Table of contents for Issue 269 in PC Powerplay

Virtual reality is fun and all, but if you need to use the keyboard whilst you’re playing a VR game, it’s not that easy. With the elaborate Oculus Rift or HTC Vive headset strapped to your noggin, you can’t see the keyboard in front of you, so typing in-game is out of the question. Logitech and HTC have teamed up to enable the use of real keyboard with tactile feedback in virtual worlds. The Logitech G Bridge SDK, together with a HTC Vive Tracker tacked to the top left of your keyboard, senses the position of your hands above the keyboard and renders it pixel perfect in your VR game. It sounds great, but unless Logitech and HTC can nail latency, it’s going to be pretty darn awkward trying to…

Anew Star Wars film is here and you know what that means: more merchandise. Nvidia’s GPUs are the latest target for the Star Wars merchandising machine. Their flagship Titan Xp graphics card now comes in “new physical designs that pay homage to Star Wars” to display “hints of the Star Wars galaxy, such as the hilt of Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber and light panels reminiscent of the Death Star.” There are two cards, one with a white/silver heatsink reminiscent of the Jedi Order and green LEDs, the other with a dark black heatsink akin to Darth Vader’s helmet with red LEDs. That said, the box these graphics cards come in is very fancy, almost like you’re not supposed to actually use the card, but keep it in its pristine packaging like…

n the experimental PvP-mode Battle Royale, a player faces off against fifteen opponents, evading the rapidly increasing death zone and eliminating each other until one victor rises out of the fierce free-for-all combat. The mode combines Warface’s largest PvP map to date with more than 70 different weapons and equipment for players to discover and adapt to the mayhem. Participants are dropped into the Mojave Desert, without any firearms initially. Scattered around the desert, players discover crates containing upgrades to their arsenal. Periodical airdrops with more valuable weapon caches will be sought after by all contestants.…

“my Sims all reach the tops of their careers; my colonists die horribly” I’ve been reflecting on my two big “comfort” games, recently. They’re both deeply engaging, self-directed and satisfy my inner micromanager. Really, when I need to disappear into a whorl of escapist perfectionism, I could go to one or the other. The interesting thing is that one allows for near infinite achievement, while the other tests, and inevitably breaks, my carefully constructed world. Of course, I’m talking about The Sims 4 and RimWorld. No, don’t turn the page, let me explain. They’re totally the same game, as I see it, with only two significant differences; RimWorld is inherently dangerous and its colonists have mandatory, autonomous qualities. Otherwise, the formula is the same; make aesthetic and logistic choices in…

1 Do Not Feed the Monkeys DEVELOPER FICTIORAMA STUDIOS PUBLISHER BADLAND GAMES DUE 2018 www.fictiorama.com/en/inicio Do you like spying on people? Do you feel as though your neighbours are a lesser form of life? If so, then Do Not Feed the Monkeys could be for you. You’ve just been accepted by The Primate Observation Club, meaning you now have the ability to invade the privacy of strangers and witness their most private moments. Spy on anyone, but make no contact with specimens. Do Not Feed the Monkeys. Pixelated weirdness with consequences is assured. 2 Krotruvink DEVELOPER VALDRAM PUBLISHER VALDRAM DUE 2018 www.valdram.com/krotruvink We won’t even try to describe Krotruvink, so instead here is the game blurb: “Have you ever been on the verge of proportionality? This story is about a…

“the main keys to victory lie in outplaying and outwitting your opponents” A MOBA without the filler DEVELOPER STUNLOCK STUDIOS • PUBLISHER STUNLOCK STUDIOS • PRICE $29.99 USD (ALL CHAMPIONS PACK) • AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.stunlockstudios.com If you take a game like League of Legends, remove all the items, lanes, minions and long drawn out matches, Battlerite is what you’d be left with. Whilst it’s clearly taking heavy inspiration from the MOBA genre, Battlerite instead cuts straight to the PvP battles and calls itself a Team Arena Brawler (TAM). Some of the other key differences include redesigning the control scheme where movement is done using the WASD keys and every attack being a skill shot with a cooldown attached to it. Battlerite comes with an easy to follow tutorial that…

