Table of contents for Issue 263 in PC Powerplay

Budget gamers rejoice, for there are some new cheap GPUs for you to enjoy. AMD has quietly launched the Radeon RX560, which it pitches as a cost and power effective way to enjoy various Esports titles such as Overwatch, with 2.5 times the performance of the previous Radeon R7 360 at 1080p with medium quality settings. 2GB versions of the RX560 should sell for around $150-$160. But if that’s too expensive for you, Nvidia’s got your back. The GT 1030 is a graphics card based on the same Pascal architecture as the GTX 1080 and designed to be a step up from the integrated graphics on Intel CPUs, with Nvidia claiming double the performance of Intel’s HD Graphics 530. The GT 1030 will have a price of around $100-$120 and…

A white American Christian has put up a change.org petition to cancel or substantially alter the recently announced upcoming Ubisoft game Far Cry 5 due to the antagonists in the game being white American Christians. Gamers United, as the petitioner calls himself has a few suggestions for changes, including making the baddies Middle Eastern or “inner-city gangs”, or at the least to make the white nationalist group be more racially diverse because ultra-nationalists are all about welcoming people of different colours and creeds. Other suggestions include making the violent, sexually aggressive villains into anti-heroes by making them a reaction to government overreach and taxation and to change the location to Canada or some other country so Americans can enjoy shooting foreigners instead of their own people. In Gamers United’s own…

“Bungie are determined to give the story a more personal feel this time around” DESTINY 2 DEVELOPER BUNGIE PUBLISHER ACTIVISION DUE TBA (PC) greybox.com/rime/en/ Broadcasting live across the internet from a private airport hangar in south Los Angeles, the world finally got its first glimpse of Destiny 2. Bungie used their time to send a clear message to everyone watching around the world - they’ve listened to their community. It was a not-so-hidden way of addressing the reception of the first Destiny, which many critics and players agreed failed to meet expectations. Over the years expansions and updates improved Destiny considerably, with final expansion, The Taken King, being a welcomed soft reboot of sorts. Destiny may have stumbled out of the gates, but finished strong. Still, at its core were…

“deep, satisfying combat against a range of creepily religious monsters” BLASPHEMOUS DEVELOPER THE GAME KITCHEN PUBLISHER THE GAME KITCHEN DUE TBA blasphemousgame.com In many respects Blasphemous may look much like Dead Cells and Sundered, but despite being a 2D action platformer, that really couldn’t be further from the truth. Blasphemous isn’t a Metroidvania style game. Sure, the levels are non-linear and progression isn’t necessarily made by going left to right, but exploration is a secondary concern. Blasphemous is a game about deep, satisfying combat against a range of creepily religious monsters and massive, even creepier bosses. Currently finishing up a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter (the campaign blew through its goal within a few days of launch), Blasphemous puts players in the iron shoes of The Penitent One, the last survivor…

“the ‘90s essence the game attempts to emulate feels more like a couple of respectful nods” DEVELOPER PIXEL TITANS PUBLISHER DEVOLVER DIGITAL PRICE $19.96 AVAILABLE AT STEAM strafe1996.com Strafe attempts to tap into our nostalgia for ‘90s shooters like Quake and Doom, while adding map randomisation and roguelike elements as something of a modern twist. The game succeeds a bit at both. Getting started, players pick one of three guns: an automatic rifle, a shotgun or a railgun/pulse rifle (answer depends on whether you’re in the Q3 or UT camp), before teleporting aboard the starship Icarus, where you’ll immediately notice things have gone pear-shaped. As you venture from room to room slaughtering freakish grunt after grunt, you’ll find several single-ammo-clip gun pickups that offer a short-lived way to deal a…

“a foundation of turn-based combat supported by some light base-building and dialogue options” DEVELOPER PIXELATED MILK PUBLISHER KLABATER PRICE US$25 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, GOG regaliagame.com Just days into my reign as the new lord of Ascalia, I decided to take a trip to Falgarwood. My council, consisting of my two sisters, my bodyguard, and the cranky ghost of a long dead ancestor, thought it’d be a good idea to get to know the area. Let the local peasants put a face to the name, that sort of thing. It’ll demonstrate that you care, they said. A few days later, far from winning over the hearts and minds of my people, I’m lost in the sprawling wildwood, fighting for my life against a pack of balefolk - or animated trees. Balefolk…

