Table of contents for Issue 265 in PC Powerplay

Just as you’ve become comfortable with USB 3.1, the USB 3.0 Promoters Group has thrown USB 3.2 into the mix yet another USB format. USB 3.2 is only available with the new, smaller Type-C connector and provides up to double the speed of USB 3.1, with bandwidth increasing from 10 Gbps to 20 Gbps. The speed increase comes from using two USB channels at once (current USB 3.1 Gen 1/2 devices use a single “super-speed” channel) - obviously both host and client devices need to support USB 3.2 for the speed increase to occur. Use of any alternate mode activities (e.g: DisplayPort, MHL, HDMI) on the same cable removes this speed increase. Luckily, USB 3.2 is fully backwards compatible with USB, but be careful, not all USB Type-C cables can…

Adobe have announced an end date for Flash. Yes, the software we all love to hate, but still find ourselves using more often than we should, will become “end of life” in December 2020. After this date, there will be no more updates. Adobe acknowledges that newer standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly are now better suited to do the things Flash has done every so faithfully all these years. Microsoft, Google and Mozilla have also announced how they plan to handle the depreciation of Flash over the coming years. Basically, Flash will be disabled by default and if you want to view any Flash elements on a website, you must click through a dialog box warning you about Flash’s poor security and performance. By 2020, Flash will be disabled…

YOU’RE INVITED! PC & Tech Authority, PC PowerPlay, Hyper and Atomic are laying it on and we’d love to see you there If you’ve ever been to an Upgrade Australia event, you know what an incredible night it is – and we hope to see you at the next one! If you’ve never come along, and you’re in Sydney on the evening of September the 22nd, then we extend an invitation to attend a truly fun night where you get hands-on and close up with the very latest PC gear. IT’S FREE, AND A WHOLE LOT OF FUN CHECK OUT THE GEAR – Leading PC and tech companies from around the world come to Upgrade Australia to display the coolest new gear and talk you through the awesomes EAT, DRINK…

When you consider your next upgrade and want to see an improvement in gaming and media performance, then your storage should be a high priority. If your current rig uses hard drives for your game installs and media then you’re in for a treat when you install a Samsung NVMe SSD. Even coming from a SATA SSD will deliver appreciable gains. There are tangible benefits a Samsung NVMe SSD can bring to many games. The first is in pure loading times. In our testing, the Samsung 960 Pro delivered sequential read speeds of 3,500MB/sec, while the Samsung 960 Evo offered around 3,200MB/sec. Compare that to a typical SATA SSD and its average speeds of around 600MB/sec, or a hard drive that struggles to achieve 100MB/sec. This sequential read time means…

1 Future Grind DEVELOPER MILKBAG GAMES PUBLISHER MILKBAG GAMES DUE 2017 www.futuregrind.net Stunt racers are great fun, and Future Grind looks to be a blast. In a futuristic city in which a number of blue and red floating rails make up the race tracks, players pilot motorcycles with similarly coloured wheels. Only blue wheels can drive on blue and red on red, so jumping and flipping through the air is the order of the day. 2 Super Daryl Deluxe DEVELOPER DAN & GARY GAMES PUBLISHER DAN & GARY GAMES DUE 2018 danandgarygames.com/ superdaryldeluxe Described as a 2D comedy action RPG, Super Daryl Deluxe looks like what you’d get if you tried to make Napoleon Dynamite the beat ‘em up and then hit it with a light dusting of Scott Pilgrim…

“we had to negotiate out of a dangerous situation using a dialogue tree” DEVELOPER CYANIDE STUDIO PUBLISHER FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE DUE LATE 2017 www.callofcthulhu-game.com H.P. Lovecraft’s writings were incredibly influential on the horror genre; books, films, and games all owe the man a tremendous debt for establishing many of the genre conventions we tend to take for granted. Given how well-regarded his work is, though, it’s somewhat puzzling how few games are based in the universe he helped establish. While Call of Cthulhu is based on the pen-and-paper RPG of the same name, it also marks one of the few times the Lovecraftian mythos has been embodied in game form. Going from the preview session we saw at E3, this will be a hard game to put down – and…

