Table of contents for #240 June 2015 in PC Powerplay

The lich: the most vile denizen in any monster manual. A wizard who discards his very humanity; a sick parody of life animating a ghoulish, rotting shell. The dream weavers at Frederator must have cast some slick glamour on Standards & Practices to get one of these freaks into Adventure Time, tormenting poor Finn with the very sight of that rictus, lipless maw. The lich is vile, and grasping, and he makes life miserable for honest sorcerers who are just trying to make a buck. I allude of course to the recent wizard war between the dark lord Atari, and Britain’s favourite bumbling mathemagician, Jeff Minter. Not entirely unlike Radagast the Brown, Minter is eccentric, and shy, and has no beef with anyone. To support his sheep-herding lifestyle on a…

DEVELOPER EA DIGITAL ILLUSIONS CE PUBLISHER ELECTRONIC ARTS DUE NOV 19, 2015 starwars.ea.com/starwars/battlefront/ Along time ago, in a gaming-verse not so far, far away, Free Radical Design’s Star Wars: Battlefront III died an unceremonious death, reportedly cancelled by LucasArts at the eleventh hour “for financial reasons”. Millions of fans cried out in terror when Battlefront III concept art and pre-alpha gameplay footage leaked online, which teased the game that could have been. The leaks showcased alternative takes on beloved heroes, such as a Sith Kenobi, alongside an enticing all-new gameplay mechanic that would have allowed players to travel from space battle to ground combat in a single, united map. While Battlefront III went the way of the Bothan spies that leaked information about the second Death Star, the dormant series…

DEVELOPER MOHAWK GAMES PUBLISHER STARDOCK ENTERTAINMENT DUE EARLY ACCESS www.offworldgame.com Video games are synonymous with combat. The most common cliché among uneducated players is that games harbour and promote violence and blood. It’s a cliché which, sadly, isn’t totally unearned. Even games with a seemingly innocent premise are filled with combat. It is, for better or worse, the main language of the medium. But can a game without combat be violent? Offworld Trading Company, a strategy title developed by Cilivzation IV’s lead designer Soren Johnson, comes damned close. It also comes close to being something totally unique, which in a landscape filled with everything from triple-A publishers to a coder in a dirty garage, isn’t something to scoff at. Offworld is an economic strategy game. Or, as Johnson himself likes…

DEVELOPER ROCKSTAR STUDIOS PUBLISHER ROCKSTAR STUDIOS PRICE $74.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL www.rockstargames.com Grand Theft Auto IV was not a huge success on PC. It’s still supported, and even modded, and by all reports now – ‘now’ being the operative word – it’s really quite good. So, when Rockstar staring making a lot of noise about how much effort the company was putting into its port of Grand Theft Auto V, it was easy to be sceptical. Then came the delays, and despite the hype of the boosted graphics and first person mode in the recent next-gen console releases, it just seemed best not to get too excited. But you know what? Our fears were ungrounded – GTA is exactly what we were hoping for, and it comes complete with…

DEVELOPER LAMPLIGHT STUDIOS PUBLISHER LAMPLIGHT STUDIOS PRICE $11.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.lamplightstudios.co.uk It’s pretty safe to say that PC indie gaming is currently in the grip of a serious nostalgia boom, with every second game released seeming to opt for 8 or 16 bit graphics, old fashioned platforming mechanics or something of the like. A Pixel Story stands out from the pack of nostalgia based games not so much for being original but for the sheer scope of the nostalgia packed into the 2D platformer. Rather than paying spiritual tribute to one game or style, A Pixel Story instead mines everything for reference, and a keen eyed observes can spot nods towards hundreds of games and movies if they’re paying attention. Players take the role of the Pong pixel, anthropomorphized…

DEVELOPER SUBTERRANEAN GAMES PUBLISHER SUBTERRANEAN GAMES PRICE $26.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM wftogame.com/game/ All too often, a game comes along that builds on the love of an older title, but offers little else. War for the Overworld is a love letter to the Dungeon Keeper series, liberally recycling the game’s structure and tools into the new millennium, but forgetting or ignoring many of the innovations that have come through the genre in the last 16 years. My first steps in the underworld started small, with Richard Ridings’ voice giving guidance; beds, barracks, booze, and bacon; all your minion’s needs in one lazy slap of alliteration. I quickly wondered why they didn’t just handle this through the UI with resource counters and population caps, instead of having the rolling voice-overs increase…