“meaning level up decisions are a constant tug of war between material choices” DEVELOPER TEAM NINJA • PUBLISHER KOEI TECMO • PRIcE US$50 • AvAILABLE At STEAM koeitecmoeurope.com/nioh/pc Dark Souls is a genre now. From 2D transplants like Salt & Sanctuary to sci-fi riffs such as The Surge, there are enough games now aping the Souls approach to formalise the genre. Team Ninja is a Japanese studio best known for its Ninja Gaiden character-action games on Xbox. Nioh is almost exactly what I expected from Team Ninja trying its hand in the Dark Souls genre: it’s Souls but with faster, more technical combat and set in a world of dojos and demons. Oddly, you play an Irish chap named William who travels to Japan, finding himself the missing link between…

this is a “what if we had gigabytes of RAM back in 1990” version of The Chaos Engine DEVELOPER PIXWERK • PUBLISHER 11 BIT STUDIOS • PRIcE $11.99 • AvAILABLE At STEAM tower57game.com Tower 57 evokes memories of the Bitmap Brothers’ steampunk top-down 16-bit shooter Chaos Engine, and was kickstarted by developer Pixwerk with this idea made explicit. The eponymous Tower has halted production (of... industry stuff) and a shadowy organisation not unlike the Pinkertons won’t have any of that! So a team of three mercenaries are sent in to get production running again. They do this by shooting everything that moves and... well, also shooting everything that doesn’t because that’s how you get coins. Coins can be exchanged for various character upgrades, new and better weapons, new and better…

meet new and interesting monsters and click on them until they explode into loot DEVELOPER CRATE ENTERTAINMENT, PIECES, GRINDING GEAR GAMES • PUBLISHER CRATE ENTERTAINMENT, THQ NORDIC, GRINDING GEAR GAMES • PRIcE $17.99, $19.99, FREE • AvAILABLE At STEAM www.grimdawn.com, www.thqnordic.com, www.pathofexile.com The last month or so has really been something of a tale of two gaming industries, one hell-bent on squeezing every single ounce of profit from its IPs through some remarkably predatory practises, and another that really seems to listen to their player base and work hard to keep them happy and loyal. Three excellent action RPGs all received (or in the case of Path of Exile, is set to receive) significant expansions, the development of one of them fully funded by microtransactions and another partially funded by…

“the level of performance absolutely destroys integrated graphics” PRICE $998 www.hp.com.au External video cards have been teased for several years, but technical limitations have stalled their mainstream adoption. More and more users express the desire to take a lightweight notebook with its all day battery life and carry it to work or around the campus and then bring it home, plug it into an external dock and have the grunt to play your favourite PC games. Thanks to Thunderbolt 3 and the bandwidth it provides, we are finally at the stage where external GPU enclosures are making sense. Enter the HP Omen Graphics Accelerator. The HP Omen Accelerator features a physically big and bold design that really stands out on your desk. There are three versions available. There’s the entry…

“FPS mode enhances visibility in dark scenes so you can see enemies” PRICE $599 asus.com/au 1 080p gaming may be overshadowed by 4K, but it’s still the sweet spot for gamers who prefer smooth motion over high resolutions. The Asus ROG Strix XG27VQ aims to be one of the smoothest 1080p monitors around with support for 144Hz refresh rates and AMD’s FreeSync. At the centre of the XG27VQ is a 1080p VA type panel with a 3000:1 contrast ratio. VA panels aren’t as responsive or fast as a TN panel, but have deeper blacks and superior viewing angles. Proof of this is the 4ms response time and 144Hz refresh rate, which are excellent, but not the fastest available. A subtle 1800R curve in the display aids in providing an immersive…

PRICE $129 www.hyperxgaming.com We like our keyboards without too many frills, compact, affordable and nice to type on. The Alloy FPS Pro, the latest keyboard from HyperX comfortably ticks all those boxes and then some, making it one of the most elegant, and nice to use keyboards we’ve seen in a while. Put simply, the Alloy FPS Pro is a tenkeyless model of the already very good Alloy FPS, taking one of the nicest bare bones designs and making it more compact. Again the keyboard utilises real Cherry MX switches, with a choice of the clicky, loud and banned in the office because of the noise Blue switches, silent but tactile Brown and linear Red. Our review model features red switches and they feel great. Like the Alloy FPS, the…

