Table of contents for Issue 259 in PC Powerplay

Next Media has something of a long history with Good Game. Over the years, many former editors and deputy editors of Next Media gaming titles, including Eliot Fish, Narayan Pattison, Maurice Branscombe, Alan Moore, David Wildgoose, Bennett Ring and Daniel Wilks (and probably more that we are forgetting) have at one time or other worked behind the scenes of Australia’s longest running video games show. It came as quite a shock to discover that, just three weeks before season 11 of Good Game was meant to begin, and after the show had officially been renewed and the crew were back at work readying a new series, the show had been cancelled. “OFFICIAL STATEMENT Sad news. After the program’s summer break, two of the key presenters of Good Game announced they…

“skill and mastery make a stream interesting, and it’s fun seeing people fail too” Does representing diversity in games really boil down to two blokes kissing in your favourite AAA title? Surely the potential for a wider range of people to participate in making games is more exciting. This is, of course, why GenXX often focuses on initiatives like Failbetter Games’ Fundbetter program, as well as finding supportive structures and communities. It’s too easy to say, “If you want to see yourself in a game, make a game,” dismissing real barriers to entry. I briefly looked into GDC Assist this year, fantasising about sitting in a chair in San Francisco and letting a pure beam of inspiring game audio advice lock onto my forehead. Did I apply? No. Why? The…

1 Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones DEVELOPER CULTIC GAMES PUBLISHER CULTIC GAMES DUE 2017 stygianthegame.com Cthulhu no longer slumbers. He has stirred from his sleep in sunken R’lyeh to inspire a number of games, ranging from reprints of tabletop classics to a slew of video games. Stygian, a turn-based RPG that looks like it was drawn by a mad Edward Gorey and has really whet the appetite of the Call of Cthulhu players in the PCPP bunkers. Characters go mad, madness affects skills and changes conversation choices. Permanent injuries are risked every fight. More like this please. 2 Monster VR Awakens DEVELOPER FIGHT4DREAM LIMITED PUBLISHER FIGHT4DREAM LIMITED DUE EARLY ACCESS vrmonsterawakens.com You’re a giant monster. You smash cities and eat the inhabitants. These inhabitants look as though they have…

“nigh invulnerable enemies that can only be fought at certain points, necessitating stealth” DEVELOPER CAPCOM PUBLISHER CAPCOM PRICE $59.99 USD AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL residentevil7.com It has been a while since the Resident Evil game series has been much more than an interactive version of the film series, with the last few games concentrating on action more than scares and the majority of frights coming in the form of spring loaded cat style jump scares. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard turns back the clock somewhat for the franchise, returning to the more deliberate, slow and atmospheric style of the original game (and its excellent remake), making for the best Resident Evil in years and one of the best survival horror games in a good long time. The name of the game…

“rounds are resolved simultaneously... changing how interrupts and reactive cards are used” DEVELOPER LIGHTMARE STUDIOS PUBLISHER LIGHTMARE STUDIOS PRICE F2P AVAILABLE AT STEAM, WWW.LIGHTMARE.COM.AU www.lightmare.com.au As the name suggests, Infinity Wars: Reborn isn’t the first incarnation of Infinity Wars. The Australian-made trading card game (TCG) first hit the scene a few years back and was immediately recognisable for its spectacular art and simple but evocative animated cards. Although not enormously different from other TCGs on the market - the game still revolves around bringing out cards to play using a slowly growing pool of resources, and trying to balance defence with enough offensive might to damage the enemy player - there are more than enough interesting takes on convention to make it a worthwhile play. Rather than tapping land to…

“designed to throw out a huge image at short range, pumping out a 100-inch screen at a distance of just 1.5m” PRICE $1319 www.benq.com.au If you’ve been reading PC PowerPlay for a while, you probably know how passionate I am about projectors as the ultimate gaming display. When it comes to dollars per inch, they’re unbeatable, delivering wall-spanning immersion at a cost much more affordable than big-screen TVs. However, they often suffer from input-latency, which is what makes BenQ’s W1210ST a rather interesting proposition. The company has focused on making this the lowest latency projector on the market. This means that as soon you hit your mouse button, your gun fires on-screen almost immediately. Projectors with high latency can add an extra 120ms or more to the time you hit…

PRICE $99.95 au.creative.com It seems as though everyone is getting into the peripherals market. Creative, the company better known for sound cards, external DACs, speakers and headphones have just released their first mouse and keyboard. While the company may be new to the gaming peripherals market, they still have ample experience with gamers, having worked with and sponsored pro gamers for years. This feedback seems to have worked well, as the Siege M04 is an excellent, well made gaming mouse that should appeal to a wide range of gamers. Under the hood sits a powerful 12,000 DPI, 1000Hz PixArt PMW3360 optical sensor, making for some fast and accurate mousing, without any acceleration. The design is nice and fits well in the hand, with a good click on the left and…