DEVELOPER SUPERGIANT GAMES PUBLISHER SUPERGIANT GAMES PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.supergiantgames.com/games/pyre WILKS: I loved both previous Supergiant titles. Both Bastion and Transistor took an interesting approach to the action and turn-based RPG, with an unreliable narrator hiding key information from the player to change how events were perceived. They also looked and sounded fantastic. Although it’s quite unlike anything that Supergiant has done before, Pyre is instantly recognisable as a Supergiant game. The character design and background art is stunning, and the interplay of soundtrack and storytelling is typical of the developer’s approach. What isn’t typical is the fact that the game veers rather wildly from the fairly straightforward RPG trappings of the earlier games. Pyre has all the emotion of the previous games, but these emotions are woven…

“it’s basic for a sim, but if all you have is an hour or so, it scratches that city-building itch” DEVELOPER MOTHERSHIP ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER TEAM17 PRICE $29.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM avencolony.com Developers of city management sims have to make a choice. Either create a super-complex ultra-detailed capital-S simulation of a settlement - which will become a cult-favourite among a relatively small group of gamers - or create something more basic and accessible, in hopes of reaching a wider audience. Now, I’d argue that by setting the game on distant worlds and wrapping it in a traditional sci-fi story, Aven Colony has already jammed itself into a niche. So making the actual game with, shall we say, app-level complexity may not have been developer Mothership’s best decision... ...until you realise this…

“superior chaining of abilities and tricks sees the fans almost literally hurl money at your team” DEVELOPER SIZE FIVE GAMES PUBLISHER SIZE FIVE GAMES PRICE US$4 AVAILABLE AT STEAM sizefivegames.com Can a videogame be a comedy sketch? UK duo Size Five Games thinks so, and its growing oeuvre reads (or plays) more and more like the gaming equivalent of an old-school BBC sketch comedy show. The latest addition is this: a comedy ‘football’ (i.e. soccer) game, which claims on its splash screen that its developer knows nothing about “the football” and made no attempt to recreate the sport accurately. The game instead focuses on the basics of kicking, passing, tackling… and aftertouch? “It’s only Football,” the game says. “How hard can it be?”` The eponymous Kickmen do battle on an…

“group fights in particular can become a frustrating cluttered mess of special effects” DEVELOPER MOTIGA PUBLISHER PERFECT WORLD ENTERTAINMENT PRICE F2P AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.gogigantic.com If I said one thing multiple times while getting a feel for Gigantic, it would have been, ‘That is such bullshit’, after charging my hero to battle, slashing wildly, unleashing a few special abilities and getting killed by someone who actually knew what they were doing. Such is the reality of the early rounds of this free-to-play MOBA-meets-thirdperson-shooter, especially if you’re more familiar with the latter style of game. But with a little patience and an appreciation for the balancing of your character’s offensive and defensive strengths and weaknesses, I was occasionally able to thrive and replace the defeatist swearing with some victorious swearing. While…

“the lowest price we could find was $499, with prices rising exponentially from there” Last month we dug deep into the performance of Intel’s new Core-X series of CPUs, but at the time motherboards with the necessary X299 chipset were rarer than hen’s teeth. They’re still not exactly filling shelves, but we’ve managed to round up four boards that we think Core-X gamers will be interested in. We should point out that we expected the X299 chipset-based boards to be a little more affordable than the previous X99 boards, to compete with AMD’s Ryzen compatible motherboards. We were wrong. The lowest price we could find was $499, with prices rising exponentially from there. It’s understandable that motherboard manufacturers are trying to make a buck, but when boards are often approaching…

“if you want to overclock Core-X CPUs, you’re going to need some extreme cooling solutions” PRICE $589 www.msi.com.au As one of the most affordable boards in the roundup, we have to say that the MSI X299 Gaming M7 ACK kicks some serious butt. It may not have quite as many features as other boards, but when it comes to gaming performance, this thing blew it out of the park, and we didn’t have to spend hours trying to extract this level of performance. Like all of the boards, it’s a standard ATX, but MSI has managed to squeeze plenty of PCIe lanes onto the board. There are four steel-reinforced full length x16 lanes, along with another twin x1 lanes. It’s got the full eight memory slots (some X299 budget boards…