Hell has frozen over with Intel and AMD signing a deal that’ll see Intel’s 8th Generation laptop CPUs ship with a customised Radeon GPU in the same package. Yep, AMD and Intel, mortal enemies, working together. By combining the GPU and CPU in the same package, Intel claims significant board space will be saved, allowing for smaller, thinner laptops and improved cooling systems to handle increased clock speeds. Due to an advanced power sharing network, these CPUs will be able to automatically engage or disengage the AMD GPU to preserve battery life. Intel and AMD haven’t announced which Radeon design will be integrated with Intel’s CPUs, but it’s likely an AMD Vega GPU with 10 compute units, a slight bump compared to AMD’s own Ryzen Mobile APUs currently on the…

Asus have launched a new ultra-high end gaming laptop - the ROG G703. This beefcake of a machine weighs in at 4.8kg and packs an Intel Core i7-7820HK CPU, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 with 8GB GDDR5X memory, 32GB DDR4-2800 RAM, 2x 256GB PCIe SSDs in RAID 0 together with a 1TB SSHD, Thunderbolt 3 and a very fancy RGB-backlit Aura keyboard with 2.5-mm travel, N-key rollover, specially-marked WASD keys and dedicated hotkeys for Xbox Live, XSplit gamecasting and the ROG gaming centre. Besides the lofty specs, what makes this laptop special is the industry’s first laptop 17.3” AHVA panel featuring a native 144Hz refresh rate and G-Sync. If you don’t need a 144Hz LCD, Asus will have a 4K60 display that supports a wider colour gamut. Thanks to the advanced…

WHAT IS OPTANE? Intel® Optane ™ is a smart, adaptable system accelerator for PCs with a 7th and 8th Gen Intel Core Processor and a hard disk drive. It provides fast system responsiveness for large capacity storage drives, making everything you do quick, smooth and easy. THE DUAL DRIVE DILEMA High capacity, high performing local storage is expensive. So, in the past, a computer might offer a ‘dual drive’ configuration, with a large-capacity hard disk drive to store data and install some applications and games, and a small-capacity SSD for use by the operating system and the most frequently used apps and games. This configuration offered the cost-effective ‘mega storage’ HDD, for large data files and infrequently used applications, together with faster boot time and rapid application/game launching from the…

Mental health org CheckPoint has just announced a new gaming community with a focus on mental health - GamerMates. Membership is completely free, and you can gain access to gamers from all over the world, mental health resources, online courses, and a community of people who understand where you’re coming from. There are also giveaways and merch, badges and achievements to unlock. And getting in on the ground floor helps CheckPoint, and GamerMates, grow, which helps more people find the mental health help they need. You can learn more about the GamerMates community, and sign up at checkpoint.org.au/gamermates, or you can become a part of the wider CheckPoint organisation at checkpoint.org.au.…

January: The first major update for Star Wars Battlefront II arrives. It includes a time attack mode where players can mow down wave after wave of Porgs™, replete with graphic laser scorching effects and tormented Porg™ screams. Sales exceed all projections. Bohemia Interactive revises its strategy for releasing weekly patches for ArmA 3 that completely break all mods – they’re now twice-weekly. “It is not enough that modders suffer,” explains Bohemia CEO Marek Španěl. “They must also be humiliated.” February: Noting that prisons in Red China force inmates to play MMOs and mine for gold, Clifford ‘Cliffy B.’ Bleszinski negotiates with North Korea to get political prisoners playing LawBreakers to help populate the servers. Kim Jong Un declines the offer, describing the very idea as “cruel and unusual punishment, and…

WARHAMMER: VERMINTIDE 2 DEVELOPER FAT SHARK • PUBLISHER FAT SHARK DUE EARLY 2018 www.vermintide.com Fat Shark’s Warhammer: The End Times - Vermintide was in some ways a very confusing game. Well, no, let me rephrase: combined with an oddly triple-barreled name, the game was set in the Old World of Games Workshop’s venerable Warhammer setting just as that game was being phased out (see: The End Times) in an apocalyptic meta-event that saw the release of a whole new setting and rules-system, Age of Sigmar. Combined with Creative’s Total War Warhammer titles, video games are now the only place you’ll find that gothic, grim, Germanic take on a typical fantasy setting. The game itself, though, was a true sleeper hit. Not huge, but critically well-received, and a tonne of fun…

War. War never changes. DEVELOPER SLEDGEHAMMER GAMES • PUBLISHER ACTIVISION • PRICE $59.99 • AvAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL www.callofduty.com WILKS: Am I the only one that thinks that returning to the WWII roots of the CoD franchise was a step backwards considering that the undisputed best games of the series came after Activision branched out from the tried and true setting? When there are so many wars, both historical and fictional to choose from, choosing instead to revisit what is possible the most well-trodden ground in gaming seems a little dull for me. I know there has been a lot of love for the game in the press as a whole, and as with all CoD games, WWII is making money hand over fist, but as an experience I find…

