CRUCIAL 16GB DDR4

If you’re trying to save some cash on your X99 build, Crucial has you covered

       So, here it is. This is DDR4. Side-loaded into the new high-performance Intel X99 platform comes the next generation of system memory – and it’s a bit underwhelming on our desktop PCs. In the server space though it’s a different matter, because that’s where DDR4 gestated.
      The main benefi of DDR4 over its forebears is the combination of higher possible densities and lower power demands. In a server farm, where you can both cut the number of memory modules drawing juice from the grid and also make each of them drink less, you can create more effiient machines – and that makes the whole lot cheaper. In the consumer world, DDR4 has really just come along for the ride. Like DDR4, Haswell-E has come from the serverbased land of the Xeon, where it’s necessarily tied into the new memory system. For us, though, it’s not such a big deal. Quad-channel DDR3 memory already offers high speeds and huge bandwidth; more than most of us even need. The lower power demands don’t make a huge difference in a solitary machine, either.
      In an X99 board DDR4 is a necessary evil, but thankfully the premium generally attached to a new generation of memory can be skirted around if you shop carefully. Crucial has produced some really impressive, ultra-basic modules that don’t cost much more than an equivalent DDR3 kit. The plain green PCB and paucity of RAM chips (just four chunks of silicon on these single-sided DIMMs) won't make you want to Dremel out a ragged new window in your PC chassis, but they do perform impressively well in our test system. The fact there are so few memory chips probably explains the performance shortfall at the same frequency compared with the higher-spec Corsair kit opposite, but it isn’t a big gap.
      The Crucial set is rated at the X99’s starting point of 2,133MHz, which is pretty nippy in the fist place, but they also do pretty well with a little light overclocking. We managed to get stable performance out of the 16GB kit running at 2,666MHz – at that speed they posted a lower latency than anything the Vengeance kit could manage, even at 3,000MHz. With no XMP on this basic kit, though, you have to set the memory up yourself if you want to go any faster than the base 2,133MHz.
      At their standard, one-touch 2,800MHz XMP setting, the modules in the rival Corsair kit, perform much better in all our memory benchmark tests. But in the real world, that doesn’t account for a lot. It’s easy to fid the performance gap between different kits if you delve into synthetic benchmark numbers. In the real world, though, you will barely register a flcker of difference in the performance of your applications or games between this £150 kit and the £300 Vengeance sticks.
      When you’ve just spent £800 on a new CPU and £300 on a new motherboard, one of two situations will arise. Either you’re desperately trying to fid a way to cut costs in other areas of your build, or that sort of money doesn’t mean a great deal to you. This Crucial DDR4 kit is a good bet for those in the fist boat.

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INTEL CORE i7 5960X

More threads than a David lynch mini-series and just as powerful

There sure is a lot of silicon given over to the graphical components of most of today’s processors. Intel’s standard Haswell architecture throws millions of transistors at its HD graphics component, and AMD’s latest Kaveri chips are only a couple of percentage points from being a complete half-and-half split between processor and graphics.
      For us enthusiast-type folk, though more used to strapping a big shiny graphics card to our motherboard than relying on weak-heart integrated GPUs – that’s a lot of redundant die space we’re paying for. it also sounds like an awful lot of space we could be shoving extra CPU cores into, doesn’t it?
      And that’s exactly what intel’s high-performance CPU range has been doing for the last few years. The Extreme line of intel’s processors represents the pinnacle of its desktop chips, cramming in more cores than any desktop chip available. For the most part, anyway.
      But despite shrinking in production process, even the Extreme range has been stuck fast at six cores for a long while. That’s despite AMD already banging the octo-core drum – albeit to little effect – and intel’s own server parts rocking six cores and 12 threads over four years ago.
      Finally though, intel has decided to up the ante on its Extreme consumer chips and is giving us a bona fied eight-core processor with the top end of its new Haswell-E processors. the core i7 5960X is that chip, and is the fist octo-core chip with intel’s powerful core architecture squeezed inside.
      Well…kinda. You could have actually gone super-extreme with the previous sandy Bridge E generation of Extreme chips and dropped a super-expensive eight-core Xeon directly into a standard X79 desktop motherboard.
      Anyway, the Xeon E5 -2687W was a 32nm mega-chip. it gave us our fist taste of eight proper intel cores in one chip back in 2012, and in doing so engendered the disappointment of last generation’s ivy Bridge E chips, still stalling on six cores.
      Two and a bit years later we’ve fially got the i7 5960X and its unlocked multiplier giving us the full desktop eight-core, 16-thread monty. It’s running on the latest intel Haswell core architecture, the new micro-architecture design for the 22nm production process fist displayed by the ivy Bridge processors. Haswell debuted over a year ago, and in the intervening time has frimly cemented its place in the top desktop Pcs around, especially after the recent Devil’s canyon refresh.
      Now, though, Haswell E is set to take our high-end desktops to the next level, offering unprecedented processing performance.

