Is It Time To Give Second Life A Second Chance?

As online communities go, it’s hard to get more ambitious or, frankly, bizarre than Second Life. Isn’t it all a bit passé, though? Sarah Dobbs looks into the state of the virtual world…

Remember Second Life? Sure you do. When the online virtual world was launched by Linden Lab back in 2003, it was meant to be revolutionary. Not quite a game, not quite a chatroom, Second Life was supposed to represent, well, a second life. It was a forum for users to reinvent themselves, to create avatars that represented themselves – physically accurate or not – and meet other people. It caused any number of headlines; couples met in Second Life and got married, fraudsters found victims in Second Life and ripped them off, psychologists debated whether or not spending time in Second Life was healthy.

Code With AI2. Timer (Part 2)

Build a useful Android timer app with David Briddock

Last time we created a simple yet useful timer app with AppInventor 2 (AI2). This week we’ll extend this app by adding more components and additional coding blocks. Remember, all you need to play along is a Windows/Mac/Linux PC, web browser and Google account. Ideally you’ll also have an Android smartphone or tablet, but even this isn’t essential.

Oh No, Lenovo

The world’s top computer builder has been caught leaving its devices potentially vulnerable twice in the space of a year. Will it ever learn?

It’s been little more than six months since Lenovo, the world’s largest shipper of PC technology – with nearly 20% of the market in 2014 – pledged to end the installation of third-party software on its machines. The announcement (which can be seen at tinyurl.com/ktzcprj) came in the wake of a furore surrounding a piece of software called Superfish, which had the capability to intercept and look at encrypted traffic in order to display adverts.

Can An App Make You More Productive?

There are countless so-called ‘productivity apps’ on the market, all claiming that they can force you out of procrastination and into a state of unbridled target-accomplishing bliss. Rob Leane asks: do any of them actually work?

The term ‘productivity app’ may seem like a misnomer, seeing as most apps available these days tend to have the opposite effect. Between this writer’s phone and his laptop, there’s enough downloaded content to stop me from ever doing any actual work. My phone tends to be filled with the likes of Candy Crush, Words With Friends and an ever-growing myriad of social media platforms. These regularly combine into a super-effective distraction device, more than anything else.

How To Get The Best From A Multi-GPU Setup

Multi-GPU setups provide the best graphical performance, and here’s how to get the best from the tech

Most people may be content with a single graphics card; some are even happy with onboard video. However, as PCs have evolved, and games have become more and more complex and visually accomplished, the need for power has grown. Graphics cards have become more and more powerful as a result, allowing developers scope to produce the best graphics they can, in fact, the more powerful graphics cards can even help the main CPU with its own workload, boosting your PC’s capabilities.

Does Alphabet Spell A New Dawn?

Google is reorganising itself as Alphabet, but why? How will it work, and what difference will it make to us? David Crookes looks at what comes next

In 2001, the Royal Mail made a risky decision that would prove to be a short-lived disaster. In a bid to show that it did more than just deliver the post, the company ditched a well-recognised name, which perfectly described what the firm ultimately did, and rebranded as ‘Consignia’, a name that the bosses admitted did not mean anything. After much eyebrow raising, and a refusal by many workers to comply, the firm changed to the more reasonable Royal Mail Group. Consignia barely lasted a year, and ultimately went down as one of the biggest – and most expensive – corporate mistakes of all time.

Half-Life 2

How the wordless Gordon Freeman became one of gaming’s best raconteurs

Before Dunwall, there was City 17. Before The Last Of Us’s overrun sewer colony, there were Route Kanal’s resistance outposts. Before Elizabeth DeWitt came Alyx Vance, and before Andrew Ryan there was Wallace Breen. Thousands of words have been devoted already to explaining how great Half-Life 2 is to play, but that’s only a fraction of its legacy. It might read like hyperbole, but a great deal of what we know about effective videogame storytelling today was incubated in Valve’s 2004 opus.

Galak-Z: The Dimensional

Scintillating but imperfect 2.5D space shooter Galak-Z proves that FTL’s creators were onto something when they coined the ‘Roguelike-like’ label. We do need a less generic umbrella for tough games that aren’t afraid to reset a chunk of progress when they kill you, and procedurally generate their levels. 17-Bit’s latest comes in hot on the tail of The Swindle, another game to be loosely classed as Roguelike, both titles experimenting with structural twists designed to retain the tension of permadeath while allowing each lifespan to contribute to a detached progression path. Call these Samsara games, perhaps: your actions in past lives can influence this one, but you’re still lashed to the merciless wheel of rebirth.