“being caught all but means death. Teriel can fight, but he’s not equipped for massed battle” Been caught stealing DEVELOPER FOOL’S THEORY • PUBLISHER IMGN.PRO • PRICE $29.99 • AVAILABLE AT STEAM, HUMBLE seven-game.com What serves as the tutorial to Seven: The Days Long Gone is an excellent example of how to lead people into a game. Teriel, a master thief and bit of an arsehole has plans to pull off the impossible heist, a job that every other thief has thought about in some way. Those brave or stupid enough to try failed, died or disappeared. Everyone else didn’t even bother to try. Bringing in a fellow thief to act as a distraction and spotter, Teriel must sneak past dozens of guards unnoticed, infiltrate a mansion, search for a…

“the only readable books in a library when you first explore it are by H.P. Lovecraft and Poe” DEVELOPER KING ART • PUBLISHER THQ NORDIC • PRIcE US$30 • AvAILABLE At STEAM kingart-games.com As soon as you start playing Black Mirror it feels both somewhat modern and something like a throwback. There’s a good reason for this. Black Mirror is an original psychological horror story but it’s also a reboot of a respected but barely remembered series of horror-themed point and click adventures, with three games published between 2003 and 2011. It feel old fashioned in the fact that it’s not going for jump scares or survival horror style vignettes, but rather using the story characters and oppressive atmosphere to instil the player with a more nebulous dread. That said,…

“guiding the dragon, its body wriggling snakelike, through fluffy fields and canyons” DEVELOPER HEAVY SPECTRUM • PUBLISHER HEAVY SPECTRUM • PRIcE US$20 • AvAILABLE At STEAM oure-game.com You can tell Oure was not merely inspired by the likes of Flower, Journey and Abzu, it desperately wants to be those games, to reach the same kind of thrilling, sweeping, almost transcendental heights thatgamecompany’s output can hit at its best. Unfortunately, although Oure may desire to soar among the clouds, it remains a pedestrian experience. You play a young child who has been mysteriously separated from her parents and finds herself in an abstract world in the sky. Clouds fill your view as far as the eye can see, a monotony broken only by the various vapour valleys, tunnels and mountains in…

HOLIDAY SACK With Christmas rushing at us with the speed of a Lear jet, grabbing time to scratch, breathe or enjoy some quality time in the smallest room seems to be becoming increasingly difficult. And this month’s disk is only going to make matters worse. So, before diving head first into the sparkling waters of gaming awesome, please remember to catch your breath, take a moment and smile at the next person you see. The holiday period is a horrible, stressful time for many people and whether or not you celebrate Christmas, please remember that you aren’t alone and there is always someone out there who will listen and care. Lifeline and Crisis services are available 24/7 and are always happy to listen and help. Finally, I would like to…

“leads to a quieter card, with our test sample barely able to be detected over the sound of our CPU cooling” PRICE $749 www.nvidia.com Nvidia’s Pascal generation of graphics cards have proven to be a hit. Over the last 18 months we’ve seen the entire range bring great gaming performance, low power consumption and excellent thermal characteristics to their respective market segments. Here we are 18 months later with perhaps the last GTX 10 series card we’ll see in the form of the GTX 1070 Ti. It’s designed to sit between the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 price and performance levels and is obviously a strategic release aimed at combatting the recently released AMD Radeon Vega 56. PLUGGING A GAP The GTX 1070 Ti is the third iteration of the…

PRICE $449 linksys.com/au High pings are awful and can easily ruin a fast-paced online game. Not only do you get killed because you can’t react in time, but you look like an idiot getting shot in the back. Unfortunately, running an Ethernet cable to your router isn’t always an option, so Linksys has teamed up with Killer to create the WRT32X router which attempts to bridge the performance gap between Wi-Fi and Ethernet. Let’s get right into it and discuss the Killer Prioritization Engine (KPE) as that’s the whole point of this router. If you don’t care about that, the Linksys WRT1900AC virtually is the same unit but cheaper, so this killer feature (get it?) better deliver the goods. To take advantage of the KPE you need a computer with…