“this ATX board comes loaded with goodies, and Asus doesn’t feel the need to charge the Earth for it” PRICE $299 www.asus.com.au It’s so refreshing to be able to write a review of an AMD motherboard in PC PowerPlay. After years with only Intel boards, it’s an absolute pleasure to write about Ryzen compatible boards like the new Asus ROG Strix X370-F Gaming motherboard. Based on the fastest Ryzen chipset, the X370, it’s the perfect example of how Ryzen delivers multi-core performance on a micro-budget scale. Consider the fact that this is the top of the line chipset for Ryzen 7, yet only costs $299. Look at Intel’s new X299 boards in this month’s roundup, and you’ll see they start at $500 and keep going up from there. Yet this…

PRICE $499 au.ttesports.com Gaming chairs are the RGB fans of 2017. Late last year there were only a few gaming chair brands, but now every vendor seems to have their own model following roughly the same design, with a racing seat design and some bright colours. The Tt Esports X-Comfort is one of the few serious looking chairs, with nothing but a white logo adding a splash of brightness to the black of the chair. Designed for the bigger gamer, the X-Comfort has a 50cm wide seat and high, 83.5cm back rest, with a maximum weight supported of 150kg. We’ve put together a number of different chairs from numerous vendors over the last 12 months, and although they all follow the same general process when it comes to attaching the…

“Path of Exile and Diablo III display almost diametrically opposed approaches to ARPG design” For the last few years I’ve had one mainstay game that’s consumed most of my non-work gaming time. That game is Path of Exile, the NZ created, free-to-play action RPG by Grinding Gear Games. I’ve taken a step away from PoE for a couple of months. By the time you read this an expansion that takes the game from being four acts to ten acts will have dropped and I’ll doubtlessly be fighting my way through Wraeclast again, but in the run up to the release I took a break. Not from gaming, just from PoE, and that break came in the form of jumping head first into the strange world of GR pushing in Diablo…

I tried waaay back in 2004 to get in this section but lemme try again :). Also thought chucking my first PC mag on my desk might help hehe. MOST IMPRESSIVE ELEMENTS: 1. XFX RX480 8gb gddr5 2. Duel Curved Samsung Screens 3. Bit Fenix Prodigy 4. Commodore Mouse Pad MY LAST UPGRADE: Since I killed my old AMD PC (always unplug your PC before opening, kids) I thought it would be the perfect time to upgrade. So I went out and got myself a cheeky i5 6400, 16gb of ddr4, Asus Z170M mobo & a RX480 8gb. Since then I have added a new 3tb drive, some new SSDs and dual curved monitors. Not the fastest PC in the world but I play dota 90% of the time so…

AMD has rounded out their Ryzen range with a new, entry level CPU. The Ryzen 3 is AMD’s budget range of Ryzen chips and consists of the Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200. Each CPU has four cores and four threads, an 8MB L3 cache, 65W TDP and includes a Stealth cooler in the box. The main difference between the 1300X and 1200 is clockspeed. The 1300X operates at a base frequency of 3.5GHz, a turbo frequency of 3.7GHz and will boost itself to 3.9GHz using the XFR feature if the conditions are right. The Ryzen 3 1200’s base is 3.1GHz, turbo is 3.4GHz and will do a mild XFR overclock to 3.45GHz. From early benchmarks, it looks like the Ryzen 3 1300X is great bang for buck versus…

Zero Latency is opening a second room scale VR facility in Australia. The new joint is set for Brisbane and will open in October. Maybe you’ve heard of Zero Latency already, but for those who haven’t, think laser tag, but with a VR kit strapped to you. You’ve got a laptop in a backpack, an Oculus Rift/HTC Vive style headset and full-sized prop guns for a fully immersive experience. It all takes place in a ~400sqm warehouse with up to 7 of your buddies (8 players all up) and you all pretend there’s zombies chasing you, shooting the bastards into oblivion as you escape the infested hellhole. Everyone gets scared, runs around like wild and has a great time. If you aren’t in Brisbane, Zero Latency’s Melbourne facility has been…

