Twitter’s New 'Buy' Button

Fancy shopping while you tweet? Sarah Dobbs finds out more about Twitter's new 'Buy' function.

Twitter is undergoing some changes at the moment. We've had new profile roll-outs, new feature roll-outs, and all sorts of changes to the terms and conditions. We've even seen a new tweet font replace the old familiar one on profile pages and streams. Now, Twitter's starting to trial another new feature, one that could genuinely change how we perceive and use the service: a 'Buy' button.

Yup, Twitter is hatching plans to get itself into e-commerce. Or, as the email announcement put it, Twitter is launching a feature that will "allow you to buy merchandise from some of the most popular names on Twitter, without leaving the Twitter experience."

Tearaway Unfolded

Atoi & Iota show yet more reckless disregard for rainforests.

On paper, this one’s an open-and-shut case. Media Molecule fills a meeting room full of mind-bogglingly well-crafted origami, talks excitedly in endearing Blue Peter tones about its new project, then releases it and we all love it. We’ve seen it all before. No, literally, we’ve seen it all before: in this case the game generating the excited chatter is Tearaway.

Okay, Tearaway Unfolded. The Guildford Studio’s first foray into PlayStation 4 presents the unique challenge of translating the thoughtful and imaginative PS Vita controls onto DualShock 4. As with those poetic foreign words with no English equivalent (go on, Google ‘Kummerspeck’), there’s no obvious way to translate the ‘popping your fingers through the screen’ mechanic using the Vita’s rear touchpad to a DualShock.

A spark of life

Halo 4 was the first time Master Chief went to war outside Bungie, and a huge bet for Microsoft and its brand-new studio. As 343 puts the finishing touches to the Master Chief Collection, we go back to the studio’s debut to see how it holds up.

When 343 Industries came into being in July 2009 – the date of a filing by Microsoft that named the studio taking responsibility for Halo after the series’ most genocidally conscientious character – it had a long list of things to do. Small things, such as growing from scratch a studio that could operate at the very peak of blockbuster development; reintroducing the most successful, recognisable and important character on Xbox; reinventing the most successful game on Xbox (while simultaneously making it the same, obviously); and doing it all under the shadow of a fixed-in-stone autumn 2012 release date for the game it had been created to deliver: Halo 4.

Game Capture HD60

Show off your smooth gaming moves with this new video capture box.

This is a new version of Elgato’s HDMI capture box, designed to let you plug an HDMI source such as a games console into your Mac and record what it produces. They’re often used by gamers to broadcast themselves playing. This new version is aimed at PS4 and Xbox One owners who want to show off new-gen games at their best – at 1080p and 60 frames per second, rather than 720p60/1080p30 on the original model. Analog input is gone, though, so you can’t record from PS3 (its digital output is copyprotected) or retro consoles.

The HD60 uses the same Mac app as the older model, which gained Twitch, Ustream and YouTube streaming in a previous update. It has an improved layout, with buttons for recording input and live commentary and for streaming across the bottom of its window.

XMG C504 Gaming Laptop

Mark confronts the realities of mobile gaming as addressed by XMG.

The XMG brand is one owned by Schenker Technologies, and the C504 was engineered for it by hardware expert Gigabyte.

Whoever is actually responsible, this is a rather well made laptop that uses a combination plastic and metal skin to deliver a good sized machine that's just over 2kg in weight.

The balance for any mobile system for gaming is to provide sufficient CPU and GPU power against battery life and heat generation. In the first two criteria, the C504 doesn't hold back in providing plenty of grunt.

Metro Redux

Far more than just a revisit, but not quite a revolution.

Light cast down through the window to hug the urinals with a warm and loving grid of pinky peach squares, and it was obvious that whoever was responsible had performed some fine and subtle work the day they set that particular scene. After all the death and the decay, claustrophobia and oppression, executions and radiation poisonings, there it was – a portion of abstract beauty to be totally ignored by players far too eager for violence or hungry for ammunition and gas filters to enjoy such delicate aesthetics, and it was as gorgeous as it was easy to miss.