PRICE $289 www.avermedia.com Every year game streaming gains more and more traction, with Twitch and Youtube streams constantly breaking the previous year’s records and more and more people turning to streaming as a career. Just recently Bajo from Good Game left the TV show to start streaming full-time. If someone leaving TV to stream doesn’t illustrate the way media is going, nothing will. Aside from having a rig capable of playing and streaming, if you’re looking to capture, or steam from a non-PC source, you’ll need a capture card. Yes, you can do similar things with most high-end graphics cards, but that impacts system performance. A dedicated card does the heavy lifting and frees up the system for gaming. The card is driverless, so works right out of the box…

PRICE $99 roccat.org The wonderful Owl-Eye optical sensor, a highly modified Pixart 3361 sensor tweaked for peak performance in the golden range of 400-3000DPI (the most commonly used range by gamers) once again does the grunt work for Roccat’s new Kone Aimo mouse. As with the other Owl-Eye mice we’ve looked at, the performance is fantastic, with a high degree of smoothness and accuracy across the golden range, making it feel like an extension of your hand, while still maintaining a maximum of 12,000DPI if you really need it. The Aimo fits in the Kone family in general shape, but the design is definitely different from the Kone Pure and EMP, with the most noticeable addition being a pronounced thumb rest that features a third thumb button. This button is…

Firefox Quantum (v57) is an all new version of Firefox, re-written to be twice the speed as the previous version of Firefox and use 30% less RAM than the latest version of Google’s Chrome browser. Mozilla has managed to achieve this by taking advantage of the multiple cores available in recent computers. Take for example rendering CSS - instead of having a single core dedicated to this task, all the little bits of code that make up a website are spread out across all your CPU’s cores in parallel. Firefox’s UI gets an overhaul too, reflecting today’s reality of High DPI displays and users who are more task focused than they’ve ever been. The new, minimalist design introduces square tabs, smooth animations, and a Library, which provides quick access to…

In October, Epic Games, developer and publisher of the free-to-play building/battleground game, Fortnight started taking legal action against players who used or were affiliated with the cheating website, Addicted Cheats. The site offers aimbots for a subscription fee. In a statement given to Kotaku, a representative from Epic stated, “This particular lawsuit arose as a result of the defendant filing a DMCA counterclaim to a takedown notice on a YouTube video that exposed and promoted Fortnite Battle Royale cheats and exploits.” Unfortunately for the developer, it appears that this particular cheater is only 14 years old. In a letter to Epic, the kid’s mother listed a number of grievances with the legal suit. She stated that the End User License Agreement (that Epic itself is using as justification for the…

“Battle for Azeroth should see lapsed players coming back in droves” For the best part of a decade, World of Warcraft has been creeping away from the factional divide at the core of the WoW universe. Rather than the Horde and Alliance (Horde obviously being the superior faction) being at loggerheads, most expansions have essentially turned the two warring factions into uneasy allies fighting against a greater evil, such as the Lich King, the Burning Legion or Deathwing. Battle for Azeroth wants none of that. It’s an expansion that should take the series back to its roots and pit the Horde and Alliance directly at each other again. In addition to upping the level cap to 120, Battle for Azeroth also adds a host of new mechanics, locations and ideas…

“ranking up is exclusively determined by the number and quality of Star Cards you have” What a piece of junk! DEVELOPER DICE / CRITERION GAMES / MOTIVE STUDIOS • PUBLISHER EA • PRICE $89.99 • AVAILABLE AT ORIGIN, RETAIL ea.com/en-gb/games/starwars/battlefront/battlefront-2 Greed is the path to the Dark Side. Greed leads to microtransactions. Microtransactions lead to loot crates. Loot crates lead to suffering. But I’m not even going to take the microtransactions into account for this review. Why? Well, they were turned off at launch and were still off at the time of review. Also, they’re far from the only problem with the game. But first, some good stuff. Star Wars Battlefront II’s presentation makes me starry-eyed. It certainly looks and sounds pitch-perfect, whether it’s the Dice-forged multi, Motive-built campaign (which…