Sweet 16

      Let’s take a closer look at this new CPU, then. We already know it’s rocking eight intel cores, and because this top chip is taking advantage of Hyper-threading that translates into a full 16 threads of processing power. We couldn’t help but break into a great big geeky grin watching the cinebench test split over 16 chunks and chew through the benchmark faster than anything we’d seen before.
      It’s also completely unlocked as any good Extreme Edition CPU should be – and contains a full 40 Pci e 3.0 lanes. What’s more, there’s a huge 20MB of cache. the only real let-down when you take a fist look at the specs, then, is that operating frequency.
      With a baseclock of just 3GHz and a turbo speed of up to 3.5GHz, it looks a little off the pace when you compare it with the 3.6GHz/4GHz  confiuration of the last ivy Bridge-E processor. We’ve also just had intel itself releasing the i7 4790k processor with a baseclock of 4GHz, which also serves to make this brand new, hyper-expensive CPU look somewhat lethargic in the clockspeed department.
      But that’s a little unfair, really – being able to run all eight of those cores at a turbo of 3.5GHz is nothing to be sniffed at and the lower baseclock is likely a result of making sure intel can produce reliable yields of these 22nm CPU dies, with all eight cores running stably. With a chip requiring more functional physical cores in a die, there’s a greater chance of it dropping out of the manufacturing process with one of them functioning sub-optimally. Pulling the clockspeed back a touch, then, means intel has better odds of producing these expensive parts in a decent volume.
      As we’ve said, the new Haswell-E chips are all unlocked, and if you’re lucky you’ll be able to get a hefty performance boost by upping those clockspeeds in your motherboard of choice.
      And the new motherboards play a pivotal role in this new high-performance story too; the processors themselves are only one part of it. Haswell-E is a whole new computing platform, offering a genuinely different proposition over the standard quad-core setups and even over the last generation of Extreme intel platforms. Accompanying the new Haswell-E processors is the X99 platform and with that comes support for new storage interfaces and a brand new standard in system memory: DDr4.
      The new memory standard remains in the same quad-channel configuration as intel has used with the other lG a 2011-based platforms, but offers a considerably lower operating voltage than DDr3. Most quad-channel kits are running at 1.5v, but the modules we’ve been testing are more than happy running at serious speeds with just a 1.2v base. With the X99 chipset, DDr4 RAM also starts out with a 2,133MHz baseclock, which is a good deal quicker than the 1,866MHz of the ivy Bridge-E generation of processors.

