Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2017 i PC Gamer

Black Mesa isn’t the biggest upcoming release on the PC gaming calendar. But it’s still notable – a testament both to the openness of the PC as a gaming platform, and to the spirit and passion of modders. It’s a fascinating project, and I’m glad I get to put it on this issue’s cover. Coincidentally, this month is also the ten-year anniversary of The Orange Box, and thus of Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Whether we’ll ever play a sequel remains an open question, but this issue we’re celebrating Half-Life 2’s legacy with a five-part retrospective of analysis, stories and jokes. TALK TO PC GAMER Have your say! Tweet us @PCGamer…

IT’S ABSURD FUN, AND I CAN IMAGINE IT’LL BE BETTER WITH FRIENDS NEED TO KNOW RELEASE 16 March 2018 DEVELOPER Ivory Tower PUBLISHER Ubisoft LINK www.bit.ly/Crew2PC The open world arcade racer is reaching a crisis point, thanks in part to the quality of Forza Horizon 3 . If not for that game, The Crew 2 might not have to be as strange and all-encompassing as it is. In the first game, you could team up with friends to race or freely explore a miniaturised USA. In The Crew 2 , you can still do that, but also instantly switch between a car, a boat and a plane with the press of a button. It’s extremely excessive and I condone it…

HELLBLADE: SENUA’S SACRIFICE Ninja Theory has a reputation for beautiful worlds and enjoyable encounters, and you’ll find both in the intriguing and atmospheric Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. You play as the titular Senua, a Celtic warrior who embarks on a journey into the Norse underworld. Her mission is to reclaim the lost soul of her lover from the grasp of Hela, the goddess of death. That means you’ll be fighting against an army of undead Vikings as you get to grips with the satisfyingly fluid combat system. But Hellblade is more than just a mindless hack-and-slasher. Senua is suffering from ‘the darkness’ – a psychosis that causes that causes hallucinations, including the constant chattering of women who mock her, argue, and occasionally offer advice. Senua’s condition is such that it’s not…

Finally released in 2007 after years of vapourware accusations as part of Valve’s celebrated Orange Box, Team Fortress 2 is memorable for several reasons. Firstly, it’s a well-tuned, creative multiplayer shooter, its classes wicked respins of ’60s spy and action movie archetypes. Secondly, it is a high watermark for nihilistic (yet misogynistic) humour in videogames. Thirdly, its cartoon style tacks hard against the games industry’s perennial fixation with gloomy photorealistic settings. There is no grit, clutter or excess shadow in TF2’s hectic cartoon-style world. And fourthly, it would enjoy enormous longevity, thanks to a barrage of updates and the decision to go free-to-play in 2011. Its greatest descendant is probably Overwatch.…

Developed by Turtle Rock and fleshed out by Valve, 2008’s Left 4 Dead is perhaps the finest co-op shooter of its age. It sees four survivors of an undead apocalypse struggling from safehouse to safehouse while a truly pernicious piece of code known as the ‘AI Director’ changes the odds ad hoc, easing off to stoke suspense only to unleash the horde when it’s least convenient. It also features a number of ‘special’ infected – the Boomer, for instance, can throw up on you, which attracts zombies, while the Hunter can pin a survivor down. The game’s joy is that it captures many of the dramatic twists we see in horror movies: traitorous survivors who leave their friends behind usually meet a sticky, ghoulish end, but you might have to…

The Chosen are a threat, but are by no means invincible NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A massive expansion to XCOM 2. EXPECT TO PAY £35 DEVELOPER Firaxis PUBLISHER 2K Games REVIEWED ON 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 970, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER Two-player, turn-based battles LINK www.xcom.com Just when you think life in XCOM is hard enough, the aliens send superpowered specialists to steal your money, take your soldiers and taunt you while they’re doing it. War of the Chosen adds three characterful bosses that harass you in missions and on the campaign map until you manage to hunt them down and take the fight to them. You have to deal with them in addition to your normal XCOM 2…