Hot on the heels of the successful launch of the marketplace changing Ryzen series of CPUs, AMD has finally announced details of its upcoming performance series of graphics cards, the Vega 56 and Vega 64. There are three base models of the cards. The Vega 56 is air cooled and boasts a base clock of 1156MHz and boost clock of 1471MHz, 8Gb HBM2 memory, 3584 stream processors and a price tag of $399 USD, a move that could potentially put the fear of god into Nvidia. The air cooled Vega 64 is faster with base and boost clocks of 1247MHz and 1546MHz respectively. The most powerful of the new cards, the liquid cooled Vega 64 has a base clock of 1406MHz and a boost clock of 1677MHz. Both the air…

Despite Wi-Fi appearing to work like magic, it can be a challenge to obtain smooth, reliable and fast Wi-Fi throughout a home. At Upgrade Australia, you'll be able to see how Asus has all the gear necessary to make slow Wi-Fi a thing of the past. Placing the Wi-Fi router in the appropriate area in your home or office is crucial to achieving a reliable network. Ideally, the router should be placed in the centre of the home, as the antennas on Wi-Fi routers are omni-directional, meaning they radiate in a circular pattern. PLACEMENT The furniture and construction of the building can make a significant difference too. For example, metal filing cabinets interfere with Wi-Fi signal and materials such as bricks, concrete and thick glass block signal. A home made…

DEVELOPER MACHINEGAMES PUBLISHER BETHESDA SOFTWORKS DUE OCTOBER 27 wolfenstein.bethesda.net Arcade Berg is the Senior Game Designer at MachineGames, making him the man to go to for the answers to any questions we might have about the upcoming Nazi alternate history game, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. For those unfamiliar with Wolfenstein, the long running series has gone through a number of iterations over the years, first appearing in 1981, but really coming to popular attention in 1992 with the launch of Wolfenstein 3D, the first game in the series to feature the now synonymous series hero, American soldier-cum-spy, William “B.J.” Blazkowicz. After a sequel/expansion in the same year, Wolfenstein fell quiet for almost another decade before being rebooted with the 2001 FPS Return to Castle Wolfenstein, in which Blazkowicz faced…

“you’ll have to use each character to uncover all the hidden areas and access different routes” DEVELOPER REBELLION PUBLISHER REBELLION DUE TBA strangebrigade.com Borrowing heavily from the 1930s adventure serials, Strange Brigade is a four-player cooperative shooter that is best described as Left 4 Dead meets The Mummy. And I mean the light-hearted Brendan Fraser version, not that Tom Cruise rubbish. The game puts you in control of a member of a secret team of adventurers who work for the British government, investigating paranormal activity around the world. Its tongue-in-cheek nature shines through in nearly every aspect, but is perhaps best showcased by the terribly English narrator who calls the action in real-time, though often with a twinge of hyperbole and some very distinct British-isms. “It’s challenging to capture something…

“running around with powerful spells flowing from the tips of your fingers feels great” DEVELOPER SCRAPING BOTTOM GAMES PUBLISHER SCRAPING BOTTOM GAMES PRICE TBA AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.fictorum.com Fictorum is quite an odd beast. It’s an action RPG with vignettes instead of a story, a third-person shooter with loot, and a Rogue-like with explosions. It’s a wizard simulator that allows you to start with huge destructive power and grow more terrifying from there. The basic plot of the game is that you play the last of a school of magic users who survived his own execution at the hands of the Inquisition, so now you’re hell-bent on getting revenge on the baddies. You do this by progressing through a series of small decisions or fights in an attempt to make…

“if you get spotted you have a few seconds grace to find a hiding spot before you’re caught” DEVELOPER IFUN4ALL PUBLISHER CURVE DIGITAL PRICE US$15 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, GOG ifun4all.com So you’ve just beaten a level in Hotline Miami. Good job. But, hang on a second. There’s a dead body sprawled on the floor in every room. Murder weapons abandoned where they fell after use. Blood just everywhere. Someone’s gonna have to clean this all up before the cops arrive. Huh, looks like that someone is you. Serial Cleaner takes this premise and adapts it into a fast and fluid stealth game. You play the titular cleaner sent into a series of increasingly gruesome crime scenes to clean up the mess. In each level you have to dispose of the…

