Table of contents for Issue 253 in PC Powerplay

AMD has released the Radeon RX 480, its first graphics card based on an all new GPU architecture called Polaris. The Radeon RX 480 is AMD’s mid-range card, a notch below Nvidia’s new GTX1080 and GTX1070 cards. However, like its Nvidia competition, it is based on the latest 14nm FinFET fabrication process, bringing more performance in a smaller package, with less heat output and power consumption - only consuming 150W. AMD say it is will be certified for use with the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, making it one of the cheapest graphics cards that’ll provide a smooth VR experience. The RX 480 packs 2304 stream processors, has a 256-bit memory bus, and is available in 4GB or 8GB variants and be in stores early July for US$199. AMD also…

Backpack computers are now a thing. Thanks to the popularity of VR headsets, Zotac, HP, Alienware and MSI have all decided to take the guts of their high end gaming laptops, chop off the screen and add strapping. This new form factor allows you to roam around in a VR fantasy land without tethering yourself to a computer on a desk. HP for example, have detailed the Omen X, which features a top of the line Intel i7 mobile CPU, DDR4 RAM and M.2 SSD, in a 4.5kg, thin plastic box. No detail on the GPU inside, but it’s likely to be whatever mobile GPU is king of the hill when the Omen X is eventually released sometime this year. MSI, Alienware and Zotac’s have similar specs and also lack…

Here at PC PowerPlay we consider ourselves true connoisseurs of the mouse. We use them at work, of course, but mostly at play, in whole mess of different games. You could say that, to any PC gamer, the mouse is one of the most important parts of a PC set up - after all, you’ll be relying upon it in a very physical way every time you sit down for a session of Overwatch or Starcraft. So, with that in mind, listen to us when we say the Z mouse, just launched on Kickstarter, is a pretty amazing looking piece of kit. The Z - developed by New Zealand company Swiftpoint - does more than just track lateral movement. It not only has the usual mouse sensor, but also a…

“more than a few war nerds would jump at the chance to play as Simo Häyhä” If you don’t learn from history, you’re doomed to re-heat it. This is the only conclusion we can draw from the greatest tragedy to hit the gaming scene this year. In recent months Blizzard, a company with no real background in first-person shooters, launched Overwatch to widespread acclaim and fantastic commercial success. Meanwhile Gearbox, a company with a long and storied history of launching bold new FPS IPs, released Battleborn – and it has sunk without a trace. As of this writing, SteamCharts.com is reporting that Battleborn is struggling to get a peak of 1,000 concurrent players a day, and is only the 261st most popular game on Steam. It’s beaten easily by Tom…

“It’s being alone and loving it. It’s making a memory out of doing nothing” It’s so good to find that place where all the things you most love about artistic mediums converge; interactivity, meditativeness, interesting sound and challenging gameplay. Soft Body scratches all of my itches and, as well as recommending this as a game you might like, it’s also the perfect pedagogical example for the Interactive Media class I teach to tertiary students. So many games have linear music and sound, when the potential exists for so much more. You’re a splodge, on one stick, and a ghost splodge on the other. Everything you touch, and most things in the game, react to your presence by providing your ears with dissonance, retro-reminiscent bloops, rubbery squeaking and/or floaty electronica. One…

DEVELOPER DONTNOD ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE DUE 2017 www.vampyr-game.com London, 1918. Things are rough, to say the least. There’s a nasty round of the Spanish Flu going around -- and many of the more frail members of the populace are falling victim to the illness. But there’s something else lurking in the shadows, as well: an ancient race of vampires, existing since time immemorial. As Dr. Jonathan Reid, you have a responsibility to treat and protect the ailing people of London. But you’ve also got an awful secret: you are among the vampires, and your constant thirst for blood may be the most dangerous threat of all… Dontnod, the French developers behind Remember Me and Life is Strange, are taking a very different approach with Vampyr, their latest title.…