If Nidhogg 2 was to have a subtitle, it would be ‘Nidhogger’ NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A fast-paced one-on-one fencing game with bows and dive kicks. EXPECT TO PAY £11 DEVELOPER Messhof PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Intel Core i5-4440 CPU @ 3.1GHz, 8GB RAM MULTIPLAYER Eight local, two online LINK nidhogggame.com Nidhogg 2 is horrible. Which isn’t to say that the graceful austerity of the first game has been stamped into mush by this sequel, but that its new art style is memorably grotesque. If you spliced misshapen clay men with Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste , you’d get something close to Toby Dixon’s squishy, messy, delightfully grisly art – a far cry from the original game’s minimalistic visuals. The best multiplayer games are…

Your citizens have hidden traits, both positive and negative NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A cult simulator with a Lovecraftian vibe. EXPECT TO PAY £7 DEVELOPER Kitfox Games PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON GTX 1080, Intel i5-6600K, 16GB RAM MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.kitfoxgames.com In three years a god named Chernobog will emerge from the sea, bringing the apocalypse with it. As a high priest you must select cultists to sacrifice to the deity, while maintaining order and discipline. Sacrifice someone without proof of any misdeeds and the people may turn on you. And even if they are proven sinners, their family won’t appreciate it. The Shouded Isle is the cult management sim I never knew I wanted, and there’s a dark charm in how it encourages…

Seoul has a seemingly infinite number of underground lairs NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Squad-based action game set in an open, futuristic Seoul overrun by deranged cartoon villains. EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER Volition PUBLISHER Deep Silver REVIEWED ON Intel i7-3770k, GeForce GTX 1070, 16GB RAM, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.aomthegame.com While still keeping one foot planted in the Saints Row universe, Agents of Mayhem is Volition’s bold attempt to create something a bit different. Whether or not you think it succeeds depends on how deeply you’re willing to immerse yourself in a colourful, yet almost sleepy, city, taking out waves of enemies with the intelligence of Afghan Hounds, in an action game where the shooting is serviceable, but not…

Puzzle Quest was ahead of its time, for better and for worse. The notion of marrying Bejeweled to RPG-style progression and a quest system was (and is) clever, making match-three RPG combat with spells and items and stuff actually work even more so. Cheap and free from microtransactions, Puzzle Quest is content to discretely kill as many hours of your life as you would like to give it. It ostensibly has an ending, but I have never seen it and hopefully I never will. Life, that is.…

I DIDN’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT MURDER WEAPONS OR MOTIVES KIMBERLEY BALLARD THIS MONTH Roamed a thicket looking for deadly nightshade. ALSO PLAYED Dream Daddy, Tacoma Are the fairytales of our youth so long forgotten? In Her Story , they shimmer just below the surface, their evil queens and changeling children reflected in our monitors. I didn’t play Her Story when it was released in 2015. Actually, I don’t even think I knew about it. Too busy reading Lord Byron, maybe, or still lamenting the imprisonment of French princess Margot of Valois. It was only when my boyfriend gifted the game to me that I decided to press play, bookmarking my place in a tome of French folktales. Although the game has just one outcome, Her Story…

1 Exclusive Sudden Strike 4 demo Get your hands on a massive chunk of this old-school style RTS The first of this issue’s two free gifts gives you the chance to try out the latest in the Sudden Strike series of real-time strategy games. Sudden Strike 4 is a massive, old-school RTS that offers three extensive campaigns set across the battlefields of World War 2. This demo is a PC Gamer exclusive, available to you now weeks before its public release. It’s a meaty chunk of stuff to try, with two missions each from the Allied, Soviet and German campaigns – letting you test yourself on the battlefields of Leningrad, Stalingrad and the Ardennes, and also take part in Operation Overlord. Don’t worry if you’re new to Sudden Strike. There’s…

I’VE NEVER HATED THE COMBINE MORE After hours of tunnels, caves and corridors I now stand on a rickety bridge with the promise of something entirely different. It might be welded together from a dozen different things but this car in front of me has got style and, more importantly, it’s my ticket to freedom. Episode Two feels like it has been very carefully building to this. Putting you through the familiar motions all so it can make obtaining this car feel like the big deal it is. Half-Life 2 had its vehicle sections but they felt stilted, bogged down in endless obstacles. This? This is the start of an epic road trip. Wounded at the start of the game, it’s great…

