Indice dei contenuti per #238 April 2015 in PC Powerplay

First off I need to make an apology. In the Sims Special issue (236) we made a joke, referring to Star Citizen as Scam Citizen. The joke was meant to be in reference to the multiple clickbait articles that referred to Star Citizen as a scam rather than implying that the game itself is a scam. It obviously didn’t come across that way in print. To make it clear, we don’t think Star Citizen is a scam. In fact, between Bennett Ring, Ben Mansill, David Hollingworth and myself we’ve actually contributed a not insignificant amount of money to the game. We’re eagerly anticipating the full release just as much as you. Now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the future. We have some really big plans going forward…

FOUR MOST IMPRESSIVE FEATURES: 1. 2 x Sli Geforce GTX 760 2. Intel i7 4790k 4.00GHz 3. 7 x Corsair Fans (Extreme colour scheme) 4. Corsair H60 Water Cooler LAST UPGRADE: Corsair H60 Water Cooler DREAM UPGRADE: 4k screen so i can see what all the fuss is about ! Gaming Mouse or keyboard. Anything to do away wiht my old alien junk. FAVOURITE FEATURE: Dare we say the ORANGE colour scheme? WHY SO SPECIAL?: My first build ever!!! My wicked colour scheme. not to many orange sytems out there. 1. So much orange! 2. Even more psychedelically swirly orange! 3. I think we’re seeing a pattern here. We can only assume that Brent was raised in the forest by a bushel of wild oranges and he is now paying…

How did you decide on the game’s elements (dirt, gems etc?) I like games with simple elements, but where people need to figure out how they interact. Some assumptions can be made about how rocks or dirt might work, but there are also a few surprises. When something behaves in an unexpected way that still suits the setting, like mushrooms spreading or falling gems killing you, it adds a lot to the experience. Why did you add items to purchase from shops, and these items specifically? The addition of shops and items seemed like a natural progression; it gives the player the nice little feedback loop of earning money and then spending it, while opening up more play options. Also, landmines/lasers are there to fix potentially ‘broken’ levels. What kind…

It’s amazing how cyclical the games industry seems right now. On the one hand, you’ve got games like Total War: Attila - a sequel to a game that was really not at all popular. But Creative Assembly has taken all the negative reviews and actually assembled a game that’s fun, and very, very challenging, but obviously built on what has come before. Then you’ve got the Homeworld Remastered Edition, which is evidence of a whole other kind of cycle. We’re used to seeing Hollywood churn out remakes (man, someone pointed out the other day that we’re likely ten years away from a Lord of the Rings remake, which is odd), but now the games industry is doing the same. In this case, though, it’s pretty welcome. The Remastered Collection keeps…

DEVELOPER CREATIVE ASSEMBLY PUBLISHER SEGA PRICE $US44.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL www.totalwar.com Okay, let me get this out of the way right here and up front. Yes, we’re one of many Total War fans that felt that Rome 2 was easily the worst of the series, and generally a poor game in its right. So, hopefully you can trust us when we say that Attila, the Napoleon to Empire, as it were, is a far superior game. It’s one you will actually want to keep playing, whereas, for a lot of people Rome 2 was un-fun and a lot of hard work. From pacing to setting and atmosphere, to the balance of units and the flow of the game’s signature real-time combat, Attila is, if not a great Total War…

PRICE $69 www.bitfenix.com While most of our cases were in the $100 to $200 range, BitFenix sent us this budget battler as it’s one of the newest cases in its extensive range. At just seventy bucks, midi-towers don’t get much cheaper than this, yet BitFenix has managed to deliver a box that doesn’t feel horribly built. Despite the low cost, the vast majority of this case appears to be made from steel. The front facia is the exception, using black plastic instead, but it’s inlaid with a metal grill that stops it looking like a huge hunk of plastic. Obviously this won’t help too much with sound proofing. A small Perspex window adorns the left side, but there’s also a windowless model for those who like to keep their innards…

PRICE $179 www.aerocool.com.tw What price would you pay for a whisper-quiet PC? Aerocool thinks you’ll be happy to pay close to $200 for the privilege of not having to listen to whining GPU fans during that especially tense section in Alien Isolation, but is it really necessary to pay so much? If you do require absolute silence from your case, don’t buy the Window version of this box, as it is lacking any of the noise-cancelling material on the left side panel. Regardless of which version you end up buying, there’s also no noise-cancelling material on the top of the case; instead a thin layer of rubberised plastic is all that stands between you and the incessant hum of the interior. A replacement top is included if you’d like to…