DEVELOPER UBISOFT SAN FRANCISCO AND SOUTH PARK DIGITAL STUDIOS PUBLISHER UBISOFT DUE DECEMBER 6, 2016 southpark.ubisoft.com Promising more than twice as much content as the last game, builds upon what made The Stick of Truth so good by adding a few layers of complexity without going overboard. Set a short time after the last game South Park: The Fractured But Whole has you once again playing as the New Kid, who can now be a boy or a girl, and quickly learning that fantasy stuff is lame now. Superheroes are where it’s at. Cartman leads the Coon and Friends squad as they battle in a ‘Civil War’ like event with their bitter rivals, the Freedom Pals lead by Timmy as a sort of Professor X character. There’s three key areas…

DEVELOPER RARE PUBLISHER MICROSOFT STUDIOS DUE 2017 seaofthieves.com Someone at Rare read my mind and finally made a pirate game, complete with the cool stuff like treasure hunting and ship-to-ship combat, and without all other stuff, like syphilis and gangrene. Taking place in a huge shared world Sea of Thieves encourages you to get social and team up with friends to explore the uncharted seas. While playing the game will be seamlessly populated with other players, so there’s no lobbies to join, but the developers are making sure the world never feels overstuffed with other players. “Every time you see another group of players we want you to say ‘hey, we’re a crew, we’re on this adventure together, there’s a ship, they’re on an adventure’,” said Rare studio head Craig…

“the grapple is limited to certain attach points so as to not make other movement skills redundant” DEVELOPER EA DICE PUBLISHER EA PRICE $89.99 AVAILABLE AT ORIGIN, RETAIL mirrorsedge.com I am an unashamed fan of Mirror’s Edge. As a lover of interesting movement mechanics, the sometimes disorienting but always fast and spectacular first person parkour of the 2008 game proved to be a real joy, as did the protagonist, Faith, a hard as nails but generally agreeable blackmarket courier and accidental freedom fighter. Due to the relatively lacklustre sales figures of the original game, the announcement of Catalyst, a prequel/reboot came as quite a pleasant surprise. Of course, being a fan of something sets you up for a fall when a follow-up doesn’t live up to its promise. Set before…

“Life is full and rich and thanks to Tamsoft, Onechanbara: Z2 Chaos is now part of it” DEVELOPER TAMSOFT PUBLISHER MINDSCAPE PRICE $39.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, RETAIL www.d3p.co.jp/anez2_chaos_pc Does every piece of art, by simply existing and declaring itself as art, have artistic merit? Can we point to the creative output of another human - or group of humans - and say that what they have done truly has no value? The concept of bikini girls fighting zombies and boss monsters in order to unlock progressively ridiculous and revealing outfits isn’t in itself offensive. But when that concept is executed as badly as Onechanbara Z2: Chaos, it becomes offensive. The female figure is a beautiful thing. It is expressive, a superb piece of evolutionary engineering. It is not a semi-rigid…

“Boss battles aren’t short affairs, sometimes lasting for 20 minutes or more” DEVELOPER THE GAME BAKERS PUBLISHER THE GAME BAKERS PRICE $24.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM furigame.com There’s not a lot of story in Furi, and what there is remains vague. You are a nameless, silent prisoner. To escape your imprisonment you have to fight your way through a series of “jailers” to reach a nearby planet and the hope of freedom. A strange man in a rabbit hood is aiding you in your escape and filling in details of what is going on. You are a strange warrior in a strange world, and the only way to achieve your goals is through killing everything in your path. Furi is essentially a boss rush game, with the only parts of the…

PRICE $1139 www.gigabyte.com.au If there’s one thing we love about Gigabyte cards, it’s that they often avoid flashy features most people don’t want, while delivering all of the performance of top-end cards at a very competitive price point. The Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 1080 is no exception. At $1139 it’s very well priced, yet comes with almost all of the performance of the more expensive Asus ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1080. It also has a couple of aces up its sleeve that help make it noteworthy. The Windforce 3X cooler is very similar to previous Gigabyte coolers, though the aesthetics have been given a touch up. Powered by three fans, it too has a unique fan design, with special 3D stripes on that Gigabyte claims improves performance by 23%. Our…

PRICE $439 www.amd.com In case you hadn’t noticed, VR is the big thing of 2016. With two excellent VR kits on the market, prospective users now need the power to deliver the ultra-smooth framerates that are necessary for a comfortable VR experience. NVIDIA has gone for the high-end, releasing its GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 products for the ultimate in framerates, but AMD is taking a very different approach. Their stats show that 84% of gamers buy video cards between US$100 and US$300 in price, so their new RX400 is targeting this broader audience. We’re still waiting for the RX460 and RX470 to arrive, but have finally got our mitts on the Radeon RX480, the only one of the cards that is officially rated for VR. PC PowerPlay was recently…

