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.