MOD Scene Mayhem

Earlier this year, Valve introduced paid mods to its Steam Workshop pages, but it was removed a few days later after a massive online backlash. Rick Lane investigates the fallout

On 23 April, a new feature was launched on Steam that allowed modders -amateur creators of modifications for various games - to charge real money for their work. Starting with Bethesda's Nordic RPG Skyrim, the plan was to gradually roll out this scheme across a range of games with extensive modding communities, in cooperation with the developers of those games.

Building A Console Killer

Mark Pickavance tries to build a console-beating PC while celebrating the Pentium's 20th anniversary

Almost exactly a year ago, I built a SteamOS PC from an AMD APU processor and a H75 chipset motherboard. I recall thinking at the time that with the addition of a decent video card, the system might be comparable with the latest-generation games console, at least on paper. Indeed, if you ask most people why they bought a games console over a PC, it certainly wasn't because the games were cheaper!

STEAM: Can It Reinvent PC Hardware?

As Valve gears up for the launch of multiple Steam Machines in time for Christmas, David Crookes looks at the likely impact on the PC market

Up until now, modern day gamers have had a simple choice to make when deciding how they want to play: do they go for an inexpensive console or do they invest in a potentially wallet-sapping gaming PC? The arguments over what path to take have raged for many years, spanning the relative merits of the hardware and the quality and quantity of the games. The truth is, that a consensus has never really been reached.

Sharkoon Skiller Gaming Keyboard

An inexpensive keyboard with a ton of impressive features

The Sharkoon Skiller Gaming Keyboard has been around for a good couple of years now, but hasn't shown any signs of fading into the background despite the wealth of mechanical gaming keyboards that are currently available.

There's a kind of snobbishness attached to gaming keyboards, in that a non-mechanical can't ever be as good as its mechanical counterpart. We've seen it a number of times, and it's utter nonsense. Yes, a mechanical keyboard is an excellent choice, but let's not discount the huge price differences and the fact that a modern membrane (or other such non-mechanical) keyboard can offer just as many features.

MSI GE72 2QD-037UK

MSI's GE72 costs just £999, which makes it the cheapest gaming laptop we’ve seen for some time. However, despite its price, it still has a beefy specs list, including a GPU from Nvidia's latest mobile range.

The GeForce GTX 960M sits right in the middle of the mobile 900-series, and it’s well placed to deliver decent performance on the MSI's 1080p screen: it has 640 stream processors, 2GB of 5GHz (effective) GDDR5 memory and a core clock speed of 1,096MHz. It's based on the GM107 architecture, which first appeared in the desktop GTX 750 Ti GPU.