01 Withings Body Cardio Scale Price: $280 • Distributor: Withings www.withings.com When we saw this advanced bathroom scale promoting the measurement of pulse wave velocity, we laughed. Then looked up pulse wave velocity and found it measures arterial stiffness and can be linked to a number of health issues. Sure showed us. POWERED UP: The scale also measures fat, muscle, water, bone mass, heart rate, and BMI. Seeing the stiffness of your arteries in cold hard data points may actually motivate you to be more active. PLAYED OUT: The base is made of aluminum. Aluminum is not a real thing. 02 Plume WiFi Price: $350 for 6 • Distributor: Plume Elegant and minimalist little WiFi range extenders. Sprinkle these liberally throughout your moderately large house to ensure coverage in every…

I HAVE ONE TOO To everyone at PCPP, Thanks for keeping this dearly needed Australian media running in both print and digital form! With the global print media industry in decline, I’m hoping your subscriber base and advertisers can keep you guys afloat longer than the inevitable big crunch of media ownership, as smaller shops have to sell up or close up, in the face of decimated advertiser revenue since clicks move to aggregator apps & sites like Facebook. Which brings me to the primary point, Daniel Wilks’ excellent article “Everybody Has One” on review scores, and the untenable position serious professional reviewers find themselves in, not only up against the usual fanboy/ girl invective, but also against professional lobbyists/advocates for publishers anticipating profit/ loss outcomes on aggregated reviews from…

Not wanting to get left in the cold when it comes to VR, Razer has shown off an implementation of an Open Source Virtual Reality based headset. OSVR is, like it says, an open-source project to standardise virtual reality specs that any manufacturer can adopt and create hardware for. Razer’s HDK2 head mounted display features 1080x1200 resolution OLED displays per eye with 90fps support, a 100Hz IR camera for positional tracking and the ability to adjust the focus on each eye individually. The HDK 2 will be available in July and sell for US$399. OSVR have also announced a US$5m development fund that parties interested in developing VR experiences with the OSVR SDK can apply for. OSVR and its partners will also help support marketing and promotional efforts to assist…

Samsung are about to release a 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD. The new range of SM961 SSDs from Samsung feature a redesigned controller that generates less heat and feature MLC V-NAND, the latest Samsung flash NAND innovation. The combination of the latest NAND and a new controller result in insane speeds over around 3.2 GB/s sequential reads and 450,000 IOPS for random reads, making the SM961 the fastest consumer SSD available - on paper at least. The SM961 range also comes in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. They’re designed for OEM use, so it’s unlikely you’ll find them in most computer stores, unlike the Samsung 950 Pro. Luckily for us, Australian store RamCity will be stocking these super-fast SSDs, with pricing on the 1TB model to be about $700 excluding delivery.…

Morphies Law is a 3D FPS where nobody dies. That put you off, didn’t it? Well, instead of dying, you get a bigger body. When you shoot someone, their body mass is transferred to you, making your body bigger. If you shoot their arms, yours get larger. Want to jump higher? Take shots at their legs. Even little things, like shooting their feet and getting bigger feet of your own, makes it possible to kick players outside map boundaries! Your team has an “Avatar”, which shows the total combined mass of the team’s players, and at the end of a match, the team with the biggest Avatar wins. This looks to be really interesting and holds a lot of promise in its design. The self-balancing aspect, for example. The better…

“the Queen Elizabeth, and King George V-class battleships will be there; HMS Belfast will make an appearance as well” WHO ARTUR PLOCIENNIK WHERE WARGAMING SAINT PETERSBURG WHY WORLD OF WARSHIPS ROYAL NAVY UPDATE Since its launch last year, World of Warships has delighted gamers worldwide with its deft blend of of meticulous historical detail and gripping arcade combat. The game already includes a raft of legendary American, Japanese, German, and Russians vessels, yet the omission of a British tech tree has grown more glaring by the day. So when the long, long awaited Royal Navy update was confirmed for a late 2016 release, we sought out the WoWS global Publishing producer Artur Plociennik for the inside scoop. As every nation in the game has its own trademark strengths and weaknesses,…