“maybe form a relationship with an equally awkward person on the other side of the door” DEVELOPER OH, A ROCK! STUDIOS PUBLISHER OH, A ROCK! STUDIOS PRICE $3.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM oharock.wordpress.com Can videogames be art? That question has raged since the first time someone said something stupid and someone else said something hyperbolic in response. The late, Pulitzer winning film critic, Roger Ebert said they weren’t and made a lot of enemies. Former senator Scott Ludlam said they were and got love. Now a strange bearded individual with crippling social anxiety enters the fray (and I’m not talking about myself). The Awkward Steve Duology, a pair of surreal and comedic micro adventure games examining the horror of having to open a door are being exhibited in the Smithsonian American…

“the Taichi placed well behind some of the other boards during the gaming tests” PRICE $499 www.asrock.com We make no secret of the fact that we tend to be fans of ASRock products. They tend to deliver performance and features of boards that cost significantly more, but when it comes to their new X299 Taichi, this is definitely a product that needs more time in the labs for testing. The biggest issue of all is performance. Despite this being one of the few boards that worked properly with Intel’s Turbo Boost Max 3.0, with the software loading properly and allowing us to associate it with certain games, the Taichi placed well behind some of the other boards during the gaming tests. It delivered just 75% of the performance of the…

“you also get the best automatic overclock of the lot, hitting 4.6GHz using its auto-tune feature” PRICE $795 www.gigabyte.com.au We’ve become quite accustomed to Gigabyte charging rather high prices for its boards, but when you compare it to what else is on the market, it’s really hard to justify those extra $250. So what does $800 of motherboard buy you? The first thing you’ll notice about this board is that it’s much heavier than the others. Whether that’s due to extra PCB layers, or better heatsinks, or metal backplate is hard to figure out. You also get the best automatic overclock of the lot, with this board hitting 4.6GHz using its auto-tune feature. This basically tests the board at a given frequency, then repeats the process until it hits its…

PRICE $449 au.creative.com There aren’t too many PC soundbars. Razer has their now fairly long in the tooth Leviathan, but aside from that there really isn’t much in the market. The reason for this may be that the width of a monitor and the proximity of the soundbar to the listener impacts the number of speakers it can house and the tricks that can be used for surround sound. The Katana is a 2.1 setup with a tweeter and mid-bass driver on each end of the bar and a separate wired subwoofer. The Katana is loud. Extremely loud. At only half maximum volume the speakers are deafening but still surprisingly crisp. Sound quality in the treble and mid ranges is excellent thanks to some quality drivers and a built in…

PRICE $99 www.astrogaming.com We’re fans of Astro gaming headsets, but they have never really been what you would call affordable, with the A50s retailing for around $400 the A40 around $300 and A38 around $200. Coming in at just shy of $100, the A10 is by far the cheapest headset in the Astro range. The big question is whether anything has been lost in the effort to keep the price down. The answer is both yes and no. The build quality of the headset is excellent. Even though it’s made of plastic the headset still feels very robust, with a tightly strung headband for a good clamp and decently sized, well-padded earcups. Unfortunately these earcups house some rather uninspired 40mm drivers that do a decent job but fail to impress…

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) want to independently test the quality of broadband in Australia. To do this, they want to place a little box in 4,000 households across Australia, that will report back to the ACCC how fast each person’s connection is at various times of the day, to various international and domestic websites. They’ll be testing NBN and ADSL services, but not mobile, satellite or fixed wireless connections. Each quarter, a report will be published that’ll name and shame ISPs that underperform compared to the rest of the market, bringing some long-wanted transparency for Australia Internet users. If you’re interested in taking part in the ACCC’s program, visit www.accc.gov.au…