Batman: Arkham Knight

The bat is back, and he’s bringing a tank...

Designing and introducing a new villain is a massive risk. Batman does not exist in a world short on lore and back-story of the kind that his legions of fans adore; the more dedicated of which will surely turn their noses up at a fresh face coming via a game, as opposed to a comic book.

For what it’s worth, though, the iniquitous Arkham Knight seems to fit within the Gotham’s shadowy ambience naturally and comfortably. He’s all muscle and military in appearance, but he possesses enough brain cells to provide a potential challenge above and beyond that which sheer brawn can muster. Who he actually is remains a mystery, the details being predictably kept under wraps in a bid to not give the game away.

Until Dawn

The Cabin In The (New-Gen) Woods.

The late ’90s/early ’00s were a golden age for teen horror movies, and that period’s immediately apparent in every flickering lightbulb, clown mask and Californian accent of Until Dawn’s ‘friends meet up in a remote lodge in the woods and start getting picked off’ horror adventure. In fact, the game’s co-writers, Graham Reznick and Larry Fessenden, have three decades between them of acting, writing, directing, editing and sound department credits in horror movies. Supermassive’s interactive scarer is clearly very aware of the old clichés, to the point that Until Dawn’s corniness seems intentional – an uncomplicated, schlocky teen slasher flick that you write and direct with the DualShock 4.

Silent Hills

If you go down to the PS4 demo section today, you’re sure of a horrible surprise – and even when you think you know what’s coming, this interactive teaser for the tenth Silent Hill game, albeit this one’s from Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, will still manage to scare you half-crazy. We can’t get it out of our heads. Even after a third playthrough it’s still possibly one of the most potent slices of gaming horror we’ve endured since we first entered the realm of Pyramid Head.

The sheer simplicity of the PT experience is part of its horrific charm. Based around a simple looping corridor setup, it forces you to study the little things and, as someone wise once said, the devil really is in the details – and no one knows this better than fantasy horror auteur Guillermo del Toro. His now cancelled THQ game, Insane, never made it past pre-production and we can’t help but wonder if he’s channelling his creative horror juices straight into this

exciting slice of terror instead.

If It Ain’t Broke... Don’t Upgrade It

We look at how to avoid unnecessary purchases and save yourself some much-needed cash.

By its very nature, technology goes forward. It advances relentlessly, through innovation, research and production. Things improve and then improvements are made on those improvements.

This constant progression works in tandem with our consumerist, capitalist culture, where the need for seemingly endless growth means companies are constantly looking for new ways to make us spend our money. That, of course, means new products.

What I haven't mentioned, however, is invention. Why?

Build a silent RIG

Everything you need to get some peace and quiet while retaining your PC ’s performance.

Of all the things you think about when building a PC, the noise it makes isn’t usually at the top of the list. The search for more power can often leave you with a big box of noisy parts, and the way your bespoke machine sounds may only become an issue after you’ve got it up and running for the first time.

You may be designing a machine with silence as an afterthought, or peace and quiet could be your highest priority. Either way, silence is an important consideration when building a system intended for use as the hub of a home theatre, a rig assembled for use as a server, or even just a system that’ll keep humming while you’re living or sleeping in the same room. Whatever the reason behind it, it is possible to achieve a serene machine.

Toshiba HG6 512GB

Toshiba makes its mark on the performance end of the SSD market.

Sometimes, simplicity is lovely. Who makes this SSD? Toshiba. Whose 19nm MLC NAND flash memory makes up its precious bits? Toshiba’s. Who makes the controller? Samsu… no, it’s Toshiba. Good thing for the company, then, that it’s not a bad piece of kit at all.

Despite Toshiba having bought OCZ seemingly as a good name for consumer-level stuff, the HG6 drives sold under its own name are still a nice option for the higher end of the general market, where the roughly £250 price tag is fairly normal. Yes, it’s almost £100 more than you can get Crucial’s 512GB MX100 SSD for, but it’s a lot less than you pay for the same size Plextor M6e PCIe SSD.

