Creative Sound Blaster Inferno

Creative’s lukewarm budget cans are all about compromise

For £40, you don’t expect to have your earlobes massaged into a state of rapture by an eSports soigneur while the last living castrato sings you lullabies about how great you are at noobstomping. It’s a question of compromise – you know you’re not getting the absolute best package at this price, so which attributes are you prepared to slum it with or do without, and which do you value above all else?

This humble correspondent wagers none among you mentally cast comfort into the wayside while reading that. Who cares what the bass response is like if you can’t bear to wear the bloody things? Well, the situation isn’t quite that dire for Creative’s Sound Blaster Inferno headset, but regrettably it’s comfort that feels most lacking from this offering.

Gigabyte P35X V3

Rivalling desktop graphics is tough for any notebook, but in a thin ’n light?

When Nvidia pulled the wraps off its GeForce GTX 980M mobile graphics chip, the internets burst alive with much rejoicing; at last, here was a laptop GPU that could give the best desktop graphics cards a run for their money. Well, kinda.

Make no mistake, the 980 looks mega on paper. With 1,536 Maxwell-style shaders and a baseclock north of 1GHz, the 980M is one hell of a GPU by any metric, including the desktop. What it’s not is unique in history. In fact, to reach what’s arguably the golden age of laptop gaming you have to wind the clock right back to 2005 and the GeForce Go 7800 GTX, a mobile GPU with the same number of pipes and shaders as the fastest desktop graphics of the day.

Dying Light

Rage, rage against the coming of the night.

I’d forgotten what it’s like to run for my life. It’s pitch-black in the city of Harran; slums, tower blocks and imperial apartments all equally anonymous in the dark. Behind me, the Volatiles ululate, disoriented as I duck through holes in fences, dodge round the more-sedentary dead, and bound over the rooftops. A single Volatile is more than a match for me. When an entire pack is chasing, pausing is a death wish, so I barrel headlong into the dark, bouncing off walls and trash. Not since the opening scenes of the original Pathologic have I been so disempowered. It’s only when I screech to a halt in front of a cliff that the pack catches up.