Testing Times

      As a platform then, the new Haswell E setup can become the base for a desktop machine with more power in it than ever before possible. and that’s borne out by the benchmarks we’ve thrown at our test system this month.
      Running the core i7 5960X against the previous ivy Bridge-E champion-chip, the core i7 4960X, we’re seeing at least a 25 per cent boost in multi-threaded applications. We’ve never seen the X264 benchmark completed so quickly: we used to have time to go off and make a cup of tea while waiting for it to fiish.
      Compared with the latest Devil’s canyon i7 4790k we’re looking at a performance uplift of well over 50 percent. Of course you’d kind of hope for some extra performance considering the extra core count, but as the 5960X is also running almost a full 1GHz slower that’s still pretty impressive stuff.
      And when you start to level up the clockspeeds with a little judicious waving of the overclocking stick, the new Haswell-E chip really pulls away from either of the older processors. With all three CPUs running at their maximum overclock there’s a much bigger difference between their relative performance. Using the cinebench rendering benchmark, the core i7 4960X is now 38 per cent slower than the top core i7 Haswell-E and even running at a breakneck 4.7GHz the core i7 4790k is a staggering 85 per cent slower than the new king.
      So what did we manage to hit with our i7 5960X, then? it took a little work, but we were able to get a rock-solid system running with the asus X99 Deluxe motherboard at 4.375GHz. try as we might though, we couldn’t get it stable at anything higher. But we’re not professional overclockers, not by any stretch of the imagination, and we’re confient you’ll be able to fid some 5960Xs going quicker in the wild.

Even running at a Breakneck 4.7GHz the 4790k is 85% slower

      One of the really impressive things outside of the raw performance of the Haswell-E is the fact that it manages to do it all within such a comfortable power and thermal envelope. at stock speeds – thanks to that lowish baseclock – the i7 5960X runs almost 20°c cooler than the top i vy Bridge-E cPU with both at 100 per cent load. i t also operates with a peak platform power draw some 30 watts lower than the 4960X. that levels off when you start overclocking, where the Haswell-E starts to get a bit more power hungry at peak performance, but impressively it still manages to run cooler than the 4960X when both are at their maximum frequency.

Gaming Beast?

      For a productivity machine, then, chewing through raw image and video fies or doing any other form of brutal number-crunching, the core i7 5960X is the pinnacle of desktop processors. i t may be super-expensive, but the time it could save you rendering scenes and such might just prove worthwhile.
      But as the best setup for gaming? that’s a tougher ask. i n tel’s supporting materials talk about performance boosts from the extra multi-threading capabilities of the Haswell E octo-core, but when it comes to fiing our testing suite across its bows we’ve barely noticed any improvements over the standard Haswell platform.
      That wasn’t necessarily a big surprise when it comes to the Unreal Engine 3 likes of Bioshock, but we were hoping for a bit of multi-threaded lovin’ from Battlefild 4’s Frostbite 3 engine. the core i7 5960X does have a slight edge when you start to throw multiple GPUs into the mix, but certainly not enough of an edge to make a hardened gamer suddenly think the extra £500-600 was worthwhile for a new cPU.
      So, no, the i7 5960X isn’t the gaming messiah chip we might have been hoping for. But that isn’t necessarily it for the Haswell-E platform in terms of gaming, because there is another option. traditionally the lower end of the Extreme range has been a quad-core, offering not much else above the standard platform, but with Haswell-E that bottom chip is a hex-core cPU costing not much more than a 4790k. the i7 5820k could be a contender for the absolute best gaming cPU around – stay tuned for more on that one.
      As it is though, the 5960X is an outstanding processor. the last eight-core chip we saw in an i n tel desktop was a pretty middling Xeon that cost £1,500; this chip is around half the price and a good deal quicker too. You still have to pay through the nose for this sort of processing power, of course, but if you think you can make good use of those 16 threads, the i7 5960X is worth every penny.

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SCAN 3XS X99 CARBON

      The X99 Carbon has tipped up with an overclocked Intel Core i7 5820K, running at a decent 4.25GHz. This is the bottom rung of the Haswell-E ladder, but it’s arguably the most exciting and intriguing of the lot. Traditionally this position was held by an uninspiring quad-core chip, offering depressingly little over the non-enthusiast class Core i7s below it. The Core i7 5820K though is the cheapest six-core processor Intel has ever made, and it’s only £50 more expensive than the Devil’s Canyon i7 4790K.
      That means you’re not paying much more for a full two extra cores/four extra threads, as well as support for quad-channel DDR4 and a good many more PCIe lanes too. That’s perfect if you want to add another GTX 780 Ti into this rig or take advantage of the PCIe-based M.2 or SATA Express connections the Asus X99 motherboard affords.
      What we found most impressive about our fist taste of this powerful little chip is that it’s easily the equal of last generation’s Core i7 4960X. That was the top chip of the Ivy Bridge-E range, and would have been the top chip just a month ago. Not only is this cheaper processor as quick, that’s with the older chip running at over 4.6GHz against the 5820K’s 4.25GHz max speed, but it’s a good bit more efficient too, as it runs at its top overclock – at 100 per cent load – around 20˚C cooler than its older sibling.
      It does need that efficiency though; our only real issue with this Scan build is that it runs off a 550W Corsair PSU. At peak load the 3XS X99 Carbon is drawing around 440W from the wall, meaning the PSU isn’t operating at its most efficient and there isn’t much spare capacity if you want to take advantage of the extra PCIe lanes with another GPU.