Kingston SSDNow V310 960GB

The time of affordable 1TB SSDs is upon us. Well, affordable-ish…

The SSD conundrum has always been whether to sacrifice size for speed. Do you spend the same cash on a smaller, faster SSD or a capacious, slower hard drive? Recently, reasonably affordable 1TB SSDs have meant this doesn’t have to be such a hard choice, although ‘reasonably affordable’ still nudges £400 in this case.

Still, if 960GB of flash storage is what you want, then Kingston will provide it. The SSDNow v310 ‘range’ isn’t so much a range as just this one drive, lording it over the 480GB maximum size that the SSDNow v300 range hit. The unit packs a Phison 3108 controller alongside nearly 1TB of storage all into a 7mm chassis, and it’s available to buy alone or in an upgrade pack complete with cables and a caddy for your old drive.

Gigabyte Brix Gaming

Half the size of some graphics cards, this tiny PC is packing a GTX 760.

Miniature PCs used to be tiny systems with correspondingly tiny power, but that’s no longer true: this latest small form-factor PC from Cyberpower is packed with top-class hardware.

Star of the show is Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 760 – a full-fat graphics card that’s somehow been squeezed into this tiny chassis. There are two versions of the GTX 760, and Gigabyte has opted for the version with a narrower 192-bit memory bus but a more generous 3GB of RAM. That’s not enough for this machine, though – that memory amount has been doubled by Gigabyte, so it’s got 6GB in tow.

Iiyama ProLite B2888UHSU

Yet another TN 4K panel? Yup, but this is the best of the bunch.

Seen one, seen ‘em all. It’s funny how quickly what was initially spectacular becomes borderline routine. We speak, of course, of the brave new army of 28-inch 4K PC monitors with TN panels.

Six months ago, a 4K pixel grid (on the PC that means 3,840 x 2,160 pixels) would set you back several thousand pounds. Now it’s yours for under £500 and no longer seems nearly as exotic. And all of them, as far as we know, are based on the same TN panel.

It’s an excellent panel that significantly raises TN’s game for colours and contrast. Only the limited viewing angles give the game away immediately, but in return you get much lower cost than IPS technology and faster pixel response.

Asus Maximus VII Formula

Whatever you do, don’t mention Haswell-E. Or that M.2 port…

Hey, have you guys heard about Intel’s awesome new Haswell-E processor and the X99 platform? You know, the cheap six-core CPU with an unlocked multiplier that drops into a big, fat LGA2011-v3 socket with oodles of PCI Express lanes and almost infinite memory bandwidth thanks to quadchannel DDR4?

Kind of makes the idea of dropping a ton of cash on a board with Intel’s mainstream LGA1150 socket look like folly. Enter the Asus Maximus VII Formula, a bleeding-edge Z97 board for LGA1150 chips that’s yours for just £250. Whoops!

Corsair Vengeance DDR4 16GB

Corsair’s first DDR4 kit might make you want to pay more for your memory.

As someone who might have been Francis Bacon once said, “I am in blood stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” He wasn’t actually talking about some battle for a Scottish throne… he was referring to the fact that once you’ve spent a vast sum of money on a new X99 motherboard and Haswell-E processor, it’s as boring shopping about for a cheap memory kit as it just dropping another fortune on a high performance Corsair set. Prescient fellow, that Bacon.

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 highperformance 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.

Next-gen displays

What exactly is 4K? That is the question. At least, it’s the first question we need to address – and the answer isn’t altogether straightforward. It’s not as simple as defining, say, 1080p. That simply means 1,920 by 1,080 pixels, progressively scanned rather than interlaced. The end.

4K started out as a sort of high-end cinematographic standard, involving 4,096 x 2,160 pixels and a resulting odd 19:10 aspect ratio. And for some diehards, that’s what 4K is. Nothing more, nothing less. However, for PC monitors, the reality is that 4K involves 3,840 x 2,160 pixels in the standard 16:9 aspect ratio. As a result, the popular definition of 4K today boils down to a display with roughly 4,000 horizontal pixels.