LucasArts released a slew of terrific Star Wars games during the early ’00s. Possibly the best known today are the original Star Wars: Battlefront games from Mercenaries developer Pandemic – where the Dark Forces captured the feel of a battle down a Death Star corridor, Battlefront sought to represent the larger pitched encounters from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Like DICE’s Battlefield games, they saw large mixed-class player armies vying for possession of capture points on gigantic maps. Raven Software’s Jedi Knight series, meanwhile, thrust you into the boots of an aspiring Jedi, supplementing gunplay with lightsaber combos. Its community remains one of the internet’s most formidable cliques.…

Irrational’s 2013 follow-up took BioShock to the skies. Its setting, the floating city of Columbia – a work of gaudy vintage American xenophobia built and policed by a self-appointed messiah. Infinite deals with much the same theme of free will as the first game, but expands this into a rather tortuous exploration of the concept of multiple universes, helped along by a dash of Tom Stoppard. It also continues the first game’s preoccupation with moral accountability – you spend much of the game working alongside a companion character, Elizabeth, who serves as the game’s moral compass. Infinite is a fairly brutal, attrition-driven shooter – its fatalistic conclusion perhaps speaks to Irrational’s despair at facilitating empathy within such constraints.…

Slimes can only take so much shit before they snap NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A cute and colourful farming sim where you rear bouncing slimes instead of cows and cabbage. EXPECT TO PAY £15 DEVELOPER Monomi Park PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Intel i7-2600, 8GB RAM, GeForce GTX 1070, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.slimerancher.com Slime Rancher pulls off a PR coup that fast food corporations would kill for: it’s battery farming, but adorable with it. It’s about cramming as many blobs as you can into tiny pens, gorging them, then sucking up their plorts (that is, poop) and selling the goods off for the highest rate. It’s the kind of horror show that has you hankering for that chlorinated chicken you keep hearing about. On the…

They feel like standalone episodes of a warmer, funnier X-Files NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Point-and-click adventure about solving supernatural crimes. EXPECT TO PAY £10 DEVELOPER Spooky Doorway PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-7700, 16 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.darkside detective.com As crumpled detective Francis McQueen, head of the two-man The Darkside Division, you’re assigned with investigating Fortean mysteries in the perfect abnormal American town of Twin Lakes. You’re assisted in this task by Officer Dooley, hands-down the best character in the game – a flippant, absurd and uninterested comedy sidekick, who still manages to have hidden depth; Odie to McQueen’s Garfield. This simple point-and-click adventure game features six cases, all dealing with a different supernatural occurrence, crammed with loving nods to every…

Everyone is expected to fly, fight, and contribute damage NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A competitive FPS that offers skilful, unconventional styles of movement in many of its nine classes. EXPECT TO PAY £25 DEVELOPER Boss Key Productions PUBLISHER Nexon REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-4770K, Geforce GTX 980 Ti, 16GB RAM, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER Five-on-five online LINK lawbreakers.nexon.net LawBreakers succeeds as an first-person shooter because it embraces and gives a middle finger to the last five years of FPS design. From a distance, Boss Key’s first game looks like another five-on-five ‘hero shooter’, where each of the characters bring unique guns and unique movement, combat, and ultimate abilities (that you trigger by hitting the Q key) into arena maps to contend for objectives. But beneath that basic…

CPUs are a hot topic this year. Starting with the launch of Ryzen and followed by Intel’s Socket 2066 chips and AMD’s monster Threadripper CPUs, there’s never been a greater choice of chips. Whichever you are using, you need to keep it cool. Water cooling is ideal, and an all-in-one liquid cooler eliminates any faff. We’ve grabbed seven popular all-in-one coolers and tested them using an AMD Ryzen 1800X running the Prime95 torture test. We measured temperatures with the cooler set to a silent mode, where the fans spin slowly, and a more uniform standard mode. Q&A What is an all-in-one liquid cooler? These coolers offer the basic properties of liquid cooling but in a self-contained unit. A CPU/water block mounts to the CPU while a pair of pipes feed…