“One of the biggest limitations with Optane is the list of requirements that must be met for it to work” New PC technologies are generally wonderful times for us geeks. We get entirely new toys to play with which deliver real benefits to our computing experience – usually faster performance, better visuals, richer sound and a myriad of other wonders. Unfortunately they often come with a flipside – bugs and complicated installation methods. Not to mention sometimes they’re just marketing launches, and don’t really deliver on their promises. We can say without doubt that Intel’s new range of Optane product is definitely one of the most complicated devices to install we’ve ever seen. But does it deliver on the performance increase promise? Before we look at how Optane performs, let’s…

PRICE $139 www.msi.vom AMD’s Ryzen has certainly caused a splash in the component market. With over 80 new motherboards on the way to support its new AM4 socket, we’re starting to see more of them hitting our labs. The MSI Mortar B350M is the latest, and shows what great value a Ryzen platform can be. At a mere $139, it’s possible to build a 10 core machine for less than $1500 when combined with the R7 series. For the price, the Mortar comes packed with plenty of features, especially considering it’s of the M-ATX form factor. There’s full support for four memory modules with a top speed of 3200MHz, while twin full length PCIe x16 slots deliver CrossFire support. There’s also twin PCIe x1 form factor lanes between the two…

“we’ve seen umpteen RGB headsets but this is the first speaker set we’ve seen that features 16 million colours” PRICE $209 au.creative.com We thought we’d seen it all when it comes to RGB lighting after seeing a power supply and RAM with programmable lights, but that was far from the end of the RGB revolution. We’ve seen umpteen RGB lit headsets over the last few years, but the BlasterX Kratos S5 is definitely the first speaker set we’ve seen that features 16 million colours. As fed up as we are at things having RGBs added for no apparent reason, the implementation on these speakers is genuinely quite good and pared back, with an understated strip of LEDs towards the base of each of the satellite speakers. These can be programmed…

“a seven year saga of rewrites and resignations and hirings and firings” TABULA RASA DEVELOPER DESTINATION GAMES (REALLY, NCSOFT) RELEASED NOVEMBER 2007 (SHUT DOWN IN FEBRUARY 2009) PERSONALITY RICHARD GARRIOTT NUTSHELL Despite taking seven years to develop, Tabula Rasa remained live for just 16 months. NCSoft left nothing but pain, penury and strife in the game’s wake, including a US$28 million payout to Richard Garriott. Back in the mists of ancient time (2000), Richard Garriott was fuming. He knew he was onto something, with this MMORPG business. Ultima Online showed that MMOs (as we call them now) were the future of gaming... all they needed was publishers to believe in them. Garriott had sold his company Origin Systems to EA back in 1992, because big visions need big money. But…

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! Letter of the month wins a copy of Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs U DON’T PLAY Here’s another letter from the sticks, this time not about Sky Muster. I have an issue with Ubisoft Support I would like to draw your attention to: On 2 March 2017 I purchased the game Far Cry Primal via Steam. After installation I happily played an hour or so. When I tried to resume play a couple of days later the game wouldn’t launch and instead saw an error message “This game was already claimed by AFOULON. Please contact…

Thunderbolt is finally getting the love it deserves from Intel, who will start integrating Thunderbolt 3 right into its processors. OEMs will no longer need to shell out for an extra chip just to support Thunderbolt. This means if a motherboard or laptop manufacturer wants to include Thunderbolt 3 support on their product, all they do is hook a port up to the chipset, instead of buying and adding another chip just for it. This effectively makes Thunderbolt 3 support “free.” In addition to this, Intel is also making Thunderbolt 3 available on a non-exclusive, royalty-free basis. This allows third-party chip makers to make Thunderbolt-compatible chips, lowering the price and placing the standard in more creative packages - so for end devices (e.g: external SSDs, video capture devices, docking stations)…

Despite not getting as much press as some of the big failures or flashier games built with the help of crowdfunding, Grim Dawn, the spiritual successor to Titan Quest has proven to be hugely successful for developer Crate Entertainment, selling over one million copies. Arthur Bruno, founder of Crate Entertainment said in commemoration of the one million sales milestone, ”It’s crazy to think that this success story somehow arose from such humble and uncertain beginnings, overcoming so many setbacks and challenges. I repeatedly questioned what I was doing those first three, hard years of development. Looking back, I think the only thing that kept me going on the bad days, was the responsibility I felt to see it through, for the people who had invested time in the project and…