The other way to look at 4K PC monitors is as four full 1080p displays on a single panel. That 3,840 x 2,160 pixel grid is precisely four 1080p grids arranged in two rows, one atop the other. So, yes, 4K PC monitors offer precisely four times the pixels of a bog standard 1080p panel.

Wild

Michel Ancel isn’t just any old highly respected French videogame designer in his early 40s that we might have a bit of a mancrush on. He, like Shigeru Miyamoto and Peter Molyneux, is also a Knight of the Order of Arts and Literature. But then again so are Kylie Minogue and Shakira, so we won’t take that honour too seriously. Still, after joining Ubisoft as an artist when he was 17, he went on to create and direct Rayman in his very early 20s, and therefore is responsible for the UK’s best-selling PlayStation game of all time.

Resident Evil

Well if it isn’t an HD remake of the grandparent of the survival-horror series that was Resident Evil, released back in 1996 when full-motion cut-scenes involving actors mostly made of ham were seen as a pretty nifty idea. Actually, it isn’t. Instead it’s a remake of the Nintendo GameCube remake of Resident Evil that was released in 2002, then in 2008 for the Nintendo Wii.

That remake replaced those meat-filled cut-scenes with stylishly unamusing computer-generated imagery and ever so slightly more professionally delivered dialogue, extra puzzles and extended areas, but kept the static pre-drawn backdrops. Oddly, considering its lineage, this remake of a remake won’t be appearing on the Wii U despite appearing on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as well as Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC – and despite Nintendo’s console blatantly being up for the job.

Quantum Break

It’s an experiment in cross-media production, but is Quantum Break really the game to convince us that the blending of videogame and live-action show is a route worth investigating?

There’s a lot riding on Quantum Break’s success, with both the publisher and developer desperate to see it reach a wide audience – albeit for different reasons. Microsoft is keen to add it to its presently limited Xbox One ‘system seller’ catalogue, while remedy surely understands the risk of the cross-medium approach.

You see, Quantum Break is not ‘just’ a game. It’s also a live-action series, these two halves coming together to create what is hopefully a successful hybrid of entertainment formats. Unlike the disaster that mostly befell Defiance, however, the live-action component here is provided on the disc – so you can consume everything at your own pace, rather than have to wait for the tv schedule to meet your own.

Velocity 2X

Fast and furiously good.

The first Velocity, which began life as a PSP Mini before getting tarted up for an Ultra Vita version, was rightly lauded for its courage and innovation. Rather than simply go again with this full blown sequel, Brighton-based Futurlab has clearly striven to inject new ideas. Strip the whole thing down and you’ve got a tight, responsive vertical-scrolling shooter. It’s atop this sturdy foundation that a genre powerhouse is constructed, with innovation as the mortar and iconic and frankly gorgeous comic book visuals as the building blocks. There’s even a proper story in there.

Diablo III : Ultimate Evil Edition

Get suited and looted for a Beelzebub bombshell.

Blizzard has an unfair reputation for plugging its fingers in its ears when good times go bad. For all its immediately apparent quality, the original PC release of Diablo III was marred by a real money auction house that even the big B admitted had fudged its intricate loot systems.

It also had always-online requirements infamously coupled with crippling connectivity issues. Compounding those missteps was the kind of immense fan expectation that can only come from a game baking in the development oven for over a decade. It’s pleasing then that this Ultimate Evil Edition proves that actually, not only is Blizzard capable of listening and acting on fan feedback, but that it’s a studio that really does understand that oft rolled-out opinion that games nowadays are more of a service than a single out-of-the-door-and-be-done-with-it product.

Hohokum

Honeyslug opens its own can of worms.

This is a game about surprise, exploration and discovery. More so, in fact, than any other game we can immediately recall. Developer Honeyslug, who previously made oddball compendium Frobisher Says, offers little in the way of direction other than to tell you that X makes you go faster, and Circle does the opposite.