DEVELOPER 343 INDUSTRIES PUBLISHER MICROSOFT STUDIOS PRICE $5.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.halowaypoint.com The Halo franchise has long been known for its cinematic FPS action, with the larger than life Master Chief facing all manner of Covenant (and Promethian) foes in spectacular environments. Much of this is lost in the top down perspective of Halo: Spartan Strike, a budget twin stick shooter that sees the Spartans working their way through a number of VR training exercises. Much like the first Halo game to appear on Steam, the 2013 twin stick shooter Halo: Spartan Assault, Spartan Strike offers up some decent quick action but feels more than a little like a placeholder – a Halo game designed to remind people that the series exists, not necessarily a Halo game in its own…

PRICE $2999 FOR WATERFORCE GRAPHICS KIT, $8499 FOR WATERFORCE PC www.gigabyte.com.au Every so often a product hits the PC PowerPlay test-bench that is so ludicrous, so insanely over-specced, that we’re astonished a company had the balls to make it in the first place. Gigabyte’s Waterforce PC is one such product. This gaming PC is so outrageously powerful that we have to question whether or not there’s a game actually worthy of putting it through its paces. NVIDIA’s GTX 980 was the undisputed king of single GPU performance until the recent release of the Titan X, but it’s still a blazer compared to the competition. Somebody at Gigabyte must have been thinking “What’s better than a single GTX 980? Why, three of them of course!”, and that’s exactly what they’ve come…

This is the gaming setup I have built up over the last 5 years to play Eve Online. I have multiple accounts and control up to 7 toons at a time. FOUR FAVOURITE FEATURES: 1. This setup runs 7 different PCs/clients, all running through an old Hewlett Packard router I got from a clearing auction. The most impressive machine in this array is my two HP Z400 quad core Zeon workstations with 120gb SSD drives and water cooling. They also the two most recent additions to the setup, and are housed in a full size server cabinet along with the internet browsing servers at the very bottom. Both running GeForce GT 730 4gb Graphics cards. 2. BenQ EW 2720 27” Monitor 3. Razor Naga mice 4. The Samsung SSD drives…

CD PROJEKT RED has announced two expansions for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. These expansions, Hearts of Stone, and Blood and Wine, will both be available through purchase of the game’s expansion pass DLC. Marcin Iwinski, CD PROJEKT RED co-founder, said the company remembers the time when add-ons expanded the game with meaningful content, and that CD Projekt Red hopes to deliver this by releasing vast games, which will “represent real value for the money”. The Hearts of Stone expansion takes Geralt on an adventure into the wilds of No Man’s Land and the nooks and alleys of Oxenfurt. This expansion will task Geralt with completing a contract from the mysterious Man of Glass. Blood and Wine is set in the new region of Toussiant, a peaceful land hiding venerable,…

DEVELOPER NETHERREALM STUDIOS PUBLISHER WARNER BROS. INTERACTIVE PRICE $79.95 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL www.mortalkombat.com Underneath all of the gratuitous gore and over the top melodrama of Mortal Kombat X there beats the (frequently ripped out or exploded) heart of a great fighting game. There is a huge roster of character, both old and new, each with three distinct styles of play, multiple game modes and the snappiest MK fighting engine yet, offering up great opportunities not simply for long, bloody combos, but technical fighting as well. It’s a gorgeous looking game - if gorgeous is the right adjective to describe a game in which heads are punched through, testicles are crushed with leg crossing regularity and eyes spend more time being pulled out that sitting comfortably in skulls. It has…

DEVELOPER KINELCO & LONE ELK CREATIVE PUBLISHER SURPRISE ATTACK PRICE $14.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM community.surpriseattackgames.com/vertigolf Veterans of other golf games will find something new when stepping up to the green; the game plays more like 3D snooker, emphasising trick shots and precision to land home without accumulating a stratospheric high score. The game starts off on the cobblestone streets of a dark, rainy town. The only place to go is inside what looks like a barbershop, but as you step inside and see a combination of TV screens, posters, and padded chairs lining around you, it’s clearly anything but. Enter Vertiginous Golf, a game that takes you off the streets and into the sunny skies. You play as a golf-club of your choosing, moving a lightning filled golf-ball, and navigating…

