Ark: Survival Evolved

This survival-RPG crossbreed has escaped containment into the hands of modders

Open-world survival mixed with crafting and available now via Early Access: it’s the call that millions who by now might know better still find themselves helpless to ignore. Ark: Survival Evolved sold over one million copies in its first month and yet is built on a familiar formula. Anyone bailing on Rust or Stranded Deep in search of something less rough-and-ready will intuit the rules, punching trees for wood, rocks for stone, and dodos for meat. They’ll take these materials and use an in-game recipe book to spawn tools that beget bigger, pointier tools with which to fend off dinosaurs and provoke the neighbours.

Star Fox Zero

After a radical change to the Arwing’s controls, Fox resits his pilot’s exam

The last time we squeezed into an Arwing cockpit, it was far less complicated than this. It takes a few flights in Star Fox Zero just to feel like a borderline competent pilot again, and we scrape our fuselage across plenty of scenery in the process. Partly, that’s down to Zero’s esoteric split-view approach, the GamePad displaying Fox’s in-cockpit perspective, while your TV is reserved for a more traditional chase-cam setup. Aiming is handled by tilting the GamePad, and you’ll need to make effective use of both of your viewpoints in order for Fox McCloud to live up to his formidable reputation as a fighter pilot, flipping between the small screen for pinpoint targeting and the main one for tactical awareness. It’s exhausting at first.

Parvum S2.0

Ikea, eat your heart out. Flat-pack customPCs for all!

What can two guys operating out of a farm in Essex bring you? Well, some of the most custom-designed cases you can imagine, for starters. Parvum Systems is widely renowned for its stunning bespoke cases. Custom-built from the ground up for enthusiasts, its innovative designs come flat-packed, ready for assembly. The custom-cut acrylic panels comprise the exterior and interior of the chassis, allowing for a multitude of different layering effects and colours.

Streacom F12C

You could run out of ideaswhere to stick the fans and drives with this one

Streacom may be a newname to some, but the companywith its head office in Holland andmanufacturing plant in China has been around since 2010. It’s made its name in SFF cases and passively cooled bits and pieces, which makes its latest product, the F12C, a bit of a departure, as it’s been designed to support ATX motherboards.

Generation Proc

How games have learned from art, music and maths – and how the world might learn from games

And on the third day, God made the world. And He saw that it was rubbish. And He then looked at the other worlds that He’d made, and thought, “They’re a bit bobbins, too, infallible as I am.”

So He pondered for silent indefinites, as the void drifted tetchily on, waiting for time, space, gravity, bicycles and all the other concomitants of virtue and vice. Eventually, He got a bit frustrated. “Bollocks to it all,” He thought, blasphemously. “Handcrafting a universe is for losers. I’ll procedurally generate an infinity of them and just choose the best one.” And lo, that was the morning of the third day, and He saw that it was good. So He went and watched fractal zooms on YouTube for the rest of the week.