Seen, not heard

      But what a GPU Scan has dropped into this machine. The overclocked EVGA GTX 780 Ti is one of the most powerful single-GPU cards you can get, and with its ACX cooling array is also one of the quietest. And thanks to the big but beautiful Corsair chassis, the system stays incredibly quiet during operation. Compare that with the relatively noisy Chillblast rig and it’s clear there’s still a place for the classic big desktop chassis.
      This lovely system is also some £800 cheaper than the Fusion Carbon, but does give away gaming performance to the dual-GPU card sitting inside Chillblast’s machine. Sometimes it isn’t just about the benchmarks though, and the hassles of twin-GPU setups still frustrate.
      Scan has created an incredibly versatile, powerful machine with the X99 Carbon. The great-value six-core chip at its heart and the GTX 780 Ti have a lot to do with that, and considering the components inside this rig, that £1,830 price tag doesn’t look bad. Not bad at all.

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Roccat Kone Pure Military Edition

      Roccat has already proved itself on the gaming peripheral battle ground with its Ryos MK Pro Gaming Keyboard, which won our gaming keyboard group test some weeks ago. This time, though, we’re looking at its newest range of gaming mice, in particular the Kone Pure series.

      The Kone Pure is a series of immensely impressive gaming mice. The base edition, the Kone Pure, has enough features to make even the most cynical of mouse connoisseurs salivate. The rest of the range, from the Kone Pure Color, Kone Military and Kone Optical all offer a little something different either in terms of design or some special feature.
      The Kone Pure Military Edition is the mouse we have on test in this instance – in Camo Charge green we might add. It’s a cleverly designed mouse, with ample width for a comfortable feel, an impressive 5000dpi optical sensor, 1ms response time, 1000Hz polling rate, 30G acceleration and 1.8 metre braided USB cable.
      On top of that little lot you also get a 72MHz Turbo Core V2 32-bit ARM processor with 576KB of memory. The processor is used to compute the various functions of the mouse as fast as possible, which decreases any lag or wait time between profile switching or when having to alter the mouse buttons during intense gaming. The 576KB of memory may not sound like much, but it’s enough to store a huge set of user configured macros.
      By default there are nine possible button assignments across the seven available buttons (counting the wheel up and down). However, these can be doubled with the use of the Roccat EasyShift + technology. If you install the Roccat Kone driver, the possibility to increase the number of macros and button assignments doubles once more and can be configured for game specific functions as well as multimedia or advanced browser functions.
      The design is rather splendid, with a glowing LED Roccat logo on the rear of the palm rest, which can be configured to illuminate in 16.8 million colors. The available designs in the Military range (Camo Charge, Desert Strike and Naval Storm) are all equally stunning, but they're also free from any distracting extras that could be hit or pressed during gaming. It’s ergonomically styled and fits in the hand well without having to alter your grip to accommodate any side installed features.
      We found the Roccat KonePure to be an extremely easy mouse to get used to. Even without the drivers installed,its functionality was superb,and it glided effortlessly across the surface of our desk. In game, it was truly terrific and very accurate, while on the desktop for normal day-today duties it functioned well enough and even added a little something extra thanks to the button assignments.
      For the reasonable price of a tad over £60, you’re getting a superb gaming mouse with plenty of capability, minus the extreme additions that are so often added for effect on gaming mice. All in all, an excellent choice of mouse for the gamer.