DEVELOPER DECK 13 PUBLISHER FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE DUE 2017 thesurge-game.com The future’s kind of a mess, but if you’ve played video games for any length of time, you know that already. Rarely do we have the Star Trek-style utopias of cooperation and realizing mankind’s unified potential - instead, what we usually get are violent, gritty mechanical hellscapes where technology has gone wild and humanity must do everything in its power to merely subsist… including making use of those machines that probably screwed up everything in the first place. Quite appropriately, there has been an uptick in games where “struggling to survive and progress in harsh environments” is key to their appeal. One might even wonder why nobody has yet married the brutal difficulty of the Souls games to a futuristic…

DEVELOPER RESPAWN ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER ELECTRONIC ARTS DUE OCTOBER 28, 2016 www.titanfall.com You can take fans demanding more from a game as either the developers didn’t put enough content into said game or what they made was so good fans are dying for more. However you feel about that statement as it relates to the original Titanfall one thing is certain; Titanfall 2 is going to be bigger than its predecessor. Much bigger. “Definitely the feedback we got after the last game was that people wanted more,” said Jon Shiring, lead engineer on Titanfall 2. “So for some of those people who thought that they went through the content too quickly, in this game there’s a lot more paths for progression and things to do. I think people will be very…

DEVELOPER UNTOLD GAMES PUBLISHER MAXIMUM GAMES DUE 2016 www.loading-human.com A common theme throughout sci-fi is the crossroads of technology, unseen forces of the universe, and how these things help define our experiences as human beings. Developer Untold Games is now taking these concepts to a frontier that seems highly appropriate with Loading Human for Oculus VR. Loading Human, like many a good sci-fi tale, is set in a technologically advanced future. As the tellingly-named hero Prometheus, you have returned to your ailing father’s lab in the Antarctic at his urging. He has given you a request: travel through the furthest reaches of spacetime to find the Quintessence, a metaphysical force of unspeakable power and potential. It could be the only force in the universe capable of saving his life. Though…

DEVELOPER NIGHTDIVE STUDIOS PUBLISHER NIGHTDIVE STUDIOS DUE DECEMBER 2017 systemshock.com Nightdive Studios is taking a rather interesting tack with its recently announced remake of System Shock. Rather than invest in the time and often difficulty of working in a high end graphics engine, the company’s instead making the game in the rather more robust – and far less graphically intensive – Unity engine. And while the game’s still in its Kickstarter phase – it’s already earned $US773,000 of its asked-for $US900,000 – there’s already a playable demo of the game to see what backers are getting themselves in for. Unity is an interesting choice of engine, but it’s one that makes a lot of sense. For one, it makes the game much more open to older systems, and it means…

“the player has to eat every now and then, and also stand near a fire to warm up. That’s about it” DEVELOPER HEORENCES, GRIP GAMES PUBLISHER TEOTL STUDIOS PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM www.thesolusproject.com Seems we’ve reached a point in the evolution of PC gaming where it’s impossible, as a small studio, to release anything on Steam unless it has “survival” mechanics - even if survival mechanics don’t really gel with whatever it is you’re trying to do. Take the Solus Project. At first glance, it’s a spiffy-looking, Unreal Engine 4 powered FPS adventure game. Ship crashes, wake up on an alien planet, crawl around looking for bits and pieces to stay alive and solve the mystery of what went wrong. In the good old days, this would have been…

“having seen what the game can be, perhaps a little optimism is at last in order” DEVELOPER CLOUD IMPERIUM GAMES PUBLISHER CLOUD IMPERIUM GAMES PRICE $60+ AVAILABLE AT ROBERTSSPACEINDUSTRIES.COM robertsspaceindustries.com Until this point, fiddling around with Star Citizen has been like any alpha: dropped frames, glitchy lighting, long load times and occasional crashes. But Alpha 2.4.x brings the first hint of coherency, and once you set out on a mission, the promise of this game starts to shine through. Here’s what it’s like. You move through the snug corridors of Port Olisar to the airlock. The lock cycles. You strike out across the pad in dazzling sunlight, the butterscotch curve of the planet Crusader over your shoulder. Ships are moving everywhere. The platform vibrates as something large lifts off. And…

