchmarks, only spinning to life as the…

PRICE $110 Mionix.net • Extremely comfortable• Excellent sensor• Impeccably designed• Thumb buttons too easy to hit Swedish peripheral design house Mionix has long been known for producing premium quality gaming gear and the newly released Mionix Castor is not the product to break that winning streak. Designed to be compatible with the three most common styles of mouse grip – finger, palm and claw – the Castor is extremely comfortable in the (right) hand thanks to both the ergonomics and the soft touch rubberised surface. The left and right buttons have a long actuation making them easy to press but still nice and clicky no matter where your fingers sit on them. As far as buttons go, the Castor is very straightforward with six buttons in all – left, right, middle/scroll wheel, two thumb…

01 Nokia OZO Price: $TBA • Distributor: Nokia Ozo.nokia.com This is the part where we expect an elderly man to put a helmet on us with a blast shield blocking our vision, and tell us to stretch out with our feelings. POWERED UP: The eight synchronised shutter sensors and microphones on this device are designed to make the capture of 3D video as simple as possible, by shooting stereoscopic 3D video and facilitating the immediate playback and review of that video with custom software. Anywhere on the planet this thing can get to, you will be able to go also, with a VR headset. PLAYED OUT: Won’t train you to be a Jedi, like your father before you. 02 Vinylify Price: $80 • Distributor: Vinylify vinylify.com If you ever made…

Welcome to the PCPP competitions page! With the office positively overflowing in PC gaming goodies, it’s become so difficult to do our ridiculously awesome jobs that we decided to pass the savings onto you. And by savings, we mean free stuff. Games, collectibles, swag, and all kinds of media that screams PC gaming. Or perhaps those are the screams of the intern trapped under the boxes of giveaways. Only one way to save them: Head to www.pcpowerplay.com.au to enter! To find the competitions, simply mouse over the “Community” tab in the main menu at the top of the homepage, and click on “Competitions”. Click through to each individual competition page, fill out the form (be sure to agree to the terms and conditions) and you’ll be in the running to win!…

LETTER OF THE MONTH WINS! Write in to PCPP with your rants, considered opinions, and endless run-on sentences of pure awesome. The address is letters@pcpowerplay.com.au . Each letter read by hand! This Letter of the Month winner scores himself a headset, keyboard, mouse and pad prize pack courtesy of Tesoro! LETTER OF THE MONTH THROTTLED I’m a gamer and I live in the sticks. The two place me firmly between the proverbial rock and hard place. I live outside wireless range and while I’m less than 5km from the nearest exchange away (so I’m told) out here our phones are connected via party lines, so ADSL isn’t an option. So we connect via satellite and with a lot of patience; lag prevents us from online gaming and…

Orbitor does to the mechanics of orbital dynamics what Osmos did for the laws of gravity and attraction - that is, turn a physics simulation into a colourful, musically intense game that is easy to learn, but hard as hell to master. Essentially, you travel through various orbital systems, building up speed to travel from one planet to another, building up enough orbital momentum to destroy each planet and gather its energy. And it has a kicking soundtrack to boot. Even cooler, the game’s the work of two guys in Canberra. Evil Aliens is the studio of two Academy of Interactive Entertainment teachers, and Orbitor came out of AIE’s own Incubator Program. The game is out now on Steam Early Access.…

Donald Trump’s popularity is instructive. No matter how many ghastly things he says, his appeal to the common man only grows. As Scott Adams and others have pointed out, Trump’s invulnerability stems from his salesmanship and his mastery of psychology. He can, for instance, alter perceptions by planting ‘anchors’ in your mind. Trump says he is worth ten billion dollars. Perhaps he isn’t worth nearly that much, but once you hear that figure it becomes a strong first impression, the first bid in a negotiating process by which he controls your reality. Peter Molyneux used to do this all the time. Giant monsters that would love you in Black & White, trees that would grow before your eyes in Fable. Every Molyneux fib you heard warped your reality a little…

DEVELOPER HANGAR 13 PUBLISHER 2K DUE APRIL 2016 mafiagame.com “The action has moved from the fictitious city of Empire Bay to New Orleans in 1968” The era of long hype campaigns for triple A games seems to be coming to an end. Fallout 4, for instance, has been in development for nearly 5 years but was not anounced until E3 and will be in our hands in just a few months. Mafia 3 is following a similar strategy. Its existence was leaked roughly a week before Gamescom where the game was formally anounced, with a tentative release date set at April 2016. It was at Gamescom that we had the oportunity to see the game in action behind closed doors guarded by a bouncer hired to keep everyone away who…

DEVELOPER COMPULSION GAMES PUBLISHER COMPULSION GAMES DUE JUNE 2016 www.compulsiongames.com You wake up in an underground bunker. The world around you is strange. The bunker is mostly in ruins aside from a bunk bed, a work table, a ladder leading to the surface and a radio. The radio is on, and from it comes the voice of Uncle Jack, the perpetually cheerful face of Wellington Wells, always on the airwaves to remind the population to take their happy pills and to be on the watch for Downers, those dissident citizens not content to be turned into an obedient and unthinking zombie via the medium of Joy, a synthetic happiness drug. You are a Downer. You want to escape the confines of Wellington Wells. You want to be free but to…