Many gamers will be familiar with the Razer brand of gaming mice, headsets, laptops and other lifestyle products. They’ve filed to start an IPO on the Hong Kong stock exchange, which will raise US$600m. Razer have taken this step to become a public company listed on the stock exchange to raise capital to grow their business in the Asia Pacific region, as well as increase the amount of R&D funds available so they can develop cool new products for us to buy. Razer will also use the IPO investment to further its plans to launch a smartphone in 2018 off the back of its purchase of NextBit, revamp the OUYA Android-based microconsole and release a more powerful Steam Machine-based gaming console style PC. Things are looking very bright for Razer…

Australia is getting an online League of Legends reality show. The Next Gamer will revolve around ten players living together in a house competing to win $10,000 and a six month contract to play with an Australian Pro LoL team. Potential housemates enter through the website thenextgamer.tv and will compete over a five day period to cull a pool of 40 down to the ten finalists who will ultimately appear on the online show. Originally details on the site said that potential players would have to make a video application, show the experience, discuss preferred roles and the like, and that they would have to be available for qualifying matches between August 11 and 15 and that successful applicants would have to be available to join the finalists in the…

How did the idea for this complicated game initially form and then grow? This game went through more iterations than I expected. I looked at it from the perspective of running a thieves’ guild, what that would involve and building the systems around that. It made sense that everything would be a balancing act for the player. The risk is in making something too unfamiliar and confusing, instead of safe and predictable. What aspects of the game/economy were hardest to balance? Stats, economy and difficulty aren’t hard to adjust, since these are all data values we can easily manipulate and test. The trick is in accommodating a lot of different players. At one point we had classic easy, normal and hard difficulty options, but players would refuse to deviate from…

“except for the alchemist’s curse that’s trapped a bunch of magical crystals in her” DEVELOPER INTI CREATES PUBLISHER 505 GAMES DUE TBA www.fangamer.com/a/kindling/bloodstained Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has some serious expectations to live up to. Not just because it’s the brainchild of Koji Igarashi (known to his fans as “IGA”), the brain behind many of Konami’s later Castlevania titles, but because it was one of the most high-profile gaming Kickstarter of recent memory. With other big gaming Kickstarters like Mighty No. 9 and Yooka-Laylee leaving fans cold, there’s understandably a bit of trepidation about how Bloodstained will turn out. Well, good news: it’s coming along, it plays great, and it feels like an IGA Castlevania game through and through. Young Miriam is an average girl living in 18th century…

“unlock new crafting recipes which allow you to deliver more items to the demanding villagers” DEVELOPER PRIDEFUL SLOTH PUBLISHER PRIDEFUL SLOTH PRICE US$25 AVAILABLE AT STEAM yonderchronicles.com I thought Yonder would give me a sword. My inventory comprised a hammer, an axe, a pick, a scythe, even a fishing rod. But my scabbard was empty, my sword hand flexed anxiously without a blade to wrap its fingers around. Yonder looks like a third-person action-RPG in the vein of The Legend of Zelda or Fable or a Darksiders by way of Fisher-Price. It looks like the kind of game that has you trekking across a fantasy countryside, running quests for hapless villagers who stand around all day and night patiently waiting for you to solve their problems, and hacking and slashing…

having to rediscover a path to your objective each time adds little aside from a time sink DEVELOPER THUNDER LOTUS GAMES PUBLISHER THUNDER LOTUS GAMES PRICE $17.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM thunderlotusgames.com/sundered In the early proceedings of Sundered, things are relatively placid for a Metroidvania style action platformer. After being dragged underground by a mass of tentacles you find yourself in an underground hell part research laboratory, part verdant biological disaster, part Yes album cover. You explore the underground area, learning how to use your basic abilities to navigate the map and kill the randomly spawning enemies, gathering shards to spend on unlocking new and more powerful abilities in the central hub. It’s simple, straightforward and the hand-drawn animation is staggeringly pretty. Then, early in proceedings one small event shows just…