There’s not even any instruction on what to do to exit the opening hub level and find the first one proper. And for this reason, while we’re loathe to turn you away, if you really want to enjoy this game to its fullest we’d recommend you avoid reading anything about it. Before you go, though, just one thing: it’s definitely worth playing.

MSI X99S SLI Plus

The X99 SLI Plus is the cheapest board in this test, although its £160 price is still high compared to many boards for cheaper and older platforms – a problem of buying new enthusiast-level technology so close to launch. The name suggests that this board concentrates on multi-GPU setups, and that’s true to a point. But, as with MSI’s more expensive Gaming 7 board, while the SLI Plus can technically support four graphics cards, you could only install three cards with dual-slot coolers.

Of course, harnessing the power of three graphics cards is an effective use of Haswell-E’s 40 PCI-E 3 lanes, but every other manufacturer offers support for quad SLI with four dual-slot cards on its boards.

MSI X99S Gaming 7

The MSI X99S Gaming 7 is half the price of the Asus Rampage V Xtreme, but it’s almost as goodlooking. It has a similar red and black theme, with black heatsinks banded with red metal, while a glowing MSI Gaming Series is illuminated on the chipset heatsink.

It’s a good start, and the Gaming 7 ticks most of the basic boxes too. It supports up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM, which is twice the capacity of some rival boards, and it has ten SATA 6Gbps ports, a SATA Express port and one M.2 connector – a storage specification that’s on a par with much more expensive products. As usual, using the M.2 socket knocks out a couple of SATA ports.

Road not Taken

Road not Taken is a surprisingly ambitious match-three game that casts you as a woodland ranger recently employed in a remote village. Your job is to watch over the village children when they venture into the surrounding forests, ensuring they return home safely. Your contract runs for 15 years, with every year representing a level. Over time, you form relationships with various people in the village, depending on how you interact with them and how you fare when rescuing children.

Gigabyte X99-Gaming 5

As its name suggests, this Gigabyte board is designed for keen gamers, and that means it has a keen sense of style. The PCB is mostly black, with red and white accents used on its heatsinks, and it has great-looking red LEDs along the left-hand edge and on the chipset heatsink. It will certainly stand out through a case window.

It has the grunt to support powerful graphics configurations as well. Two of its 16x PCI-E slots can run at their full speed when occupied, and it can run a further two slots if you’re happy to settle for 8x speed – ideal for quad-card setups and, unlike the MSI boards, it can accommodate four dual-slot graphics cards too. There are three 1x PCI-E slots too, which is more than any rival on test.

EVGA X99 Classified

The sleek, black X99 Classified is the second most expensive board on test , but It has plenty of features. The top-right corner has power and reset buttons, a clear-CMOS button, a triple-BIOS switcher and a two-character POST display.

The EVGA is also the only board in the Labs to provide two 8-pin CPU power connectors – comparably, the Asus Rampage V Extreme only has single 8-pin and 4-pin plugs. The EVGA is also one of only two boards on test to include two M.2 connectors, and the PCI-E slots make full use of Haswell-E’s potential 40 PCI-E lanes. This board can run two 16x PCI-E slots at their full speed, or four slots at 8x – enough power for all but the greediest of graphics configurations.

Asus Rampage V Extreme

The Rampage V Extreme is a classic ROG board: its PCB is wide, and it has the familiar black and red design. At £326, it’s also the most expensive board on test. The dramatic colours are matched with big, angular heatsinks too. The tallest is on the left and doubles as a shroud over the I/O, and there’s more metal covering the VRMs above and below the CPU socket.

That chunky, aggressive metal doesn’t impact on PC building though. There’s reasonable room around the CPU socket and the eight memory slots, and it’s easy enough to get to the 8-pin CPU power plug and the 4-pin supplementary connector. That extra connector is the first hint at this board’s enthusiast leanings too. There’s an extra Molex connector for PCI-E power, and there are power, reset and clear-CMOS buttons alongside toggles for PCI-E slots. There’s also a two-character POST display, and an M.2 slot. The latter sits between the right-hand RAM slots and the main power connector, which is unusual but sensible, freeing up more room for slots in the middle.