PRICE $459 www.zqracing.com.au Since we first got this chair last year, ZQ has been offering it ‘on sale’. It’s usually priced at $499, but the current price is $459. It’s a lot of pay for a chair, but the chair you get is likely to easily outlast not only your gaming PC as it currently stands, but also your desk. As you’d expect, though, you have to put it together first, and this is the one area where the impressive build quality of the Alien works against it. Putting it together by myself, it was at times a literal balancing act to get everything fitting properly while it was invariably braced in place by body parts, and even once my over-inquisitive cat. But, once together, I don’t think I’ve ever…

PRICE $349.95 au.creative.com Calling the new Senz3D a webcam is a bit of a misnomer. Thanks to the integration of Intel RealSense as well as a noise cancelling microphone, the unit is a lot more than just a webcam, but whether or not you’ll use much of the extra functionality is debatable for most users. The camera has a few uses that are handy, outside of Skype calls that is, right off the bat. The camera can accurately scan faces so works well with Windows Hello for hands free login. The microphone is surprisingly sensitive and features decent ambient noise cancellation, making it good for Skype calls and gaming chat – so long as the game isn’t too bombastic. The fact that the camera can judge depth also allows it…

THE BROWN NOTE Hey guys, I must say I was quite surprised and a little disappointed that you were recommending surge protectors but didn’t mention a UPS at all. The chance of a surge on an Australian power grid is extremely minimal. Since moving to Phillip Island, the only time I’ve experienced a surge was on Black Saturday weekend when the trees fell on the power lines. Then the lights went so bright at least 6 bulbs in our house popped instantly. That’s a surge. However, the biggest problem for computer equipment are brown outs (momentary interruptions in the mains power supply). These power outages are long enough to reset your oven clock and shut off your desktop PC’s power supply but not long enough to be a proper power…

“funky, almost bulletproof vest-style garment that integrates haptic feedback and tracking of your torso and limbs” Virtual reality is already one of the most immersive technologies on the market today. Room-scale VR can make you feel as though you’re anywhere from the depths of space to the surface of Tatooine, in ruined cities from ages past, or truly surrounded by swarms of zombies. With cameras tracking your full body motion, and controllers in your hands, you’re practically right there, in the middle of a whole range of different experiences. But for all of that, there are a number of companies that want to ramp up that sense of full body immersion. Beyond merely seeing and hearing your 360-degree environment. Hardlight VR has just started a wait-list for what it calls…

MASS EFFECT: ANDROMEDA DEVELOPER BIOWARE MONTREAL PUBLISHER ELECTRONIC ARTS DUE MARCH 2017 www.masseffect.com The Mass Effect trilogy is heralded as one of the defining last-gen franchises. It’s unsurprising, really, given BioWare’s history of strong storytelling as well as memorable characterisation, coupled with the tantalising prospect of personalised player narratives by way of save-game importing across sequels. It’s a damn shame, then, that I came across the holy sci-fi trinity so late that I couldn’t get into them. In truth, I played bits of Mass Effect 2 and 3, and I genuinely enjoyed what I played, but I was all too aware of the save importing, so I was determined to start with the original game. The trouble is, for an action-RPG, the original Mass Effect is disappointing in terms of…

“the villain must fight and jump his way to that level’s princess, punching and throwing grenades” DEVELOPER STARBLADE PUBLISHER STARBLADE PRICE $14.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM nefariousgame.com A lot of games coming out at the moment rely on nostalgia for old-school gaming in some form or another. The worst of these games simply ape something that has come before, resulting in clunky 8 or 16-bit snore-fests that evoke the feeling in little more than the look, unfair difficulty and lack of refinement that was the hallmark of many of the early games. On the other hand, there are those games that look to the past for inspiration and pay tribute to what has come before without having to resort to mimicry to evoke the right feelings. Nefarious is one of those…

“Memoranda isn’t a retelling of any particular Murakami tale. Rather, it’s a pastiche of his style” DEVELOPER BIT BYTERZ PUBLISHER DIGITAL DRAGON PRICE US$15 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, GOG bitbyterz.com Video game developers too rarely look beyond genre pillars like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings for inspiration. So when the creators of a new point and click adventure claim to have been influenced by the short stories of Haruki Murakami, it piqued my attention. The end result only disappoints when it adheres too closely to the conventions of the adventure genre. Murakami is a Japanese literary author best known for his novels Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84. He typically portrays a contemporary real world where the mundane is punctured by the surreal. Page upon page…