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BioWare’s Body Horror?

Plug & Play

      It takes a certain amount of faith to spend several years in medical college, only to leave and set up a fledgling games studio, but that’s precisely what Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk  did back in 1995. The good doctors are now best known as the founders of BioWare, among the most respected developers currently active; with such games as Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age and Mass Effect among their key titles, BioWare’s track record speaks for itself.
      Things have changed a great deal for BioWare’s staff in recent years – its founders retired in 2012, leaving the studio under the ownership of EA. It’s now headed up by Matthew Bromberg, and under his leadership, BioWare’s currently working on an as-yet unnamed Mass Effect sequel, and a similarly unspecified Star Wars game.
      What we weren’t expecting, however, was for the studio – previously best known for its action RPGs to suddenly branch out into the survival horror genre. However, if we’re interpreting a recent teaser trailer correctly, this is precisely the direction BioWare’s newest title is going.
      On the 24th July, games journalists and other industry types were sent an ominous email which read, “The time is near… they are watching. Your power is rising. You’ve been chosen.”Then, at midnight, a live-action trailer appeared online ( youtu.be/32bLpcBoxT8), which promptly assaulted the viewer with a series of nightmarish images and sounds: a hooded figure running down a dark, cluttered alleyway, glancing back at something off-camera. A René Magrite-like shot of a man in a black suit, sitting in an opulent living room, his head obscuredby thick black smoke emanating from his ice-white collar. The same hooded figure, struggling to open a car door, only to see that is doppelganger is already sitting inside, staring back at him. What can it all mean?
      For now, BioWare isn’t saying – at the time of writing, the game’s title hasn’t even been announced yet – and a visit to a website (www.youve-been-chosen.com) doesn’t reveal much either. Only the words, “Cologne, Germany” hint at more details to come: this is the venue for the annual Gamescon conference, so it’s pretty certain there’ll be further announcements later this month.
      There’s some speculation that BioWare’s nightmarish project might be the rumored collaboration between the studio and Failbetter Games, the UK team behind the online adventures Fallen London and Sunless Sea. Whether this is true or not, it certainly looks as though BioWare’s exploring some refreshingly different territory with this new project. A survival horror game with the freedom of choice of Mass Effect? Yes please, BioWare.

Online

      Firefly’s the kind of cult TV show that, had it been cancelled by Fox in 2014 (rather than in 2002), would have probably been snapped up by a company like Netflix, or at least turned into a web series. Unfortunately, time was never on Firefly’s side, and Joss Whedon’s sci-fi adventure was axed after just out after just 11 episodes had reached TV screens. The series’ fans remained unusually devoted, though, which explains why, more than a decade later, it’s getting its own MMO in the shape of Firefly Online.
      To coincide with the San Diego Comic Con in late July, developer Sparkplug Games unveiled the first trailer for the game ( youtu.be/8y98otfH9X8), which will be a space exploration sim where players customise their own ship and blast off for their own Firefly-inspired adventures, which involves gathering your crew, completing missions and trading items. The trailer’s largely given over to a procession of wide-eyed Browncoats, each describing how they’d tailor their chosen ship, but the big reveal comes at the end: series star Nathan Fillion, who played rough-and-ready hero Malcolm 'Mal' Reynolds will be making appearances in the game, along with the rest of Firefly’s original cast, including Alan Tudyk, who the developer says will be playing “multiple roles”.
      This will certainly give Firefly Online an air of authenticity, especially with the returning cast being joined by some remarkably familiar ship designs – among them the Kepler, a new ship created by Tim Earls, the designer of the craft from the original series. Cast and ships aside, though, what of the game itself? Given that Firefly Online’s a browser game created in Unity, it’s fair to say that it won’t be as sharp-looking as something like Star Citizen, and if you’re looking for a sheer scale, you might be better off waiting for something like No Man’s Sky or Elite Dangerous – according to Sparkplug, Firefly Online will have 200 worlds to explore, which is a far cry from the procedurally generated galaxies of those other games. Then again, Firefly Online will be taking a more story-led approach to space trading, rather than a purely open-ended sandbox, so if Sparkplug can make the narrative aspect of the game right, Firefly Online is likely to be a must-have title for fans looking to return to the uiverse Joss Whedon created over a decade ago. Updates on the game's progress will be found at keepflying.com.