“the end of the level will always be to the right, but that skips a lot of content” DEAD CELLS DEVELOPER MOTION TWIN PUBLISHER MOTION TWIN DUE EARLY ACCESS dead-cells.com Steam, and indie development as a whole seems to run in cycles, with the style of games under development switching every six or so months. About two years ago everything being released seemed to be some kind of Rogue-like or Rogue-lite with permadeath, then the mood seemed to switch to everything appearing to be a survival sandbox of one kind or other. At the moment, the major thrust of development seems to be Metroidvania style games. The fact that development in the indie space follows certain themes isn’t that surprising – the same happens with AAA development. What is surprising,…

“Prey is designed to be played in numerous ways, but simply gunning your way around is impossible” DEVELOPER ARKANE STUDIOS PUBLISHER BETHESDA SOFTWORKS PRICE $79.95 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL prey.bethesda.net What a fascinating history the Prey brand has. This game bears no resemblance to previous titles – either the first Prey that came out in 2006, or the much-liked and non-released Prey 2, promised by Bethesda but eventually cancelled back in 2014. In fact, the only real link is in structure – you’re alone, in space, and you have to fight aliens with strange powers with your own strange powers. But Prey – the 2017 Prey, which is all we’ll talk about from this point – also has its own rich history, albeit one that is internal to the game.…

“races such as the Horatio, who consist of nothing but clones of a single eccentric hyperbillionaire” DEVELOPER AMPLITUDE STUDIOS PUBLISHER SEGA PRICE $39.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM endless-space.com The space-empire 4X turn-based strategy genre is, to my mind, one of the most prescriptive in gaming today. To the untrained eye, all 4X games appear the same - the galaxy map, the tech tree, the million billion buttons and icons, and the same basic progression. Start small and primitive, explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. From the time the genre appeared with Reach for the Stars in 1983, to maybe 2015, the pace of new 4X releases remained manageably steady. But for some reason, now we’re getting all the 4X games, all at once. The fine details are different but overall each of…

“Gideon’s super-suit gives him the ability to rocket across the ground by sliding on his knees” DEVELOPER PLATINUM GAMES PUBLISHER SEGA PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM vanquishgame.com It’s hard to tell if Vanquish is a typical example of the broad-shouldered, chain-smoking, constantly angry and edgily swearing machismo that was so prevalent in action games released around 2010, or whether it is a parody thereof. The testosterone is laid on so thick that you can almost smell it and Sam Gideon is such a man’s man that you could easily see the game as a parody, but the fact that Platinum plays everything so straight and cheerless that could be a mistake. The story of Vanquish does nothing to help - some evil Russian robots are trying to take over the…

“Netgear has gone for a very aggressive design, mimicking some of its gamer-focused router designs” PRICE $149 www.netgear.com One of the most boring networking components we can think of is the humble switch. Designed to split a single Ethernet connection into many, they’re usually not equipped with any smarts at all other than basic traffic management, unless you’re talking about Enterprise-grade switches. The S8000 changes all that, bringing a raft of advanced features to the consumer-level. It’s an eight port switch, so once you’ve plugged your input cable in, there’s room for seven more Ethernet devices. Netgear has gone for a very aggressive design, totally unlike the beige boxes we’re accustomed to with other switches, and mimicking some of its gamer-focused router designs. It’s rather heavy as well, with the…

what you’ll notice most is the relatively low power when it comes to gaming PRICE $1,999 www.asus.com.au It’s nice to see a company delivering a 15.6-inch laptop without focusing first and foremost on ultra-portability or how slim they can make the chassis. Asus has aimed to deliver a laptop here that is quite portable, yet has the gaming guts to allow a bit of LoL on the side. Unfortunately once again we see yet another company scrimping on the GPU to keep the price down, limiting this machine to very basic games. At the heart of the issue is the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050. To put it bluntly, unless you’re playing very graphically basic games, this machine simply won’t cut it. As our new suite of benchmarks show, the GeForce…

PRICE $179 www.razerzone.com Nobody could have predicted just how popular gameplay streaming would become, but the market is now awash with game stream capture devices. The Ripsaw is just one amongst many – does it have the goods to compete with the latest products? This tiny box doesn’t have as many ports as other rippers – there’s HDMI in and out, component in, mic and auxiliary sound in, and USB for connecting to your PC. Thanks to the speedy USB connection, it can capture in full HD at 60fps with zero compression, but it can’t handle 4K. Razer promises zero latency when playing games through this box, but we noticed an ever so slight amount of lag when playing Squad. Lowering the quality settings helped to reduce this, but most…