PRICE $89 au.ttesports.com Upon initially examining the exuberantly OTT design of this mouse, one may conclude that so much style must surely be overcompensating for a lack of substance. Not so! Under its many-faceted skin lies a gaming mouse that’s on par with the very best you can buy. Only the recent Logitech G502 is its equal, and for the same reasons. This mouse (and the Logi) has bang-on-perfect cursor movement on-screen. There’s no lag or acceleration to mess you up. Straight away, as soon as you plug it in it just feels right. Install the software for expanded DPI options and a bit of RGB personalisation, and it only gets better. The laser sensor feels more like a really good optical, in that movement is beautifully smooth and natural,…

PRICE $895 www.asus.com.au Welcome to our first review of Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 1070 chipset. The Republic of Gamers brand means top-quality gaming parts from Asus, and Strix indicates the best of the best. It’s around $170 more expensive than entry level GeForce GTX 1070 cards such as the Gainward Phoenix, so what does that extra cost get you? The easiest difference to spot is the huge three-blade DirectCU III cooler, which takes up twin slots. Asus claims this delivers 30% better cooling three times quieter than the default cooler, so we were a little surprised when it turned out to be the loudest cooler, at 48dB. This fairly noticeable under load, but we’re sure it’ll quieten down if the card isn’t run in OC mode. A very cool (literally)…

PRICE $899 www.msi.com This version of the GeForce GTX 1070 is MSI’s performance-oriented model. With base models of the Geforce GTX 1070 starting at $729, you’re paying an extra 23% for MSI’s performance model. You obviously won’t get a 23% boost in performance over the entry-level cards, so what do you get? As usual, let’s start with the cooler design. Unlike other manufacturers, MSI has gone with a twin-fan setup, but they’re bloody big, at 100mm across. These use a new twin-ball bearing design that apparently last longer while running quieter. Each fan also houses two types of blade – a dispersion fan that accelerates airflow, alongside normal fan blades which blow straight down. At just 47dB in our fan test, they seem to do the job nicely. Obviously there’s…

PRICE $169.95 www.roccat.org Although we’ve loved most of the Roccat mice we’ve had a chance to review, the same can’t be said for the company’s keyboards. Most of their range is enormous and stuffed to the gills with all the bells and whistles that have come to define “gaming” peripherals. The Suora is different. It’s a barebones as can be, with only a single LED backlight colour (Roccat Blue), six keys that double as programmable macro keys, a minimal bezel and little else. Getting such a sparse keyboard form a company normally known for packing in all the extra functionality it definitely came as a surprise, and a rather pleasant one at that. Rather than using Cherry MX keys, the Suora instead features TTC switches with a 1000Hz (1ms) polling…

FOUR MOST IMPRESSIVE FEATURES: 1. Sli 980m’s and i7-4800mq CPU 2. Streams to a 78” LED TV 3. It’ll whoop your desktop “probably” 14000+ in firestrike 4. The massive heatsinks I plastered onto the intel pc stick to stop it overheating LAST UPGRADE: The Sli 980m’s I installed last as they cost a bit DREAM UPGRADE: They Have just released the 990m “exact same specs as the desktop version of the gtx980” two of them would be nice but probably overkill WHY SO SPECIAL: Built it from a 2nd hand bare shell which is a very hard in a laptop. Heatsinks have to be modified and every thing is so fiddly. Build for a fraction of the price of a pre built one and because of the higher quality clevo…

MSI are partnering up with EK Water Blocks to sell new Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and 1070 graphics cards ready to be watercooled, straight from the factory. No stuffing around with ordering water blocks that don’t quite fit and then having to deal with removing the manufacturer’s stock air cooling apparatus. Just hook up your hoses and away you go. MSI’s GeForce GTX Sea Hawk EK X cards a nickel-plated electrolytic-copper water block that covers both the GPU and the VRMs. There’s even a cool looking dragon etched on the rear backplate. Besides the addition of the watercooling block, these cards are also factory overclocked. How much they’re overclocked, we don’t know. We also don’t know when they’ll be out or how much they’ll cost. But if you’re into watercooling and…