Mind: Path to Thalamus

For the past few years, a handful of developers has been experimenting with the idea of first-person games that don’t rely on guns and gore. These alternative approaches have taken numerous forms. Some opt for horror, while others emphasise survival. Many choose a combination of puzzling and narrative to hold the player’s interest, putting varying degrees of emphasis on one or the other. Mind: Path to Thalamus is a little different. Its weapon of choice is awe.

Thalamus features puzzles and narrative too, but it sets them up within astonishing environmental design that will leave you gazing in slack-jawed delight. It’s one of the very few examples of the form that could realistically dispense with any player interaction whatsoever; puzzles, storytelling – it could drop them all and it would still be absolutely worth your time to investigate. But it contains these elements as well, for better and worse.

ASRock Z97M Anniversary

Last’s month’s cover feature sported a budget PC that included Intel’s Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition CPU, which we’d overclocked to 4.6GHz. This low-price CPU can provide a great way of getting some decent grunt for under £60, and Asus has recently offered BIOS updates for all its cheap boards with H81 chipsets, which enable them to access unlocked multipliers. One downside of this route, though, is that you need a way to flash the BIOS in order for such a board to work with the Pentium G3258. However, ASRock has just presented an alternative route, via a cut-price, full-on Z97 motherboard – the Z97M Anniversary.

Asus Z97I Plus

The motherboard market is inundated with mini-ITX models these days, and small form factor PC fans have never had it so good. Thankfully, not all the mini boards that sport Intel’s new Z97 chipset are expensive either. In fact, Asus has reduced the price of its mainstream Z97 mini-ITX offering considerably, compared to its Z77 and Z87 counterparts. The Z97I-Plus retails for just £106, making it one of the cheapest Z97 mini-ITX motherboards available at the moment.

Aorus Thunder M7

There seems to be something of a glut of hardware manufacturers spinning off their gaming peripherals wings into separate, standalone brands. Thermaltake did it with its Tt eSPORTS department, Kingston is attempting to do it with its HyperX brand and now Gigabyte is getting in on the act with its Aorus brand.

The team behind the new name isn’t playing safe either, as the £70 M7 is a distinctive first release. Aimed squarely at the MMO crowd, it’s festooned with large buttons down its thumb-side edge, which has the unfortunate result of making it look a little ugly and unbalanced.

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

Regular readers will have consumed our previous coverage of The Pre-Sequel – a game set between the timelines of Borderlands 1 and 2 and attempting to tell the story of how the latter’s antagonist, Handsome Jack, became the ultimate bad dude in town. So, in the interest of the getting to the juicy new stuff in quick time, here’s a recap of we’ve seen and written about thus far…

It’s set on the moon of Pandora, the location that has played host to both previous games. The lower gravity of the moon enables you to jump higher, float across gaps and put the new jetpack ‘vehicle’ to good use. On the flip side, the moon has no atmosphere and so you must make sure that your oxygen kit is fully stocked whenever you step outside a building. Enemies also adhere to these rules, though, flinging themselves across chasms with their jetpacks and worrying about their oxygen. Hint: you can kill enemies much more easily if you manage to shoot holes in their oxygen tanks.

Final Victory

Apparently the real innovation in the games industry is applied to keeping one’s head above water...

Some of our favourite developers just can’t seem to catch a break these days. How can a company survive, when merely being good just isn’t good enough?

What is an arena? It is a confined space in which contestants battle to the death. What is fate? It is an inevitable outcome that one can not escape. Everyone’s ultimate fate is death, but it’s the moments and years leading up to our oblivion, and our perceived helplessness over their contents, that one usually associates with the F-word.

Displayced

Hanging games on the wall challenges our engagement with them.

Recently, while lying on a legs-shaped pillow, to gentle guitar music and ceiling high moving images of human hands slowly caressing various objects, I fell asleep. The installation I was inside of, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, did specifically aim to be relaxing. I feel extremely comfortable in art galleries, generally. They’re all about engaging your imagination and intellect, rather than overwhelming you with sensory information. Well, unless overwhelmingness is a piece’s specific aim.