Before I start, go easy on me, I’m only 13… Anyway. Ever since I was 12 I’ve been obsessed with making my own PC and having a setup that would blow people away although around half my stuff is 2nd hand. Unfortunately my parents bought my desk and I can’t drill holes for cable management and mount my monitors like a lot of people do and it’s a bummer because I love competitive gaming and I want cords for response times but they look bad... MOST IMPRESSIVE ELEMENTS: 1. Gigabyte 1050Ti G1 Gaming 4GB 2. Corsair K70 Rapidfire RGB MX Speed 3. Corsair MM800 RGB Mousepad (Razer mousepad on top for mouse gripping) 4. Deepcool RGB 350 LED Strip Kit LAST UPGRADE: Gigabyte 1050Ti G1 Gaming 4GB DREAM UPGRADE: A…

You know those 80 Plus ratings on power supplies that are supposed to let you know how efficient they are? There’s now an alternative rating scheme from a company called Cybenetics called ETA and LAMDA that they say offer greater accuracy than the 80 Plus ratings we’ve come to know and love. The ETA rating measures power efficiency via “a unique, custom-made application to account for the efficiency results of thousands of different load combinations through a unique proprietary application” and assigns a rating of A+ for the most efficient and D for the power supplies least efficient. LAMDA certification tests for noise levels - the quietest of PSUs gets an A++, with noisy clunkers getting an E. Respected power supply manufacturer Seasonic is already on-board, embracing the ETA and…

16 -core, 32-thread versions of AMD Ryzen CPUs have been announced and will go head to head with Intel’s Broadwell-E and upcoming Skylake-E CPUs, together with a new motherboard platform called Whitehaven. These new high-end desktop CPUs are dubbed “Threadripper” due to the insane amount of threads (i.e: parallel tasks) they can handle. The flagship Threadripper CPU is the Ryzen 9 1998X, with 16-cores, 32-threads, a base frequency of 3.5Ghz and a boosted clock speed of 3.9GHz in a toasty 155W TDP. The entire Ryzen 9 lineup supports up to 44 lanes of PCIe bandwidth and four DDR4-3200 channels. There’s not as much detail about the Whitehaven X390 platform, which will be soft-launched at Computex this month. AMD’s Ryzen 9 ThreadRipper CPUs should hit the market in the US summer…

Our fifth event was the best yet, with a record breaking number of stands all showing off lustworthy PC gear. As always, it was quite apparent that everyone who came along had a great time, with almost everyone leaving with free gifts. The biggest winner of the night was Alex Chong who took home the PC PowerPlay Beast PC worth almost $7,000! Over the course of the night our master builder Josh Collins assembled the Beast using the very best components from In Win, AMD, Cooler Master, Aorus, MSI, G.Skill, Razer and Microsoft. This went down rather well, as you can imagine, so we’re looking at doing this at every Upgrade Event, evolving the Beast as technology marches along – so be sure to come to the next one, which…

1 Hyper Jam DEVELOPER BIT DRAGON PUBLISHER BIT DRAGON DUE EARLY ACCESS hyperjamgame.com Imagine a multiplayer brawler filtered through the lens of '80s neon art all set to a rad synthwave soundtrack. That’s Hyper Jam in a nutshell. Two to four players choose an '80s inspired character, any of whom would have looked at home on the cover of a Cyberpunk 2020 supplement book, grab weapons and fight to the death in a number of arenas. It’s fast, furious and the fact that powerups can stack makes combat some glorious chaos. It’s also Australian made. 2 Hellhunter DEVELOPER BALLISTIC INTERACTIVE PUBLISHER BALLISTIC INTERACTIVE DUE 2017 hellhuntergame.com Hellhunter promises to be a different kind of horror game. Rather than being a victim or accidental protagonist, players instead take the role of…

SUNDERED DEVELOPER THUNDER LOTUS GAMES PUBLISHER THUNDER LOTUS GAMES DUE JULY thunderlotusgames.com We took a look at the beautiful, hand-drawn Metroidvania by way of H.P. Lovecraft a few issues ago, but thanks to the power of being a Kickstarter backer (full disclosure – I definitely backed Sundered on Kickstarter) we have some more up to date code to play, and boy howdy is it good. As with Dead Cells, Sundered does something that seems both incompatible with the meticulous crafting that goes into a Metroidvania type game as well as one that utilised hand drawn animations and backgrounds – the levels are largely procedurally generated - but Thunder Lotus Games has a clever workaround. While the majority of each area may be procedurally generated, there are set rooms and encounters…