“It’s all about smashing the 60Hz barrier that the current DP 1.2 standard limits us to” As tempting as it is to splurge on one of the many sexy new gaming monitors released in the last few months – don’t. Better things are coming, very much better, and very soon. By the end of the year we’ll start seeing screens that support the newest Display Port 1.3 standard, and that’s what you want to hold out for. Lately we’ve seen ultra-wide screens, curved screens, FreeSync and G-Sync, along with the rise of Adaptive Sync. IPS LCDs are getting cheaper and OEMs are doing amazing things with previously inferior TN panels. All good things, for sure, but you would be well advised to wait for DP 1.3 – and while you…

“Hero unit Gabriel Angelos led the charge and used his devastating hammer attacks to wipe out infantry squads” DEVELOPER RELIC ENTERTAINMENT PUBLISHER SEGA DUE TBA 2017 dawnofwar.com Coming over five years after the last expansion, and seven years after the last main entry in the series, Dawn of War III has a lot to live up to. Somewhat of a fusion of the first two games, this new entry combines the base building of the first Dawn of War while retaining the focus on hero units as seen in Dawn of War II. It’s also being developed with those new to the Dawn of War series in mind. “Even fans of the franchise may not have played it for five or ten years,” Philippe Boulle, game director on of War…

DEVELOPER DICE PUBLISHER ELECTRONIC ARTS DUE OCTOBER 21, 2016 www.battlefield.com It’s a strange world we live in when the latest Call of Duty is accused of being too repetitive despite being set in space and featuring zero-G combat, while Battlefield 1 is praised for innovation while going back in time to World War I. But in a weird way it makes sense. Gamers have conquered been to the future already, but how often have they fought in the Arabian desert or up high in the Alps? Truthfully, I’m struggling to think of many examples. My time with Battlefield 1 was spent playing 32 versus 32 Conquest matches on a map called St. Quentin Scar, an area based on the French countryside. You know the drill, two teams fight to hold…

DEVELOPER SPIRAL HOUSE PUBLISHER MAXIMUM GAMES DUE 2017 trollandi.maximumgames.com Over the past few years, we’ve seen some very interesting examples of games centred around a single player controlling two characters, separately and cleverly using the capabilities of each character to help advance further. Developer Spiral House and publisher Maximum Games are taking this concept to new places with Troll and I, a game about a young boy and his very unlikely companion. Troll is a mythical monster that’s been living in the Nordic wilderness. As with many cryptids, he’s the target of people who want to prove his existence, and one such person has sent out packs of hunters to uncover Troll. Unfortunately, said hunters are also causing serious environmental damage in their quest, opening portals for hordes of nasty…

DEVELOPER STREUM ON STUDIO/CYANIDE PUBLISHER FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE DUE 2016 spacehulk-deathwing.com The Warhammer 40K universe has seen a fair few game adaptations of late - see our highlight of Dawn of War III this issue - but despite having a lot of trappings that would be perfect for a big, action-heavy first-person shooter, there hasn’t been one set in Games Workshop’s sprawling sci-fi setting for quite some time now - the closest we’ve gotten was Warhammer 40K: Space Marine, a third person shooter from 2011. However, with the upcoming release of Space Hulk: Deathwing, that’s about to change. Space Hulks, in the universe’s terminology, refer to derelict masses of broken ships space debris that have accumulated and formed into large chunks floating in the black. In the original Space Hulk…

“Bosses are more akin to bullet hell encounters than traditional action RPG boss fights” DEVELOPER ANIMA PROJECT PUBLISHER BADLAND GAMES PRICE $19.99 AVAILABLE AT STEAM, HUMBLE www.gateofmemories.com Anima may not be a known commodity in the English speaking world, but in Spain and France it’s a popular commodity. A tabletop RPG designed by Carlos B. Garcia Aparacio and the Anima Project Studios, Anima: Beyond Fantasy (the core book) invites players to adventure in the world of Gaia, a land heavily influenced by the art and style of Japanese RPGs, with Asian inspired honour codes, martial arts and spirituality but still clinging to some traditional Western fantasy concepts as well. Although the game was briefly released in an English translation around 2010, Anima never really took off outside of Spain and…