While we wait with bated breath for AMD’s new Zen-powered CPUs, Intel has once again delivered an annual refresh of its existing product range in the form of the new 7th Generation Core CPU. With little competition from AMD, once again we see Intel release a product that has the smallest of improvements, with one exception – media encoding/transcoding performance. Overall, the new 7th Gen Core CPUs, formally codenamed as Kaby Lake-S, offer some of the smallest changes we’ve ever seen from a new Intel desktop CPU. Keen readers will know that Kaby Lake CPUs were first launched for laptops (note the lack of the -S at the end of the mobile product CPU names), with the desktop launch taking place several months later. From this it’s obvious where Intel’s…

PRICE $219 www.asus.com.au While many hardware vendors seem to be embracing the aesthetic of smaller and sleeker when it comes to mouse design, with the flagship mouse of a new range Asus has gone in the other direction. The Spatha is enormous and heavy, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Designed for MMORPGs, the Spatha is covered in buttons but is still very comfortable in the hand. The mouse is usable both wired and wirelessly, with the latter using a pairing/charging station and limiting the polling rate of the mouse to cut down on wireless lag. In wired mode, the Spatha is capable of a rather incredible, if somewhat impractical 2000Hz polling rate (1000Hz wireless), with up to 8200 DPI. It’s strange to see the numbers so high given…

“a controller aimed at and partnered with the pro gaming world, but for PC gamers it’s an extravagance” PRICE STARTS AT $219.95 bluemouthdirect.com/collections/scuf Scuf controllers are good. There is no doubt of that. They are well constructed, comfortable and highly modifiable, but despite that they are something of a hard sell as they are hugely expensive, even before calculating in the costs of any parts for customisation. In the US there are a huge number of options for each controller when it comes to look and base parts, but because of the size of the Australian market, and our distance from the rest of the world, that is not the case here. In Australia the Scuf controller instead comes in a couple of base options and a couple of base…

In almost twenty years of technology coverage, I’ve never actually made it to the Consumer Electronics Show, aka CES, which is held in Las Vegas every January. Held on the 4th of January, I’m generally catching up with family at the time, so have always given it a miss. This year I decided it was about darned time to see what the fuss is all about – this is the biggest gadget-show on the planet, covering a vast array of technologies, including TVs, home automation, drones, and basically any other device that requires electricity to operate. 2017 was the year I finally decided to check out this mega-show (thanks to the kind folk from Dell for sending me over), and to say I was unprepared for the scope of the…

SPORE DEVELOPER MAXIS PERSONALITY WILL WRIGHT RELEASED 2008 NUTSHELL Thanks to the power of modern PCs, Spore had a chance to be everything its developer promised. But fundamental design disagreements mutated that vision into something rather more profane. A central theme in Hagionaut games up until now has been the way the designers and developers of these titles expected too much of contemporary hardware. How nuts was Richard Garriott really, when he tried to build a massive 3D open world that could run on a machine that may not even have had a 3D accelerator? Spore suffered no such restrictions. By 2008, PC hardware was so powerful that only vision (and programming skill, I guess) could hold back a game. Hell, this was a world that had already seen The…

What’s better than one computer? Two! My wife and I love to game together as you can see. We have this awesome setup with our two computers I built myself. I first built my computer at 15 and haven’t stopped building since. I built the computer on the right 5 years ago - it still has my original hard-drive in it which is 8 years old now. My wife asked to play with me, so we started with local co-op on my computer. We soon ran out of games, and she kept begging me for her own computer. I then built my wife’s computer on the left, which is now 2.5 years old. She handpicked the parts she wanted, with a bit of advice from me. She did inherit my…

Laptop gamers rejoice! Thanks to the huge bandwidth in Thunderbolt 3 you can now have desktop class GPU performance without having to invest in a separate desktop PC. With the Asus ROG XG Station 2, which implements this technology, you can have the thin laptop you need to travel between home, work or school and the GPU firepower necessary to play the latest games and enjoy VR gaming with no lag. Just like the familiar process of plugging in an external hard drive, you can now connect an external GPU for when you need it, instead of carrying it around with you all the time, taking up space and weight in your laptop. THUNDERBOLT 3 IS GO! The huge bandwidth in Thunderbolt 3 makes this possible, with over 40Gbps available…