I BUY SOME NOODLES, AND AM DELIGHTED BY THE OPTION TO REFUSE PAYMENT PHIL SAVAGE THIS MONTH Immediately turned to a life of stupid crime. ALSO PLAYED Rez Infinite, Pyre My name’s Phil, and I have a confession: I love janky games. It’s why I’ve spent days in the buggy sandboxes of Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series. It’s why I once spent an afternoon hunting flying jaguars in an unpatched version of Boiling Point . It’s why I’ll always have a fondness for a particular type of Japanese game that combines quirky writing and a heap of systemic jank to create something entertaining. The best of these is Sega’s excellent Yakuza series, but they’re not on PC, so I’m playing Way of the…

PLAYING BERTRAM FIDDLE IS LIKE A WATCHING A SINISTER ANIMATION MATTHEW ELLIOTT THIS MONTH Tried to drill through a wall using an ice cream cone. ALSO PLAYED The Darkside Detective, Baldur’s Gate When I played the first Bertram Fiddle episode for this column, I got horribly drunk on sherry and port, chosen tipples of the elderly, festive or desperate. Now that the sequel is here, things are going to be different. The fact you can play adventure games while tipsy doesn’t mean you should . It’s a pleasantly dull, adventure-free start. Bertram is working in a factory making ‘adequate soap’. Before I can do anything else, I need to finish his work for the day by selling three shipments of soap. It’s going…

We did it! We finished all of GTA Online’s heists. Now we’re at a loose end, though. We have money, we have military helicopters, but we have nothing to do with them. That’s when Samuel suggests that, for one night only, we put our toys to use. Tonight, friends, we grief. FIRST TARGET Phil: We gather near my new bunker, which has little practical purpose, but is at least near the airfield. Tom and Samuel both own helicopters, bought with their heisting riches, but I have made some bad investments, and must steal one from the map. Specifically, I want to steal a Cargobob. It’s a transport helicopter, and comes armed not with guns but a winch. I can think of no better tool with which…

IT SOUNDS LIKE IT WOULD HAVE MADE FOR A FANTASTICALLY DRAMATIC EPISODE Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw, who left Valve in 2016, posted an article on his personal website that is almost certainly the story outline for Episode Three . Titled ‘Epistle 3’, the story concerns a certain ‘Gertrude Fremont’ who travels to Antarctica with ‘Alex Vaunt’ to look for a missing ship called the ‘Hyperborea’. You don’t have to be an expert in Half-Life lore to know what he’s talking about there. What exactly inspired Laidlaw to release this information, and whether Valve approves, is a mystery. But the fact he did suggests this is a story that will never be told elsewhere. After the funeral of Eli Vance, who died…

“I’VE NEVER SPOKEN TO ANYONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO AVOID [CRUNCH]” I’m talking to Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games, developer of Regency Solitaire and upcoming card-based RPG Shadowhand . “It occurred the day after I had done some kind of crunch until 5 am,” he says. “I got up in the morning and crawled under my desk to switch the plugs on, and my back went out. I’m just in my early 40s now.” In a blog post from 2015, creative director Clint Hocking said the 80-hour weeks he worked during the development of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory “gave me brain damage”. Whether or not crunch time is necessary to release a game ‘on time’ is a perennial topic in game development…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Early 2018 PUBLISHER In-house DEVELOPER Square Enix LINK www.finalfantasyxv.com MONSTER HUNTERS As well as more specific sidequests, outposts also offer bounties on tough monsters. You control Noctis in combat, and fight and cast spells in real time. But his friends provide support, and you can tell them to activate specific special moves. Ignis’s group heal is particularly useful. ROYAL RIDE Noctis’s car, the Regalia, is your primary method of transport. FFXV’s driving physics are pretty janky, but fortunately Ignis is on hand to act as chauffeur – at least during the daylight hours. At night, powerful daemons roam the world, making driving much more dangerous. REST AND RELAXATION Welcome to Lestallum, one of the game’s largest settlements. The rest of the map is more rural, full…