Incoming

      The summer months are a bit of a drought for major new games, which then quickly gives way to a tidal wave of releases by autumn. This year’s no exception, with the release of Assassin’s Creed: Unity now mere weeks away. Unity relocates the stalk-and-slash franchise to Revolution-era Paris, a city whose grime and stunning architecture have been lovingly replicated with more fidelity than ever. Behind the graphics, there’s a new, improved control system, which will apparently make for smoother rooftop running antics and more involving combat.
      Unity’s powered by Ubisoft’s new Anvil engine, and as you can see in the latest trailer (youtu.be/Y5tBpPxdZGs), the results appear stunning from a technical standpoint. The developer’s rightly proud of what it’s created: a replica of 18th-century Paris that is so detailed that its most famous landmark, Notre Dame Cathedral, took a year to build all by itself. The most exciting part of this shiny new engine, though, is the addition of a cooperative mode where four players can join together as a quartet of stealthy assassins. Smoother graphics aside, elements like this could bring freshness to Ubisoft’s well established franchise. Assassin’s Creed: Unity is out on the 28th October.

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BORDERLANDS : THE PRE-SEQUEL

      Like a robot wearing a m an’s face,Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel neither one thing nor another.It iterates and improves on the series like all good sequels should, but story wise it slots into the gap between the first two games, charting the descent of a more humanized Handsome Jack. He’s kind of like the Star Wars prequels’ Anakin Skywalker, if he were intentionally rather than accidentally funny.
      Like the story, the Pre-Sequel’s world size is also a halfway house, bigger than Borderlands but a touch smaller than Borderlands 2. I start on Pandora’s moon, a location you could see in the last game but never get to, and it’s the perfect place to test The Pre-Sequel’s various new features.
      The area I spawn in is called Outlands Spur, an expanse of jagged rock cut by deep blue chasms. While they’d pose obstacles on Pandora, here I can jump them with the help of glowing green boost pads. Before that, though, I need oxygen. I am, after all, in space, and frequent trips to O2 terminals are a necessity. They serve as waypoints rather than burdens though, lining the path to my mission – which is to freeze a lake by redirecting a flow of methane so that I can cross into Drakensburg.
      That’s easier said than done with the moon’s native population of Kraggons pounding about, though. They’re like crystalline space stegosauruses, and they attack in packs. At least they offer a chance to test my weapons. One criticism of the Borderlands series is that, despite the roughly 87 bazillion guns, you’d see the same types crop up repeatedly in the course of a game. The Pre-Sequel aims to keep things fresh with two new families of firearm: laser and ice. The first are more precision weapons, able to target an exploding fuel barrel at 500 paces, while the latter specialize in crowd control, immobilizing one target so you can concentrate on others.
      The character you pick also greatly affects how you play. I start with celestial gladiator Athena, whose action skill, Kinetic Aspis, is a Captain America-type boomerang shield that absorbs all frontal damage and directs it back at the enemy when thrown. Robotically augmented engineer Wilhelm’s action skill summons two drones called Wolf and Saint: Wolf roams the level attacking enemies while Saint sticks close and regenerates health. Finally there’s the lawbringer Nisha, whose action skill, Showdown, consists of pressing LB to automatically aim at enemies and receive increased gun damage, fire rates, reload speed, bullet speed accuracy, and recoil reduction. The fourth, Claptrap, isn’t available in my demo.
      Like before, all characters have three separate skill trees. Athena, the tanky healer of the group, has the Phalanx tree, which is all about teammate buffs and health regeneration. The Wrath of the Goddess tree contains Kinetic Aspis, which cause your shield to ricochet off multiple enemies. Xiphos is more for damage-dealing solo players and includes moves like Epicenter (butt-slam to create black holes). Ceraunic Storm ups elemental damage through moves such as Flash Freeze.
      Each character also carries four pieces of equipment, including shields and skill mods. I chuck a Longbow Flamin’ Merv grenade at a group of soldiers and watch as it splits into eight smaller grenades and burns away their air masks.
      The game swells with this brand of slightly off-colour humour. The series was always driven more by its personality than its weapons, and The Pre-Sequel looks to be packing its share of Internet-dominating gags. Along with a very vocal Handsome Jack, a cockney called Pickle looks set to become this year’s Tiny Tina.
      The third Borderlands game has no number for a reason: Gearbox evidently feel it hasn’t earned sequel status. They’ve clearly got unfinished business here, however, and when that includes laser-rifle shoot-outs with ice dragons on the moon, there’s no doubting its pedigree.