PRICE $1399 www.benq.com.au A curve still carries a hefty per-pixel price premium. This fine gaming monitor from BenQ, for instance, has fewer pixels than a 27” professional monitor, for roughly twice the price. But a curve brings a lot to the experience. At 34-inches, the XR3501 is very wide. It sweeps and, thanks to a tighter than normal curve, it envelopes. This display has a 2000R curve instead of a 3000R - meaning a circle made up of XR3501s arranged edge-to-edge would be only four metres across, not six. Smaller radius is better, see. Making up for the 2560x1080 resolution is a 144Hz refresh rate, though there’s no FreeSync or G-Sync here. Speed is a game-friendly 4ms grey-to-grey and various contrast settings allow for inky blacks and a nominal contrast…

PRICE $1249 www.asus.com As the most expensive card in the roundup, we really wanted to see what Asus had done to make this card shine. Once again it’s part of Asus’ ROG Strix premium range, which is why the price of $1249 is around $240 more expensive than the cheapest GeForce GTX 1080 on the market, Gainward’s Phoenix GeForce GTX 1080. Once again Asus has used its new DirectCU III cooler, which is a rather large dual-slot design. Asus claims that is now using special patented Wing-Blade fans on this cooler, which apparently increase static air pressure by 105% over the GPU. Like most GPUs these days, it also supports 0dB mode; when you’re only doing light 2D work, the fans are disengaged entirely, making for a silent PC. It’s…

PRICE $1139 www.msi.com “The MSI card does have an extra power plug, which suggests it might overclock better, but that’s no guarantee” Priced almost identically to the Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 1080 we didn’t expect to see much variance between these two cards. And we were right – they’re functionally almost identical, so choosing one will come down to your brand preference. Once again we see what appears to be an identical cooler to MSI’s GeForce GTX 1070, which uses the new Torx 2.0 fan to deliver 22% more air pressure. It’s got the same double ball bearing and twin-blade design, and it worked brilliantly. Even in OC mode, this card recorded the lowest fan noise, at just 46dB. That’s even quieter than the lower-powered GeForce GTX 1070 from MSI!…

PRICE $139.95 www.ozonegaming.com Back in the day when membrane gaming keyboards were still a thing, the Blade night have been worth the asking price, but in today’s market it just comes across as an overpriced lump of plastic that is well past its prime. There is truth to that last part. The Blade is old. It’s actually a product from 2013, finally released to the Australian gaming market in 2016. In 2013 the Blade may have been an appealing alternative to the more expensive gaming keyboards around at the time, with the likes of the Corsair Vengeance K70, Logitech G710+, Logitech G510s and Razer BlackWidow Ultimate dominating the marketplace and setting the price ceiling pretty high. Compared to them, the Blade may have seemed like something of a bargain. In…

“The gaming world is embracing Linux as well, with many titles currently available” For a long time now nearly everyone has been comfortably sitting in the Windows OS camp. It’s easy to use, takes advantage of modern technology and let’s face it you can pretty much find software for any application on it. There are alternatives however to Windows – and I’m not simply taking about Apple MAC OSX (though it is an option). The popularity for other Operating Systems like Linux and Android shows that people are both curious and willing to try new things. Let’s take a look at some of the options available out there to try. Linux has been around for some time but is now at the stage where it is a serious rival to…

“They poured millions of pounds of development money into elaborate sets and costumes” Privateer 2: The Darkening DEVELOPER ORIGIN SYSTEMS PERSONALITY ERIN ROBERTS RELEASED 1996 NUTSHELL Ostensibly set in the Wing Commander universe, it used no Wing Commander characters, ships or locations. Instead it was populated by surprisingly serious actors like John Hurt, Christopher Walken and Clive Owen. Obviously, gameplay suffered. FMV. Full motion video. What a triumph of technology it was. Tiny snippets of blurry film stitched into gaps in the low-res gameplay of the 1990s, like a tiny smear of caviar on dry toast. The 486s and Pentiums of the day were so underpowered, full-scene video had to be heavily interlaced to effectively halve the vertical resolution. Even then, framerates rarely hit the 30s. The first great FMV…