DEVELOPER TEQUILA WORKS PUBLISHER GREY BOX PRICE $29.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM greybox.com/rime/en I’m not usually one to be drawn in by whimsy. For the most part the whimsical is more prone to frustrate or annoy me rather than tug at my heartstrings or fill me with childlike glee. It’s not because I’m a grumpy old curmudgeon, no matter how much I like to play up that image but rather the simple fact that whimsy often seems to be a replacement of any real emotional or depth, essentially tricking people into forgiving some otherwise painful flaws. Rime is whimsical as hell, but it’s not shallow. It’s a gorgeous, rich and melancholy adventure that brims with magic, both literal and figurative and manages to tell a story of mystery and survival without…

 DEVELOPER ELECTROCOSMOS “the developers have managed to fit in a lot of combat options with only two active buttons” PUBLISHER ELECTROCOSMOS PRICE $6.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM runicrampage.com There’s nothing particularly subtle about Runic Rampage, a Rogue-like hack and slash indie from first time developer Electrocosmos, but that is one of the strengths of the game. There’s not much when it comes to eye-candy or bells and whistles, so everything rests on how good the combat feels and how well the action flows. Over the four acts that make up the game, the action flows pretty damn well. You play a red-bearded dwarf. There’s some sort of eminently skippable story about dwarf kings, broken crowns and divided peoples, but it’s not really something you will find yourself paying attention to. Instead,…

“a simple back and forth of shoot, cooldown, shoot again and hope you can shoot a little harder” DEVELOPER TELEPATHS TREE PUBLISHER IMGN.PRO PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM innerchainsgame.com You awake on a horrible biomechanical world and must escape by reaching a place called “Last Hope.” That’s the premise of horror FPS Inner Chains. It’s also pretty much the sum total of the story as well. There’s little in the way of narrative throughout the adventure, just the occasional hint that there’s something big and bad at play. Without a solid reason for running around the admittedly fantastic looking hellscape, all players are left to ponder are the shooting mechanics and the quality of the AI. From the outset, neither are anywhere near as good as the environments. The first…

“There are no mouse controls and the key for starting the game is E” DEVELOPER MOJO BONES PUBLISHER BANDAI NAMCO PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM impact-winter.com/en There is a good game at the heart of Impact Winter, a survival adventure game that sees players trying to find other survivors and live until rescue arrives after an asteroid strikes the Earth and leaves it in a state of permanent winter. Unfortunately this chewy nougat centre is coated in a layer of strange decisions so thick that the goodness has a hard time shining through. The problems start with the menu screen if you’re a keyboard and mouse user. There are no mouse controls, and the key for starting the game is E, and unless you got a special PR boxed copy,…

AMD’s improved manufacturing process has allowed them to eke out a little more performance While we wait with bated breath for AMD’s new high-end GPU, the Vega series, which promises to rival Nvidia’s GTX 1080 Ti, we’ve been fed another annual refresh of their existing products. Last year AMD launched the RX4XX series to much fanfare, promising VR-ready performance at a price point that would make VR a whole lot less expensive. We covered the brand-new GPU in detail when it released in June of last year, based on the new Polaris architecture, and AMD has given it a fresh lick of paint to offer a slightly improved version of the product this year. Welcome to the Radeon RX5XX series, but don’t get too excited – not a whole lot…

“Gigabyte has managed to make this 15.6-inch screen fit into a 14-inch footprint” PRICE $2,899 www.gigabyte.com.au You wouldn’t pick it from the outside, but this is a gaming laptop in a business suit disguise. Gigabyte has chosen to use a chassis that wouldn’t look out of place on a CEO’s desk, but packs plenty of gaming grunt within. As a result it’s not exactly super portable for a 15.6-inch machine, weighing 2.1kg, though Gigabyte has managed to make this screen fit into the footprint of a 14-inch machine. This is thanks to the super thin bezel around the screen, which is just a few millimetres thick. It’s a standard HD 1920 x 1080 IPS panel; at this price we’d have expected something a little higher resolution. Due to the small…