“the suits at the Disney Corporation are creating and marketing films as if they were video games” Another year, another Star Wars sequel, and another sense of lingering dissatisfaction and unease that is difficult to articulate. Fortunately, we have gifted critics like Rich Evans to help crystallise our thoughts; to remind us that while the Star Wars universe appears to be immense, it’s actually quite small. Star Wars is the story of Luke Skywalker leaving the family farm and going on an adventure. Everything tacked on to that will always be fan-fiction. Ah, fan-fiction. Back in the ‘90s the burgeoning internet allowed this literary genre to proliferate like never before, and at first it all seemed like a good idea. In those heady days many of us honestly believed that…

“a swarm of bugs that infest the population with mind-controlling nano-viruses” DEVELOPER MORGONDAG PUBLISHER MORGONDAG PRICE $5 AVAILABLE AT STEAM imprint-x.com Hot on the heels of the wonderfully melancholy meditation on solitary space exploration, RymdResa, comes the second game from two person Swedish design team, Morgondag. Well, hot on the heels is a bit of an exaggeration, but the year and a half break between releases has been worth the wait. Imprint-X is an entirely different kind of game but still manages to evoke many of the same feelings of isolation and loneliness as RymdResa. Not bad for a puzzle game about pushing buttons. Underneath a domed city on an asteroid, a giant robot head releases a swarm of bugs that infest the population with mind-controlling nano-viruses. Players take the…

“your attitude to a crew member is determined by whether or not you make them get the tea” DEVELOPER BILLY GOAT ENTERTAINMENT LTD PUBLISHER BILLY GOAT ENTERTAINMENT LTD PRICE $18.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM billygoat.tv Near-future political what-if stories are always interesting. For instance, what if the UK elected a socialist government and abolished the monarchy so the Queen and her family had to be secretly smuggled to Canada by a hot fighter pilot and they almost got shot down, but really this is all just the drunken hallucination of a man living in far north Queensland during the wet season? The above paragraph is actually a synopsis of Nevil Shute’s 1953 novel In the Wet and I mention it because its premise is no less insane (nor any less Queen-related)…

“If you’re a fan of bright lights, this blazing box will light up your gaming den like no other” PRICE $2,299 www.msi.com Looking like an alien prop from one of the spacecraft in Independence Day, the Aegis 3 is certainly eye-catching. This mini-PC is about half the size of a regular PC gaming tower, but its striking lines make it hard to miss. MSI has used some rather clever engineering to fit most of the goodies of a full-sized PC into such a small, oddly shaped case, but has made one major compromise in the process. If you’re a fan of bright lights, this blazing box will light up your gaming den like no other. Both the front panel and right side emit enough light to confuse incoming pilots, but…

PRICE $329 www.msi.com Thank you MSI, for delivering a super-slick black motherboard that will be aesthetically appeasing to those of us who prefer our PCs to look like a serious piece of machinery rather than mobile Karaoke machines. At this price, the MSI Z270 Gaming M5 is going head to head against the Aorus, so what else is different apart from its subtler design? Well, not much. MSI was keen to emphasise the M.2 shield, as it appears that M.2 SSDs can throttle back under duress. It’s basically a small heatplate that goes over an M.2 SSD. This board has similarly powerful and flexible fan controllers as the Aorus board, while the physical layout is also extremely similar. There are three full length PCIe x16 slots, though only two come…

PRICE $229.95 au.creative.com The Siege M04, the new gaming mouse from Creative is excellent, but it’s a fairly safe first stab at the mouse market. With the Vanguard K08, Creative is not playing it safe. Not by a long shot. Rather than opting to go with the well-known and widely accepted keys of a brand like Cherry or Kailh, Creative has instead opted to work with switch maker Omron to create their own unique mechanical switches. The PRES keys (Perceive-React-Execute Switch) have an actuation of 45g - the same as Cherry Brown and Red - but a throw distance of only 1.5mm. It’s a linear switch so there is no mechanical actuation point or noise; it’s just straight up and down. The feel of the switch is a little hard…

01 N ntendo Switch $469.95 • Nintendo www .nintendo.com What happens when a home gaming console is also your portable gaming console? POWERED UP: 720p touchscreen that clicks into base station to hook up to your TV, then unplugs and lets you continue gaming on the go. PLAYED OUT: Rather ordinary battery life of 2+ hours, powers barely current-gen-quality games. Speaking of which, there’s really only the new Zelda worth playing on launch, and it’s on Wii U as well. Oh and enjoy paying a monthly fee for online play access. Very expensive when you consider the other consoles that money can buy. 02 Elago Vintage Stand $40 • Elago www.elagostore.eu Here s something to make you regret buying an Apple watch a little less! It’s a cute stand modelled…