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PATH OF EXILE : FORSAKEN MASTERS

Take a master class in monster-slaying.

    spare a thought for the losers of of ExileThey slay the same monsters as everyone else. They run the same’s action-RPG loot lottery.Path dungeons and take out the same bosses, only to come out the other side with a rusty trowel and bargain-bucket plate mail.
      In a random system, some will find themselves on the wrong end of every dice roll. Producer and lead designer Chris Wilson understands their pain. “There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing what you want to do and just having badluck preventing you from actually doing it.”
      Path of Exile’s second free expansion, Forsaken Masters, wants to help. It’ll introduce seven ‘masters’: NPCs who represent a powerful, idealised version of each character class. You can befriend them to unlock customisable hideouts and extra crafting options, designed to give less fortunate players ways to tweak items to suit their needs.

      This is an RPG, a place where bonds of friendship, trust and love can only be forged through the completion of a linear series of errands, but the tasks will vary significantly depending on the master you’re trying to woo. For the assassin master you kill individual targets, but sometimes you’ll have to leave particular witnesses alive to send a message to their bosses, or lead targets into traps. Elsewhere, Elreon the Templar master is busy rescuing relics from dangerous, monster-infested dungeons – a man clearly in need of a monster-slaying specialist.
      After a few missions, your relationship with the master will level up, and they’ll start appearing in towns to chat and sell you things. Prove yourself further, and they’ll whisk you away to a hideout, which can be decorated with paraphernalia befitting an action-RPG superhero – artfully placed logs, impaled corpses, swarms of bees, that sort of thing. The hideout gives you access to the master’s specialised crafting bench, and daily missions.
      Unlike the extra endgame activities the last update brought, all of this will be folded into lower level areas. “We wanted to make sure that everything in the new expansion could be experienced within the first 40 or so hours of the game, playing through the first difficulty level or two,” says Wilson. Grinding Gear wants to package PoE’s hero vs horde combat runs into different formats to appeal to different types of player. Dailies will offer guaranteed progression in bite-sized increments as a quick, palatable alternative to continuous re-runs of the three-act story. 

      Masters will also be free, a symptom of Grinding Gear’s ‘no friction’ approach to the free-to-play model. The only items you pay for are cosmetic. More updates are coming. If you’re looking for a place to slay millions of monsters in the coming year, Path of Exile makes a fine choice.