According to Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey, the top two discrete GPUs used by PC gamers just happen to be NVIDIA’s GTX 660 and GTX 760. There’s a good reason for this; costing around the $300 mark at launch, both of these graphics cards captured the sweet spot of performance versus price. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, it hasn’t had a new product at this price point since the GTX 760 launched way back in June 2013, an eternity in technology timelines. It’s taken almost two years for the successor to one of NVIDIA’s most popular products to arrive, in the form of the GeForce GTX 960. With the help of ASUS, we took two of these cards for a spin in both single GPU and dual-GPU configurations, to see whether the latest…

PRICE $69.95 www.minitar.com As somebody who has just moved into a house that doesn’t have Gigabit Ethernet conveniently piped through the wall cavities, I’ve had to endure the delights of trying to establish a Wi-Fi network over three floors. With my main router on the middle floor, I’ve been dealing with a signal strength of about 60% up on the top floor, where my HTPC and office PC are located, and frequent drop outs have become part of my daily routine. Enter this Wi-Fi repeater, which aims to boost the existing Wi-Fi signal, allowing the wireless network to reach further, faster. Setting up this thing couldn’t be simpler. Just plug it into a power point in an area where you’re getting about 50% signal strength from your main router, then…

1. Razer Seiren Price: $280 • Distributor: Razer www.razerzone.com Anyone remotely serious about podcasting and other audio recording needs to be serious about the hardware they use to do it. That three dollar plastic desk mic from your local budget PC store won’t cut it. POWERED UP: Four recording patterns to satisfy almost all recording situations, be it a roundtable podcast, your acoustic guitar stylings, or your barbershop quartet’s garage EP. PLAYED OUT: These types of microphones can actually be a little TOO good sometimes; say, if your recording venue is buffeted by a lot of ambient noise, for example. 2. Swyp Card Price: $70 • Distributor: Swyp www.swypcard.com It seems like every franchised establishment wants to issue you with a “loyalty” or “rewards” card so they can keep track…

The Raspberry Pi is a great little device which is capable of doing many cool things. One of those is acting as a remote streamer for playing your media files. Through the use of RasPLEX, you can connect a Raspberry Pi to any television or monitor and play your media from your PLEX server. While it may not be as outwardly feature rich as say an Apple TV, its low cost point and flexibility make the Raspberry Pi a great project platform on which to build. To use RasPLEX, you will first need a PLEX server to connect to. PLEX is a freely available media server and can be downloaded and installed onto your desktop system from https://plex.tv. It’s simple to setup and really is a “follow the bouncing ball”…

Gold trading has always been a thorn under Blizzard’s troll-hide, whether it be the in-game economy getting skewed by farmers, or the presence of farming bots themselves. The new WoW Token may not fix those issues, but it’s an interesting move to let people get in on some light trading themselves. The WoW Token will launch in an upcomnig patch, and it’s an in-game item that lets you, well, trade gold. Not for cash, though, but rather for in-game time. Economics in the real world is bad enough, but it looks like I go a little cross-eyed for game economics as well, but I’ll try to explain it. You can buy a WoW Token through the in-game shop for real dollars, and then sell that Token on the Auction House…

In their efforts to balance realism with playability, the game makers at Paradox have hit upon a novel system for affecting how tightly players can grip the reins of power in Hearts of Iron 4. As producer Dan Lind explained to us, this system is called ‘Political Power.’ Though the denizens of the notorious image board 4chan call it something else: Fuhrer Mana. “[Laughs]. Yeah, although we should probably not call it that [more laughter].” To give an example of how it works in-game, Dan recalled Hitler’s precarious political position in the early days of WWII. “Germany is on the warpath. And France and the United Kingdom are extremely tired of war after World War I. And Germany is supposed to not have a military at this time. But they…

What makes a great, classic adventure game… … story? I like stories where the player and the main character are at an equal disadvantage. It’s why Guybrush shows up wanting to be a pirate, not already being one. … puzzle? To find the locked door before the key. Also, hard puzzles should seem obvious in retrospect. … inventory item? Something funny and where the player can see several uses for it and the correct one is not necessarily the most apparent.…

THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT DEVELOPER CD PROJEKT RED PUBLISHER BANDAI NAMCO ENTERTAINMENT DUE MAY 19, 2015 thewitcher.com/witcher3/ There’s a marked tonal difference between American and Japanese RPGs and those developed in Eastern Europe. There are outliers, sure, that delve into themes and topics more commonplace in the other territories, but for the most part European RPGs are more sombre and lacking in overt heroics. America and Japan seem to focus mainly on chosen ones, grand destinies and, above all else, hope, whereas there seems to be a stronger focus on survival and doing what it takes to get by in RPGs created in Europe. “The roots of what you are speaking about lie, I think, in culture and history. Europe saw countless wars and was a giant battlefield countless…

PCPP: The reliance on teams can make MOBAS a frustrating experience for new players, especially if you don’t have a group of friends to play with and end up matched with a group of far more experienced players who aren’t interested in incorporating you into their team and just call you a noob. Have you done anything to counteract this problem? KM: Heroes is inherently more of a team game than traditional MOBAs, and that was a very deliberate decision on our part. This is a game where you live and die by your team. We got rid of the idea of the carry – the one player that everyone is trying to make really powerful so they can literally carry the game. We wanted everyone to have a role,…

As the Tech Editor at PC PowerPlay it’s easy to get caught up in the performance offered by the fastest goodies. Half the time I get to use these high-end products over extended periods without having to buy them. And if I can’t borrow one, I’m happy to use my 30-something, single with no kids salary to spend $600 or so on a GPU. Yet Valve’s hardware survey shows that I’m on the outlier of hardware purchases; there aren’t many gamers who are happy to spend a couple of grand a year on PC hardware. It turns out that you guys have much more important things to spend your cash on. This is why cards like NVIDIA’s GTX 960 are so highly anticipated. The vast majority of PC gamers can…

PRICE $169 www.phanteks.com With one of the highest price tags in the roundup, we were a little surprised when we realised the EVOLV was actually a micro tower. That means it only has room inside for a mini-ITX or microATX motherboard, which automatically limits its potential. Cases of this size usually sell for well below the hundred dollar mark, so why is the EVOLV so darn expensive? Two words: build quality. To put it bluntly, this thing is built like a Sherman tank. The steel frame is clad in thick aluminium, and we mean thick. Each panel can be removed without requiring the removal of thumbscrews, as it uses a clipping mechanism to keep each one in place. The sheer depth of each surface will make this quite a potent…

PRICE $299 www.plantronics.com/au/ I own three sets of headphones – my noise cancellers for flying, my gaming headset and a third set that pair with my phone via BlueTooth for listening to music while I’m out and about. The BackBeat PRO offers to replace all three with a single set that can do everything I need, but this convenience comes at a relatively high price. To connect to your PC, simply use the included headphone jack. To connect to a phone, use BlueTooth or the NFC connection for a fully wireless experience. It’s possible to pair the device to two different devices, such as a phone and a tablet, and it will automatically switch between the two when a call comes in. The 24 hour battery life means they’ll last…

Since its inception in 2002, developer CD Projekt Red has been about one thing - bringing Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher series to life. Come May, however, the driving force for the developer is finished, with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt hitting shelves and completing the story first started on PC in 2007. Eight years working on the same property is a long time, and the Witcher stories have an even longer history, with the first being published in 1992.CD Projekt Red’s next endeavour, however, have roots that extend even further. In 1988, R. Talsorian Games published a boxed set of a pen and paper RPG created by Mike Pondsmith. Cyberpunk 2013, or just plain old Cyberpunk as it was more widely known introduced the world to the dark corporate future (of…

Arkayn: I like the issue. I am happy so far with Wilkie considering he only just stepped in. dingbat: My only real gripe is not enough reviews. Way back there would be at the minimum six reviews. Perhaps it is because I write movie reviews like I’m being paid for it, but I love it when I buy a movie rag and there are 20+ plus movies to read about. Its hardly like there are less games out there than movies. Hell I have to be careful on steam with indie games, they are cheap... until you’ve bought six all at once! There is so much stuff out there waiting to be written about... Hell I might switch from movies to video-game reviews. I agree that for a new editor…

It’s not often - if ever - that hear the term “chill-out crafting and city-building game”, but that’s exactly what the team at Flat Earth Games have built, with Towncraft. Released for the iPad back in 2013, Towncraft is out now on Steam, alongside Flat Earth’s second game, Metrocide. It’s pretty much a classic city-building game, but much more slower-paced and relaxed. It’s cartoonish, retro graphics hark back to an older period of PC gaming. “The idea at the outset was to create the kind of in-depth simulation game for iPad that I enjoyed on PC,” said Rohan Harris, co-founder of Flat Earth Games. “The processing power was there, and it bothered me that I couldn’t play the kind of complex games that I wanted on the device. After it…