NEED TO KNOW RELEASE Winter 2018 PUBLISHER Ubisoft DEVELOPER Blue Byte LINK www.bit.ly/ubianno1800 STRIKES Any disgruntled and underpaid workers will go on strike in Anno 1800 – at first standing atop soapboxes to peacefully voice their woes, before breaking into full-on, torch-burning, window-smashing riots. By sending in mounted police and paddy wagons, you can attempt to restore order. STORY A story-based campaign awaits any would-be ruler. Details on this mode are thin at the moment, however the inclusion of era-authentic industrial warfare, telegraph communications, propaganda tools and/or mass-conscripted armies would be neat to play around with. SANDBOX Similar to its forerunners, Anno 1800 gives keen city builders the tools to rear and raze their customisable metropolises as they see fit. You’ll be given the opportunity to settle new lands, strike…

Eight years in the making, Black Mesa is finally nearing its release. Initially developed by a passionate team of hobbyist developers, this remake of the original Half-Life – fully backed by Valve – has bloomed into something more ambitious. With the help of Steam’s Early Access platform, the team has found itself with the resources to remake and overhaul the original’s controversial Xen chapters, bringing them more in line with the quality of the rest of the game. And when it’s done, this will be the best way to relive the Black Mesa incident. I spoke with project leader Adam Engels about the incredible journey so far. “The world of Half-Life is a detailed painting, where the more you look, the more…

BUGGY Your buggy comes equipped with a roll cage to encourage you to be a bit reckless (and the metal framing also helps mitigate motion sickness). The infinite ammo crate in back and the gauss gun mounted on the front means your car is useful in combat, too. Just don’t leave it alone for too long, or seagulls will poop all over it. (Fortunately, you can drive it through water to wash off all the stains.) BOAT One of the subtle mysteries in Half-Life 2 is the low sea level. Throughout the entire game, you pass countless beached tugboats, skeletal piers and depleted canals. Supposedly, Valve planned a whole sequence to explain how the Combine was stealing Earth’s water, but that level got cut. It’s probably for the better. It’s…

1 START WITH A SPEECH Skipping the lengthy speech on the train is… tempting to shave off a few minutes, but the need for a speedrun shouldn’t overshadow good showmanship. Take your time. Speak… haltingly. 2 USE THE AIRWAVES You don’t always have to spy in person. Show up on a… monitor from time to time. It will net you royalties and you won’t need to… wear pants. 3 FOCUS ON FREEMAN Don’t waste time searching for… wherever you put Adrian Shephard. Face it. You just plain lost him. 4 TELEPORT You can skip that whole… bullshit antlion beach by using teleportation. Don’t forget to get there early. 5 DO YOUR RESEARCH Letting Freeman see you briefly before you walk away is a sick move but can be a real…

A collaboration between DigiPen Institute of Technology students and Valve, 2007’s Portal isn’t strictly speaking a shooter, but its outlandish physics puzzles and sense of level design and scripting as a form of coercion make it feel like a critique of Half-Life – a parallel the game’s wonderfully funny ending sequence plays up to. Based on the DigiPen game Narbacular Drop, Portal casts you as a human lab rat armed with a gun that creates portals, lost in a shifting mechanical labyrinth run by a malicious, yet utterly inept, AI. The Portal Gun itself is every bit as fun to mess around with as Half-Life2’s Gravity Gun but the game’s unquestioned star is your nemesis, GlaDOS, a carnival mirror image of the AI antagonists from System Shock and Marathon.…

From Doom onwards, the FPS has enjoyed a fruitful rapport with horror games. Most of the biggest names include a level or two that takes inspiration from the likes of Resident Evil. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has its spooky hoverbike trip through a quarantined Detroit, Half-Life 2 has its legendary Ravenholm level and Far Cry includes fever dreams where the designers are free to invoke the paranormal. A number of studios also work across genres. Monolith’s FEAR games are a captivating marriage of heavy ordnance and poltergeist activity. 4A’s Metro games, meanwhile, pack all the narrative texture of the Stalker series into a series of half-collapsed tunnels – though light on jump scares, the first instalment is one of the eeriest games you’ll play.…

One of last year’s nicest surprises was that the long-overdue Doom ‘4’ – announced in 2008 – is utterly terrific. The game’s success lies with how it captures the swagger of the original Doomwithout trying to translate its techniques directly. The levels are as receptive to exploration as those of the original, and the gunplay unfolds like a mix of Quake and Unreal fed through Far Cry’s animation suite. The game also speaks to collective weariness of exposition in action games by roughing up its own narrative – one of the first things Doomguy does is smash a speaker before someone can fill him in on the backstory. Together with MachineGames’ rebooted Wolfenstein: The New Order, it suggests that id’s licences have plenty of life in them yet.…