PCPP: Did you feel any extra pressure when developing the game due to the fact that it was Kickstarted and garnered around 70k more than the initial goal? Scott Richmond: Definitely. Like any creative process the more interest you have directed at you the more stressful it all becomes. For us, it was the first time we had been given the collective responsibility to deliver a game that must meet the standards of thousands of fans. One thing we’ve been quite proud of throughout our short history in development has been the transparency we have been giving our backers every week, for 3 years, with what we’ve been up to and what we’re doing. How important was Peter Molyneux’s endorsement of War for the Overworld to the crowdfunding campaign and…

PRICE $3099 www.gigabyte.com.au Three grand is a lot to pay for a gaming laptop by anybody’s standards, yet the P37x is one of the few products that is worthy of such a premium. From its slick, sturdy exterior to the immensely powerful assortment of goodies tucked away inside, it’s obvious Gigabyte hasn’t scrimped on a single thing when building this game-blazer. Let’s see just what this kind of money buys you. The large 17.3 inch display means this is a slab of a laptop, yet Gigabyte has made it incredibly thin, at just 22mm deep. Weighing just 2.7kg, it’s one of the lightest 17.3 inch laptops we’ve seen. Despite the screen’s large size, the native resolution of 1920 x 1080 is crisp enough to nullify any obvious pixels, and it’s…

I am, even though currently medicated, an angry person. I’m free with all my emotions but anger is the one that comes most naturally. I bring up my anger not for sympathy but to illustrate something that happened this month. Although I am usually incensed about something, I am also usually a calm person, holding my anger in check under the surface, but one thing is guaranteed to make me boil over and become a ranting, swearing ball of white hot vengeance. That thing is plagiarism. In mid-April, PCPP regular Meghann O’Neill pointed me to a website that had been republishing her indie pages verbatim without accreditation or consent. In a few minutes of searching we found multiple instances of not only PCPP work being reprinted but articles and reviews…

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 sweet Turtle Beach Grip 300 Gaming Mouse Kit! LETTER OF THE MONTH OFFENCES Felt I had to respond to Daniel Wilks article in issue 239. I certainly agree that citing people’s opinions and comments from years ago as justification for getting offended is not rational nor reasonable and that would be far better if we respected other people’s views and not look to get offended. That being said, describing people (or a particular person) with differing views as being “gullible and an idiot” seems to be…

Seeing as you didn’t ask but would love to know, I’m going to tell you what PC PowerPlay is. It’s like the massive wall of ice in Ice Age, smashing relentlessly over the landscape, unstoppable, awesome in its might. Hey what? Oh. Ok, that’s the 1995 version. The 2015 version is more like a river that’s carved a big fat deep trench into the earth, and on it flows. Twenty years ago there was Hyper, which was and is fab, Gamestar for a little while, which was shit, and that was the infant Australian games mag scene. Here at Nextmedia (known as Next Media at the time – isn’t that interesting?), which at the time was a wee boutique publishing company doing Simply Living, for trendy hippies, Hyper, and the…

When I requested a copy of Grundislav Games’ A Golden Wake, I expected it to be suitable for A Collection Aside and it almost was. Sometimes, however, you’re distracted from appreciating an otherwise strong narrative and you choose to write about that process instead, in your opinion column. Obviously, this is one of those times. More harshly criticising independent games isn’t something that I enjoy, but there is always value in raising an honest impression, right? A Golden Wake is a lengthy adventure game with a 1920s setting, careful dialogue and strong puzzling. I imagine I would have enjoyed it a year ago. Oddly, my problem doesn’t stem from the game itself, but from playing Meg Jayanth’s 80 Days. I haven’t written about 80 Days in Generation XX because it…