“a bloated, obese beast that doesn’t so much suffer from feature creep as feature gorge” DEVELOPER SPORTS INTERACTIVE • PUBLISHER SEGA • PRIcE US$60 • AvAILABLE At STEAM, RETAIL sigames.com When you buy this year’s edition of Sports Interactive’s venerable management sim you actually get two games. The first is Football Manager 2018, a formidable database heaving with nested spreadsheets, endless tabs of exhaustive statistics, and a dizzying number of ways to exert your influence over proceedings. The second is Football Manager 2018 Touch, a misleadingly titled stripped-down version of the first game and the only one of the two, I think, that is worth your time. In its non-Touch form, FM18 is gargantuan, a bloated, obese beast that doesn’t so much suffer from feature creep as feature gorge. It…

“squandering whatever goodwill nostalgia fond Road Rash memories may have garnered” DEVELOPER TEAM 6 • PUBLISHER MAXIMUM GAMES • PRIcE $29.99 • AvAILABLE At STEAM www.maximumgames.com Nearly everyone who played Road Rash back in the day has fond memories of motorcycle combat racing, hurtling around tracks hitting other riders with bats and chains causing them to wipe out. For something developed in 1991, it was a surprisingly nuanced game, with good physics, a large range of bikes and weapons, and even a system that allowed players to steal the weapon of another rider if they timed a punch right. It’s now 26 years later and Road Rage, an open world spiritual successor to Road Rash has been released on Steam. To put it mildly, the game is a disaster from…

after logging in to your ‘80s computer you’re instructed to decrypt a batch of files DEVELOPER KONSTRUCTORS • PUBLISHER KONSTRUCTORS • PRIcE US$5 • AvAILABLE At STEAM konstructors.com The first thing Sorry, James asks of you is to enter a username and password. To clarify, it’s not asking you to create a username and password, but to enter a specific username and password. No immediate clues are offered as to what you should type in the flickering monochrome CRT field. If you’re like me you’ll try a few things at random before scratching your head and wondering if you missed something vital. A few minutes later, after double-checking the game’s Steam page to make sure you’re not going mad, you’ll crack it. The login, that is. It’s an unusual way…

“increasing power levels and setting a higher core clock leads to throttling quite quickly” PRICE $1139 www.asus.com.au AMD themselves hyped up their Vega GPU to the point where it was anticipated as being a GTX 1080 Ti killer. Sadly this was not the case, and the reference card underwhelmed. Still, when looking at the underlying architecture, Vega has much to offer, particularly now that we are seeing the first custom models arrive that address the biggest weakness: cooling. We are keen to see what Vega is really capable of with the Asus ROG Strix RX Vega 64. VEGA DONE RIGHT At first glance, you get the impression that this is a serious graphics card. It’s effectively a triple slot design so consideration is needed when choosing accompanying components. Asus have…

“if you’re an AMD owner, none of this fancy stuff works, so you should investigate another monitor” PRICE $1199 asus.com/au The Asus ROG Swift PG27VQ is, on paper, the perfect match for a fast GPU that spits out hundreds of frames per second at 1440p in your favourite games. But what’s it like in practice? Inside is a TN panel that supports a 1ms response time for virtually lag free gaming. TN panels aren’t as nice to look at as an IPS panel, but if you want low response times, TN is the only way to go. To Asus’s credit, they’ve made a nice-looking TN panel, but the colour gamut is average, with only 72% of the NTSC colour space. If you plan going multi-display, three of these units make…

PRICE $249 steelseries.com The Apex M750 is a beautifully built keyboard. It’s solid, looks great, has some excellent lighting and features Steelseries’ proprietary QX2 switches, but even so there are some problems with the keyboard that you may want to consider before making the plunge. The QX2 switches feel great but are better suited for gaming than long term typing due to the travel and actuation distances. The keys move 4mm but the actuation point is only half that. That, combined with the soft actuation force makes it a rather clacky keyboard, so if you’re looking for something on the quiet side you may want to opt for different switches. For gaming the short actuation makes the keyboard feel very fast and smooth. Rather than the standard fold out legs…

PRICE $99.95 www.impactsystems.com.au There’s a strange mix of new and old in the Armaggeddon Panzer III speakers. Rather than utilising a banana plug or some kind of proprietary connection between the sub/controller and the satellite speakers, like most other models you’ll find in the price range, the Panzer instead uses an old-fashioned coax connection. This connection, while still common in high end audio gear, feels a little out of place in some budget speakers. The satellite speakers don’t appear to be shielded in any way either, so you’ll want to keep your phone out of range if you don’t want static from calls or texts. When it comes to performance, the Panzer III Elefant speakers are a little bit of a mixed bag. The trebles aren’t quite as clear as…