Why is bullying important to portray carefully? Bullying has not been thoroughly explored in games. A lot of people have written to thank us for starting a conversation about something that has affected them deeply. Where did you find the information you needed about the subject matter? Our eldest daughter, the original Ninja Pizza Girl, just completed a psychology degree. She directed us to a lot of information on bullying and self-esteem.We also spoke to people from Beyond Blue and Reach Out, and attended a course on resilience run by a Brisbane clinic called Minds and Hearts. After receiving advice, what changes were made? We changed a lot of things; the resolution of the narrative, the way that Gemma recovers when she’s too discouraged and ready to give up. Instead…

The Witcher games have received almost unanimously positive reviews from all around the world and the original novels have been translated into at least 17 languages. What is it you think accounts for such widespread appeal of Geralt as a character? Geralt is a very interesting hero -- he’s a monster slayer, tough and fearsome. He’s an excellent swordfighter, he’s pretty witty, and gets the attention of many women. It’s just cool to become a character like that in a video game, I think. On the other hand, he’s an outsider, an outcast despised by society. He gets hired to do the dirty work everyone else is afraid to. He’s also a mutant, not capable of feeling emotions the same way normal people do, and this affects his ability to…

Pity the poor PC case. When building a new gaming box, we all get excited about the GPU and CPU that will be powering its interior, yet little thought is paid to the chassis that will house everything. Selecting a new case usually boils down to figuring out how much of your budget is left over, and then picking something that doesn’t look totally ugly. Yet the case is probably one of the components that will last the longest, so here at PC PowerPlay we think it’s worth spending a little more thought on which case your components will call home. We’ve sourced seven of the latest PC cases priced below $200 to see which one deserves to live in your gaming den. CASING THE JOINT When it comes to…

PRICE $129 www.thermaltake.com.au Thermaltake claims this is a mid-tower case, but it looks almost as big as a full-tower to us; there’s a reason it can host a ginormous eATX motherboard. It measures 54cm by 24cm by 56cm, so is only suitable for those who have room for a fully-fledged tower. Thanks to the large size there’s plenty of room inside for anything you can imagine, with a whopping eight expansion slots. It’ll also host basically any of Thermaltake’s newish range of radiators, or up to nine fans, three of which are included. In case you hadn’t noticed, the Core V51 seems obsessed with cooling. The use of mesh panelling on the front and top, along with a wire grill at the rear, means it’ll be a breeze to maintain…

PRICE $150 www.fractal-design.com We’re going to end our roundup with a doozy of a case, in the form of the Define R5. This is basically the perfect PC case for a mid-range gaming PC. Here’s why. For starters, the entire case exudes that feeling of top notch build quality that certain other brands lack. The finish is perfectly smooth, everything fits together snugly, and metal is used throughout, apart from the front door. This folds open to reveal twin optical drive bays and a lengthy fan grill, and like both the sides, is lined with thick, high quality sound absorbing material. If you want to install a fan over your GPUs, a small piece of the sound proofing can be lifted out to mount a side-fan. Of all the cases…

BUDGET The perfect entry-level gaming PC CPU AMD FX-4300 4 Core Black Edition $118 www.amd.com We’re sticking with AMD’s budget beauty. MOBO ASRock 980DE3/ U3S3 AM3+ $69 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 Sapphire Radeon R9 280X $325 www.sapphiretech.com Enjoy 1080p performance with all the options POWER Cooler Master Thunder 500W $66 www.coolermaster.com The budget beast doesn’t need a lot of juice SOUND Sennheiser HD201 + ASUS Xonar DG $56 www .sennheiser asus.com www.asus.com.au Headphones plus soundcard – yes! OPTICAL Lite-on DVD-RW $21 www.us.liteonit.com We’d happily retire the drive, but some of you guys still believe in physical media. STORAGE Toshiba DT01ACA050 500GB…

Fans are strange beasts. Sometimes fans are a loose conglomerate of people who like one thing, but sometimes that shared passion bonds fans together into some kind of super-organism that acts as one and has cells that act to protect the larger body. In many ways, February was a month that was defined by fans, fan backlash and the mishandling of fans by people who should know better. There were three fan interactions that really stood out to me as being the defining moments of the month, each illustrating a different aspect of fandom. To start with have the debacle surrounding Peter Molyneux’s Godus. I won’t go over all the details as Ben Mansill has covered most of that ground in his column but instead focus on what I think…