“this isn’t a sombre look at corporate espionage; it’s goofy, sarcastic and frequently absurd” DEVELOPER XGEN STUDIOS PUBLISHER XGEN STUDIOS PRICE US$20 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.thelowroad.com My partner didn’t trust me and I didn’t trust him. So of course in a game called The Low Road I had no option but to blackmail him into cooperating with me. You can stuff your ethics and consciences and enjoy the view from the high road. I’ll be down here getting the job done. The moral vacuum described here is the 1970s American automobile industry and, in particular, the parallel industry of corporate espionage fuelled by it. Initially, you play as Noomi Kovacs, a young intelligence graduate starting her first spy job. She’s itching to get out from behind her desk and into…

“where Dream Daddy does succeed is in depicting a cast of characters you’ll grow to like” DEVELOPER GAME GRUMPS PUBLISHER GAME GRUMPS PRICE US$15 AVAILABLE AT STEAM dreamdaddy.biz “Build that dad!” So I built my dad. He turns out to be a tubby, balding dude with tufts of grey around his ears and a thick salt and pepper beard. He’s wearing a blue t-shirt emblazoned with two fried eggs where his man-boobs are hanging. I call him Beanton. Beanton’s just moved to Maple Bay with his teenage daughter, Amanda. In a scene-setting conversation I get to elaborate a little on the family history and decide that Beanton was once married to Amanda’s mother but she passed away some years ago. Father and daughter get along well though, and they’re looking…

“Asus has delivered a well-balanced product, with a solid feature set and respectable performance” PRICE $589 www.asus.com Given the high reputation of the Strix brand, we were rather happy to see that Asus hadn’t slapped an $800 price on this mothboard. It’s well within the pricing range of more affordable X299 boards (which is still rather expensive). Yet Asus has managed to deliver a well-balanced product, with a solid feature set and respectable performance. We really appreciate the sticker that Asus puts on the memory slots, that show exactly how to populate them depending on how many sticks you use. Other boards use some rather strange memory slot configurations, so this little sticker saved us from having to browse through a 100 page manual. Speaking of memory, Asus rates this…

“more than enough oomph to chew through your PLEX library, which explains why it’s so expensive” PRICE $799 (EXCLUDING DRIVES) www.qnap.com If you’re anything like us, you probably use your NAS for two main purposes. First, to back up your super-critical data with redundancy. Secondly, as a media server. The first use is pretty easy for even the cheapest NAS devices, but running as a media server takes a whole lot more grunt, especially if you want to run PLEX. Well, the QNAP TS0-253B has more than enough oomph to chew through your PLEX library, which explains why it’s so expensive for a dual bay device. QNAP has gone for a new look with this NAS. The left side simply slides away to reveal the twin drive bay mounts, which…

PRICE $299 www.asus.com/au Looking something like a Transformer’s deodorant stick, the ROG Strix Magnus is the most aggressively “gamer” styled microphone we’ve ever seen. It has weird silver flanges and cutouts, and, of course, the ubiquitous RGBs capable of syncing up with Aura technology so every Asus product you own can flash at the same time. Luckily there’s more to the Magnus than flash. It’s quite a compelling mic. Aimed squarely at the streamer/YouTube creator market, the Magnus features three condensers for three different recording modes; cardiodal for clear focussed single user recording, stereo for two or more on opposite sides of the mic and omnidirectional ENC (environmental noise cancelling) to cut down on feedback during like casting or in loud environments. The unit is surprisingly light but is well…

WOLFENSTEIN 3D DEVELOPER ID SOFTWARE PERSONALITIES JOHN CARMACK, JOHN ROMERO AND TOM HALL RELEASED 1992 NUTSHELL The true genius of this Nazi-blaster wasn’t the atompunk WW2 theme, it wasn’t the pseudo-almost-2.5D engine. It was the sheer speed, and the total commitment to that ol’ ultraviolence. Today, Wolfenstein 3D is museum piece, a curiosity. Its blurry sprite-based SS drones and vaguely-Nazi-shaped officers barely raise an eyebrow. And the giant swastikas on the walls are understood by all to be mere set-dressing, just like the golden eagles and occasional baffling chandelier. But back in 1992, Wolfenstein 3D blew everyone’s mind... and some people’s lunch. Single-plane fakey-3D engines had been toyed with by various developers, but it took the programming genius of John Carmack and the undeniable gameplay instincts of John Romero and…