TOTAL WAR WARHAMMER DEVELOPER CREATIVE ASSEMBLY PUBLISHER SEGA DUE TBA www.creative-assembly.com The game we’ve all known was coming since it was announced that SEGA gained the rights to Warhammer in the THQ fire sale has finally been officially announced. Aside from the very flashy CGI trailer there has been little information available as to the factions that will be playable. The trailer shows human armies (probably Empire), Orks, Vampires and Dwarves, but we’re going to assume that dark, high and wood elves will be represented as well, a few more human factions and maybe Skaven if Fatshark don’t have an exclusivity agreement. RAY’S THE DEAD DEVELOPER RAGTAG STUDIO PUBLISHER RAGTAG STUDIO DUE 2015 ragtagstudios.com Zombies are everywhere. They seem to have become to go for every filmmaker, game developer or…

DEVELOPER N-SPACE PUBLISHER DIGITAL EXTREMES DUE Q3 2015 Swordcoast.com It’s a bit of a crowded market for PC RPGs nowadays. In fact, there’s such a wealth of great stuff that it’s becoming hard to stand out from the pack. What can a dev do to catch the attention of consumers? Well, you can get the license of the granddaddy of all RPGs, Dungeons and Dragons. You could then opt for the Forgotten Realms setting, the host of many beloved campaigns and books – not to mention PC classics like Baldur’s Gate. But maybe that’s still not quite enough. What the game needs is something big, unique, and dynamic, a chance for players to truly experience the same sort of chaos and camaraderie that the best tabletop D&D sessions offer. Can…

DEVELOPER BRACE YOURSELF GAMES PUBLISHER BRACE YOURSELF GAMES PRICE $14.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.necrodancer.com Crypt of the NecroDancer is not the first game to fuse dungeon crawling and rhythm action – the rather charming Sequence (Now known as Before the Echo thanks to a copyright claim) did it a few years back – but it most definitely the most polished mashup of genres. Rather than the obvious differentiation of styles as seen in Sequence – dungeon crawling followed by button matching rhythm action, Crypt of the NecroDancer instead integrates rhythm and music into every aspect of the game and is an absolute joy to play as a result. The entire game is played with nothing but the arrow keys (or a dance pad if you have one and don’t mind…

DEVELOPER EVAN TODD PUBLISHER EVAN TODD PRICE TBA AVAILABLE AT STEAM lemmagame.com/ The Italian futurists said speed is something dynamic, vivid and beautiful. Those words capture the spirit of Lemma, a first person parkour platformer that uses puzzles and movement to draw you into its world. Lemma is a strange game with eclectic aesthetics; part realist, cubist, and new-international; the modernist style with its emphasis on symmetrical spatiality emphasises its surreal, dreamlike state. Gameplay wise, Lemma plays like “Parkour’s greatest hits; 2000s”, showcasing, on the whole, elements and beats from its predecessors, particularly Mirror’s Edge. However, Lemma brings to the equation some mind-bending abilities and stunning vistas to complement its voxel world. Part of what gives Lemma its unique look is its reliance on Voxels, 3D pixels that work well…

DEVELOPER CLIMAX STUDIOS, UBISOFT MONTREAL PUBLISHER UBISOFT PRICE $13.95 AVAILABLE AT UPLAY assassinscreed.ubi.com/en-us/games/chronicles/ Assassin’s Creed games are better known for their wide-open sandbox like cities which encourage players to lose themselves amidst historical settings. At the best of times, these settings are ones largely unexplored in videogames, and on that regard, the latest release, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China, follows the trend of the better games by giving players a taste of the final years of China’s Ming Dynasty. Like other Creed games, Chronicles: China revels in historical tourism, letting players relish the sites of the Great Wall and Macau, to the quieter port areas and their associated ships and houses which we wouldn’t usually see in a videogame. However, this, along with the storyline which involves killing Templars who play…

PRICE $529 www.soundblaster.com Serious audiophiles know there is no substitute for an external headphone amplifier. While many of today’s high-end gaming motherboards now include expensive audio chipsets tucked away behind EMF shielding, they’re still prone to interference caused by the electrical currents that fill our PC cases. By moving the amplifier outside of the case, devices like Creative’s new Sound Blaster X7 remove this issue entirely, but will gamers notice an improvement in their audio quality worth over $500? There are plenty of external USB headphone amps available for the PC, but the X7 differs from the pack by the inclusion of a Creative SB-Axx1 digital signal processor, or DSP for short. It’s also got enough oomph to power a pair of stereo speakers, courtesy of a 100W amplifier. Looking…