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Bullet heaven

      Jun’ya Ota was 19 when he decided he wanted to make a game. Unsatisfied with most games on the market, he wanted to make something for himself to enjoy: something simple, challenging and a bit oddball. In his spare time, he taught himself programming and how to compose game music. Under the alias ‘ZUN’, Ota created Touhou Rei’iden – Highly Responsive to Prayers in 1995.
      In a game vaguely similar to Breakout, Shinto monk Reimu Hakurei smacks around a giant yin yang ball  as she crosses dimensions, searching for the demon who destroyed her shrine. It’s absurd, difficult to control,
and unrepresentative of the series as a whole.
      While the yin yang ball mechanic was thankfully dropped, the game’s bosses were clearly influential.Most stages involved flipping tiles and scoring points, but every five levels, Reimu would encounter a vaguely hellish figure. These unnerving enemies would shower the screen in increasingly complex patterns of projectiles, shifting the focus from coping with a primitive physics engine to simple survival – a welcome change of pace.
      The Story of Eastern Wonderland was ZUN’s second game, and a significant departure. It was the first ‘true’ Touhou game, a bullet hell shoot-’em-up with slower, more intricate patterns of projectiles. However, ZUN was still experimenting with the tone and setting of the Touhou series: in one tonally confused level, after fighting hordes of cartoonish ghosts, you encounter a modern-day tank emblazoned with a yin yang  symbol.
      Computers at the time weren’t well equipped for rendering action-oriented games. The first five Touhou games were developed on the NEC PC-9801 (‘PC-98’), a Japanese MS-DOS-based computer roughly analogous to the Apple II. Due to the low frame rate, resolution and colour spectrum, half the challenge was telling enemies’ projectiles from the background. The music was similarly difficult to appreciate, due to the small range of noises the computer could make. 
      Though ZUN finished Highly Responsive to Prayers in 1996, he initially sold the first two Touhou  games a year later at Comiket 52, a biannual convention and market for self-published works. Sales of the first five games were unremarkable: 1998’s Lotus Land Story sold less than 300 copies. Mystic Square marked the fifth and final release of the PC-98-era titles, and after the series’s tepid reception, it seemed to be the end of the Touhou Project – an eccentric curiosity that never broke out of obscurity. ZUN went on to work for Taito Corporation as a programmer for several years.
      In 2002, ZUN’s blog carried an announcement: a new game, The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, was in
development. This sixth entry was hardly recognisabl "Apple-interchange-newline" as a descendant of his earlier works. Running on Windows, it was fast and fluid – the equivalent of moving from Wolfenstein 3D to Quake. It was a fresh start for the Touhou series, and a rebellion against the direction he saw other games going in.
      ZUN felt many shmups at the time were overburdened with abstract systems and gimmicks, leaving dodging projectiles as an afterthought. In a brief post-mortem, ZUN wrote, “The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil brings things back to the starting point, by curbing the game systems that change the difficulty in obscure ways while at the same time pursuing the natural fun of dodging bullets.” It was slow to build momentum – initial circulation was limited to the copies sold at conventions, and later, online CD retailers. Ultimately, the three things that garnered the most attention for the Touhou Project were the music, the characters, and piracy.
      As a self-taught composer, ZUN’s early compositions were largely forgettable, unaided by the crude chiptune system he had to work with. After years of experience and the technological leap, he was able to make something special. TEoSD’s memorable, orchestral soundtrack was, like many aspects of the series, atypical  for the genre, but nearly every song made the best of its synthesized pianos, strings, and horns. Future releases maintained that standard of quality, and as fans began to put out cover albums, people became familiar with Touhou’s music before the games themselves.
      As a self-taught artist, however, ZUN’s work has been less successful. Trying to make the characters cute, many came out disproportioned and doughy-faced. The dialogue is also laughably baffling, including such biting insults as, “She’s lower than a human. I bet she doesn’t even have ten fingers.” What ZUN did establish was distinct personalities, however one-dimensional. As the cast expanded, fan works became increasingly widespread, including art, writing and games.
      While the Touhou Project’s popularity was growing steadily, distribution of the games wasn’t. Initially, circulation was limited to copies from Comiket. A few online hobby shops began to stock copies, some of which shipped internationally. Availability though was frequently limited, and many people interested in the series turned to piracy. This, combined with fan translations, led to an international fanbase.
      After the release of the seventh game, all the excitement culminated in 2004 at the first Annual Hakurei Shrine Grand Festival, a convention  exclusively for Touhou fans. ZUN used the opportunity to demo both Imperishable Night, the eighth entry in the series, and Immaterial and Missing Power, a fighting game made in collaboration with Twilight Frontier, a Japanese indie developer group. The convention has grown each year since, offering the perfect platform for popular cover bands to release albums.

Fan works became widespread: art, writing and games

      Ten conventions and 13 games later, ZUN is  married, has a child, and Touhou has blossomed into one of the most popular Japanese indie game series. He has no intention of stopping: “I’m going to keep making games that stand out. If all my fans disappear, I’m still happy if I can keep doing the games I want.

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