Dead Rising 3: Apocalypse Edition

Next Gen gets even next-genner.

When it first appeared last year as an Xbone launch title, the third instalment in Capcom’s rather stupid Zombie slaughtering franchise, stood out as one of the few games that appeared to actually be designed for the hardware inside so called ‘next gen’ consoles.

This meant moving the game out of fairly confined areas into a proper open world, populated by a higher density of Zombies than ever before, taking full advantage of the souped up AMD netbook processor that lay under the hood of the console.

The psychology of the completionist

Just as there are different types of game, so there are different types of player – the most common being completionists and non-completionists. The difference is that completionists approach a game with the intent of finishing all tasks and levels to 100% and from every angle, while other gamers simply approach a game for fun and can easily walk away. Dr Nicola Davies discusses the psychology behind the drive to complete games – or not…

Whether a gamer is dedicated to finishing the game or not, game developers do everything they can to entice players to continue using their products. For most game developers a complex storyline and dramatic end sequences are a standard lure. Sequels and expansions draw in players who have completed achievements and are looking for more.

The Fear Factor

As we recover from an extended hands-on with Alien: Isolation, we find the time to appreciate a slower pace and a faster heartbeat…

Perhaps the most telling element of Alien: Isolation was amplified in our most recent hands-on with the game. If Isolation was a routine first-person shooter, the list of missions would have taken about 15 minutes – all we had to do was track down some medical supplies to help patch up a wounded colleague. But nothing is that simple or straightforward in Alien: Isolation and, in this ongoing game of uber-cat and blindfolded mouse, this short sequence of events took us more than three hours.

Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble

It’s been an age in coming, but the wait is nearly over. The Witcher 3 will be with us in February and, with the promise of a huge world and a gripping story, this is the next-gen RPG you’ve all been waiting for…

The spectacle of two titanic camps clashing for domination of their realm is nothing new in the world of role playing games. As well as serving as an appropriate backdrop for many a dramatic in-game battle, it also neatly summarises the struggle for supremacy of the very genre itself that has been raging between heavyweights Bethesda and BioWare in recent years.

Tigers, and Elephants, and Yaks... OH MY!

David Hollingworth takes on the frozen and not so frozen reaches of Nepal, in a preview session with Ubisoft’s openworld shooter, Far Cry 4.

I’m happy to admit, I’m bit of a pinko leftie, type, all worried about animal conservation and keeping endangered species safe and sound. So, when I first saw the trailers for Far Cry 4, I was a little... bemused to see elephants being used as giant living battering rams and bullet magnets. Yeah, I’m that guy.

But you know what? When you manage to clear out a teeming fortress in Far Cry 4 with the help of a trusty, stampeding elephant, it really is a thing of rare, gaming beauty. I’m not proud – but I am entertained.

MSI GS60-2PE-060UK

The GS60 is the thinnest and lightest full-on gaming laptop we’ve ever seen, tipping the scales at under 2kg (1.96kg), with a chassis that’s 20mm thick at its broadest point. This slim, light laptop is made from a magnesium-lithium alloy – a material that MSI says was first used on NASA’s Saturn V rocket. The metal is black and brushed, and there’s subtle backlighting across the keyboard, power button and logos. It’s a greatlooking machine, even if it won’t attract attention in the same way as larger laptops with larger designs, such as the Alienware 17.

Importantly, though, MSI hasn’t skimped on the internals despite the slim dimensions. The key component is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 870M – a GPU with 1,344 stream processors, 3GB of GDDR5 memory at its disposal and a core base clock of 941MHz. It isn’t as powerful as the Alienware 17’s GTX 880M, but it should still be able to handle today’s games at great settings.

Intel Core i7-5960X

The Core i7-5960X is Intel’s gleaming desktop flagship, with no compromises. It has the full-fat Haswell-E silicon, so it has a fearsome specification, including eight cores, 20MB of shared L3 cache and Hyper-Threading. However, the eight cores have resulted in a slight reduction in clock speed. The 5960X runs at 3GHz, which is less than the 3.6GHz from last year’s 4960X, and it’s also less than the frequencies of both the 5930K and even the 5820K.

