No Man’s Sky: Hello, Worlds!

Curious rover Jen Simpkins takes one small step for OPM into the brave new worlds of No Man’s Sky – and discovers a planet teeming with NSFW creatures…

Louil, 7.36pm. It’s around three degrees celsius. Dusk creeps over the never-before-explored planet; possibility stretches out toward the horizon. A soft thumping heralds the arrival of some form of life. We hold our breath… as an octopus-headed, cushion-bottomed ballbag with tentacle arms hops serenely, majestically into view. Hello Games’ Sean Murray and David Ream exchange a wide-eyed look. “What is that?” we ask. Murray replies, “We have no idea.”

Buy, rent, donate, or go free?

Electronic Arts shakes up the gaming world with Origin Access, but is it any good? Dan Griliopoulos finds out

How should you get hold of a game? Depending on its age, there might be a hundred ways to get it—from simple torrent or newsgroup piracy (which we don’t advocate), to buying a digital download on Steam or GOG, to hunting out a rare physical-world shop and buying it from an actual human being, to forming a crack team of pro-gamers to break into the developer’s offices on the day of release, play it extensively on location, then bug out before morning (which doesn’t count as piracy, we’re fairly sure—just a whole lot of other crimes).

Skylake Goes Mobile

Intel’s range of CPUs has penetrated every nook and cranny of portable PCs. Which do you want?

Intel’s new sixth-gen Core processors represent a departure for the big blue chip-making machine in more ways than one. First of all, it decided to deliver both a tick and a tock in the space of a couple of months. It also figured that it would rather get the desktop chips out the factory door first, then follow them up later with a whole slew of mobile processors, rather than the other way around.

Synology DiskStation DS1515

So much more than just a box of drives

The DS1515 is a five-bay NAS, which boasts a number of impressive features that make it a tempting solution for use in a small office as well as the home. The four Gigabit Ethernet ports support Link Aggregation for speedy access as well as failover, in case a connection fails. It also boasts a hardware encryption engine, and supports the use of an SSD cache drive, useful in an office.

Denon DA-300USB

Unequivocal audio perfection? Close

We’re sure you’ve noticed b y this point, but we’ve gone a little audio loco this issue. Yes indeedy, including this sweet little number here—the DA-300USB—this issue alone will feature no fewer than 13 different acoustic reviews. So what is it that makes this little device so important? Well, in short, it’s all about completing the holy trinity of audio perfection. The Denon is a key ingredient, one that needs pouring into that mixture. In short, if you haven’t already digested our first feature this issue, it’s all well and good having hi-fi headphones, but if you’re not powering them through a solid and dependable amp and D/A converter, you may as well not bother. That said, the Denon DA-300USB is hardly cheap—at $500, you could easily buy an AMD R9 Nano for this kind of money. So the question has to be put: What exactly goes into building a DAC like this?

Mad Catz RAT Pro X

You don’t have to be Mad Catz to make it but it helps

The question of how many dpi is “enough” is one that’s been batted around by tech companies for as long as we’ve had optical mice. Whether it’s 800, 1,600, 5,000, or more, everyone has an opinion—and it often coincides with the maximum sensitivity of whatever pointing device they’re trying to sell you at the time.

Crucial BX200 960GB

An old-school SATA drive in a PCI Express world

These are exciting times in data storage. That's right, storage is exciting. For proof, observe exhibit A, namely the introduction of much faster PCI Express interfaces for PC hard drives. Exhibit B involves radical new memory technologies, such as Intel and Micron's 3D XPoint. Case closed?

Certainly, the overall upshot is that storage is moving from what you might call the megabyte era into the gigabyte era, in terms of bandwidth or data shunted every second. In that context, what to make of a new SSD from Crucial (the retail front of the aforementioned Micron), which is based on the ancient SATA interface, and looks decidedly non-exotic on paper?

Audio-Technica ATH-A2000Z

Here’s a closed-back headphone from Audio-Technica with familiar features except that its capsule closures are made of titanium instead of wood. To what effect?

Human resources departments have many wonderful euphemisms for giving you the sack: downsizing, right-sizing, letting you go, etc. So what’s the right term for trimming down an overly numerous and confusing product offer? ‘Rationalisation’, sometimes used for the former, is a term that actually makes sense in the latter case. So, Audio-Technica, a word to the wise: undertake some product rationalisation.

Sennheiser HD 471i

Headphone pricing has sky-rocketed over the last few years. Not so long ago $300 would have been considered quite a price for headphones, but new price plateaux have been created and surpassed since then, past $299, then $499… The demand for higherpriced (and hopefully higher-quality) designs has grown so fast that $799 is fast becoming the mid-point of the pricing range for audiophile headgear. What a delight, then, for Sennheiser to remind us that you don’t need a second mortgage to enjoy a good pair of headphones.