DEVELOPER HAREBRAINED SCHEMES PUBLISHER HAREBRAINED SCHEMES PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM harebrained-schemes.com/shadowrun/hongkong An urgent call from a father figure you haven’t spoken to in many years prompts you to travel to Hong Kong. It’s time you left the past behind you and reconnect with Raymond, the man who took you in off the streets and gave you an education, and make amends with Duncan, the friend and foster brother you left behind when you took off. The reunion doesn’t go smoothly. Duncan is standoffish, as can be expected and Raymond is nowhere to be found. Before long the police and media are saying that Raymond was shot dead resisting the police and that you and Duncan are terrorists. What else can you do but burn your SIN, go underground and…

DEVELOPER DREADLOCKS LTD. PUBLISHER DREADLOCKS LTD. PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.dex-rpg.com There’s a kind of scrappy charm to Dex, an extremely ambitious open-world platformer/brawler/RPG set in a cyberpunk dark future of corporate greed, rampaging gangs, sentient AI and sinister conspiracies. Pretty much every cyberpunk trope you can think of can be found somewhere in Dex, from the boilerplate concepts of jacking into the ‘Net and post-human cybernetics through to the more esoteric plot points found in novels, movies and comics. As can be expected from a game with so many ideas and concepts being thrown around not all of them stick, but when they do, Dex can be rather engrossing. Players take the role of the eponymous Dex, a young woman who discovers that she can access cyberspace without…

The 100-series chipset, along with the new i5 6600K and i7 6700K CPUs marks a new era for the desktop PC with the continued support of DDR4, introduction of USB 3.1 over the new Type-C connector, as well as an array of onboard features and technologies that lets you unleash the full power of your PC. “We are very excited to launch our new 100 series motherboards based on Intel’s new Z170 chipset here at Gamescom in Germany, ” commented Henry Kao, Vice President of GIGABYTE Motherboard Business Unit. “We know everyone has been eagerly waiting for this, so we made sure our 100 series motherboards are packed with features which will make them stand out and provide the best possible experience from the latest 6th Gen. Core CPU from…

It seems that Skylake is a bit of a fizzer if you’re looking for a massive performance increase over the last generation or two of Intel CPUs. However, it brings with it two major new upgrades in the form of a new motherboard chipset, the Z170, and mainstream support for DDR4. Motherboard makers finally have something new and interesting to release, and they’ve gone crazy with “Gaming Edition” boards, trying to cash in on the healthy PC gaming market like never before. I’ve managed to source six of these gaming focused boards to see what the fuss is all about, but before we check them out, let’s see what Z170 can do. AIMED AT GAMERS The Z170 chipset is the first chipset to be released for the new Skylake processors,…

PRICE $259 www.msi.com • Great price• Good factory overclock• Three modes are handy• OC mode is loud Now this is more like it – MSI gets that buyers of the GTX 950 want to pay the absolute lowest possible price for their graphics card. At the time of writing this was the cheapest GTX 950 on the market, yet MSI has managed to deliver a product that competes well with the Galax, which is $30 more. MSI’s trusty Twin Frozr V cooler has been put to good use on this card, though it’s probably overkill for a 90W part. Once the MSI software is installed it’s possible to run the card in one of three modes. OC mode cranks the fans to annoyingly loud level, while the GPU Boosts up to 1317MHz. Silent mode…

PRICE $209 www.kingston.com • Good value• Tight memory timings• Looks good• Only rated to 2666MHz If you’ve decided to make the splash in Intel’s Skylake platform, chances are you’re going to need a DDR4 memory kit. Kingston has just released a pack for the likes of you, packing twin 8GB sticks of DDR4 memory into a single pack, making the most of the Z170’s dual channel memory controller. Entry-level kits of DDR4 memory start at $175, but they only run at 2400MHz. The Fury kit is rated to handle a slightly higher speed, with Kingston claiming this kit will happily run at 2666MHz. It’s not a huge speed boost over Skylake’s default speed, but any frequency increase is appreciated given DDR4’s loose memory timings. I didn’t even need to change a single setting in…

PRICE $199.95 www.roccat.org • Hugely customisable.• Extremely accurate.• Comfortable• Fin rocker switch is awkward• Poorly placed shift button• Pricey The Roccat Nyth is nearly the polar opposite of the Mionix Castor when it comes to design sensibilities. It’s a mouse that’s all about the bells and whistles, the design features and the sheer amount of buttons. Billed as an MMO mouse, though eminently suitable for most games, the Nyth, in its out of the box state, boasts a scary number of buttons - 18 in all. More than pretty much anyone could ever use. Even if they were an avid MMO gamer. Out of the box the mouse is comfortable, if a little cluttered with buttons, but the virtual ace of the Roccat sleeve is that the Nyth is designed to be hugely customisable. The thumb…