As such, benchmark results aren’t always clear-cut. While this new chip is an undeniable beast in most of our tests, its lower clock speed and higher core count mean it isn’t always the best option in applications that aren’t heavily multi-threaded.

Making the most of Minecraft

Rick Lane takes you through the various mods available for Minecraft on the PC, from different shaders and texture packs, through to new game features.

Minecraft is less of a game and more of a cultural phenomenon. With 54 million copies sold on all platforms to date, it’s become one of the most widely played games on the planet. Almost everything you can imagine has been recreated in its blocky world, from the Starship Enterprise to Westeros to the entirety of Denmark. It’s even become a teaching aid in many schools across the world, in subjects including science and English.

Its near-universal appeal also means there’s an abundance of user-created content for the game that expands its potential in nearly every way possible. Graphical updates, new items, new environments, new adventures. In fact, there’s so much content available that attempting to sort the wheat from the chaff is liable to make your eyes go square. As such, we’ve put together a detailed guide to making the most of Minecraft, including which mods to install, how to install them and how to generally make Minecraft a fuller, more enjoyable experience.

Life is Strange

Life is Strange is one of the most surprisingly fresh and engaging games we’ve come across for some time. Based around the increasingly troubled and complicated life of 17-year-old max, the themes and ideas here centre on the difficulties of growing up, not fitting in and struggling to come to terms with the uncompromising reality of the situations around you.

Max has returned to her home town after a five-year absence, a period which has seen her best friend, Chloe, change dramatically. Once the quintessential promising student, Chloe is now a renegade with a love of blue hair dye, smoking weed and general rebellion. It’s implied that this new demeanour is a direct result of the feelings of abandonment and loss she felt at max’s initial leaving.

Dell Venue 8

A cheap 8in Android tablet, but it's no bargain.

The Venue 8 is Dell’s latest Android tablet. If it looks familiar that’s because it comes wrapped in exactly the same hardware as the Dell Venue 8 Pro, but runs Android 4.4 KitKat instead of Windows 8.1.

From the outside both tablets look identical, cased as they are in the same sturdy, black plastic. The narrow borders to the right and left of the screen (when held vertically) make it somewhat tricky to hold and use with one hand, though the ribbed rear compensates for this somewhat with its easy-to-grip texture.

At 338g, the Venue is virtually the same weight as the metallic iPad Mini 2, so it’s light enough to carry around without difficulty. The Venue is a tad thicker than Apple’s 8in tablet to accommodate a handy microSD card slot for adding more storage to the built-in 16GB. One design improvement would be to raise the power and volume buttons (which are flush with the casing) to make them easier to press.

Toshiba Satellite Click 2

A cheap laptop-tablet hybrid, but you get what you pay for.

The Satellite Click 2 is the latest in a line of Windows 8.1 laptops from Toshiba that double up as a tablet. This two-in-one hybrid seems very reasonable at a shade under £500, but look closer and the Click 2 isn’t as good value as it first appears.

As a laptop, the Click 2 weighs 2.1kg, which is light enough to be carried around without much effort. Just over half of this weight is in the screen, so when it’s detached to use on its own, you’re carrying a hefty 1.1kg tablet. This is very heavy for a tablet and - combined with its chunky dimensions - makes it awkward and uncomfortable to hold and use.

Motorola Moto G 4G

The cheapest 4G Android phone available.

The original Motorola Moto G was one of our favourite Android phones and for good reason. Despite a budget price tag of £150, its performance, battery life, responsiveness and build quality rivalled smartphones costing twice as much - making it the first budget Android phone worth buying. The Moto G has now been updated and it’s better than ever.

The new Moto G has two significant upgrades compared to its predecessor. The first is access to 4G networks (the older model was 3G-only). While 4G contracts and pay-as-you-go plans tend to cost more and offer less generous usage allowances than their 3G equivalents, download and upload speeds are significantly faster.