It’s not just about killing things but also about playing with the music NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An on-rails shooter about the evolution of life. EXPECT TO PAY £20 DEVELOPER Monstars Inc, Resonair PUBLISHER Enhance Games REVIEWED ON i5-6600K, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070, HTC Vive MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.rezinfinite.com Let’s start with the basics. Rez is an on-rails shooter, originally released in 2002 for Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. You travel along a set path across five wireframe levels, and shoot everything that you see. Sometimes enemies drop one of two types of power-up: one upgrades your form, giving you extra protection against enemy attacks, the other lets you auto-shoot everything on the screen. At the end of each level is a boss. Are you…

This is a funny game, and you’ll want to root out every last joke NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? An open world RPG comedy western with turn-based combat, a lot of hats, and ghost pickles. EXPECT TO PAY £8 DEVELOPER Asymmetric PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Intel i5-6600K @ 3.50 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.westof loathing.com Welcome to the Old West, where snakes are used as whips, cattle are demonically evil, and alongside stick-figure cowboys there are goblins, necromancers and a lot of ghosts. There are ghost horses – I ride one myself – and ghost cowboys. There are even ghost pickles, and they’re not the strangest food you’ll encounter. A comedy RPG, West of Loathing is goofy and wonderfully written. After choosing…

Controller feedback is leaps and bounds better than last year NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? A licensed racer with racing’s smuggest faces on the box. EXPECT TO PAY £40 DEVELOPER Codemasters PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON i7 2600K, 16GB RAM, GTX 1070, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER Up to 20 players LINK www.formula1-game.com There are two ways to look at annualised licensed releases like F1 2017 . One is to compare it to last year’s effort and take a stock inventory of all its little iterative improvements. The other way is to compare it to the real thing: everyone’s favourite waste of a Sunday afternoon, Formula One. Either one of these methods demonstrates, in F1 2017 ’s case, what a stellar job Codemasters has achieved this…

Jade’s day job is taking photos of animals for an appreciative scientist NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS IT? Third-person cartoon adventure with big ideas. EXPECT TO PAY £3.50 DEVELOPER Ubisoft PUBLISHER In-house REVIEWED ON Intel Core i7-6700K, 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 980, Windows 10 MULTIPLAYER None LINK www.bgegame.com Beyond Good and Evil has only grown more attractive with time. It was always lovely, the world of Hillys, despite being a dystopia where the threat of war has left a population of animal people to the mercy of a military autocracy. I’d choose to live there if I could. The world could go to shit but you’d be just that little bit happier if your uncle/best friend/hovercraft repairman was an anthropoid pig with fart-powered rocket shoes. The game’s worldbuilding…

1 I/O CONNECTIVITY This houses 64 PCIe lanes, meaning you can run up to four GPUs at x16 without degradation or throttling. 2 SINGLE-CORE PERFORMANCE This behemoth is still a Ryzen part, and you can expect performance similar to a i5-6600K. 3 GAMING? By default, AMD  includes a gaming mode to ensure single-core performance doesn’t hold back titles that tend to favour higher clocks. 4 OVERCLOCKING HEADROOM You can clock this up to around 4 GHz across all the cores, adding an extra 160 points in Cinebench tests. AMD THREADRIPPER 1950X  www.amd.com £990 CPU Let’s get this out of the way right now: this is not a gaming part, but that doesn’t stop it from being an incredible piece of engineering. AMD’s Threadripper series is aimed solely at the professionals, the…

ANDY KELLY THIS MONTH Hacked the planet, literally. ALSO PLAYED The Sexy Brutale In the world of else Heart.Break() , atoms have been replaced by bits. This means you can hack the very fabric of reality and bend it to your will, providing you have the right tools. Modifiers are devices used by hackers to pull up the code for an object, whether it’s a cup of coffee or a door, then edit it. If you’re tired, you can hack the coffee to boost its caffeine content by 200% instead of sleeping. Or if a key won’t open a certain door, you can inject a piece of code that will make it brute force the lock. But it takes a while to become powerful. This is a…