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture

Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture starts in a familiarly restrictive manner, funnelling you down a set path marked out by immovable barriers and impenetrable shrubs to keep you from wandering off into the tempting landscape beyond. It’s a sop to convention that feels almost like a letdown in the context of the promises made for the game, but any sense of disappointment is short-lived. Only a short while later you’ll be overwhelmed with indecision as Rapture’s world and story reveal their surprising – and entirely refreshing – indifference to your presence.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Hideo Kojima isn’t normally one to practise what he preaches. The Metal Gear saga warns against puppet masters who would govern our lives from the shadows, but does so in adventures traditionally trussed up by directorial intent and a rigid script. Kojima’s self-contradictory nature is perfectly captured in The Phantom Pain when series mainstay Revolver Ocelot berates new recruits for “fighting as Hollywood taught them” only to spend a few seconds swivelling a six-shooter on his finger in slow motion. This is the same man who, two hours earlier, helped us unload a shotgun into a flaming unicorn. The series has made knowing nods to the conflict between authorial vision and agency in the past – think of Raiden at the end of MGS2 – but until The Phantom Pain (and its playable prologue, Ground Zeroes), it had not sought to remedy it.

The making of Her Story

Sam Barlow and Viva Seifert talk us – in spoiler-filled detail – through this shake-up of game narrative conventions

Big publishers and their aversion to risk makes for a solid, if familiar, backbone to a story, but it’s usually slaved to a simplistic narrative. As a topic, creative stagnation looms large over the videogame industry, spurring talk of an increasingly desolate landscape of numbered sequels and incremental feature bloat. It’s a genuine concern, even if such warnings often appear, without apparent irony, next to lists of ten things to be excited for in Fallout 4.

Devil’s Third

Six years, four game engines and two publishers later, Tomonobu Itagaki’s latest could generously be said to have endured a problematic gestation. And yet, setting aside the fall of THQ and the shift to a new console, it’s always seemed to be a game built upon precarious foundations. On a fundamental level, its combination of FPS gunplay and thirdperson melee combat simply doesn’t work. And when you shoot the leg of a man standing a good five feet away from the nearest cover only to stifle a chuckle as his head inexplicably pops off, you’ll wonder if Devil’s Third would have been much better under ideal conditions.

Satellite Reign

Driving rain. Neon skies. The hum of plasma in the air. The warmth of a nostalgia stretching back to Syndicate (the 1993 game that introduced a generation to the joy of cities as playgrounds, not the quickly forgotten 2012 shooter). On the surface, Satellite Reign looks like the sequel fans have been waiting for since 1996’s Syndicate Wars, and in many ways this Kickstarted spiritual progeny is just that. In execution, though, something fundamental has gone missing – and it’s not just the adverts for Ghost In The Shell.

Until Dawn

Horror’s a fine fit for a Heavy Rain-style game, and teen slasher horror seems to fit the mould even better. While Until Dawn was beaten to the whole jump-scares-and-QTEs thing by The Walking Dead, tension in Telltale’s game comes from the fear of a known quantity: shuffling undead that bite and kill indiscriminately. In Until Dawn, the fear stems from ignorance – you don’t know what’s out there, what it wants, or what form the attack will come in, if it comes at all. The fear of the unknown is a powerful thing.

Heat Signature

Gunpoint’s creator still has a way to go before signing this off

Spinning through the vacuum of space in a recently extricated urinal block isn’t a situation we planned for today. It’s the stuff of Douglas Adams-fuelled nightmares and came about as a result of being a little too bold at the helm of what was, until recently, a considerably larger vessel. Luckily, our personal pod can be remotely controlled, so after leaping clear of the space lav, we’re soon back in an oxygenated environment.

Scalebound

Xbox One’s exclusive action-JRPG doesn’t want for scale

Hideki Kamiya starts his presentation of a pre-alpha Scalebound by stressing that, even though the session will focus on combat, this isn’t a traditional action game, but an action-RPG. The game channels Kamiya’s work on Okami as much as it does Bayonetta, then, and we’re promised a vast world in which to showboat.

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.

Skylake Deep Dive

Intel’s latest architecture is finally here, so we got investigating

Well, here you have it folks. Skylake hath cometh to the people, and with it comes the absolute pinnacle of Intel’s microprocessing technology. Let’s just forget about Broadwell. Its short life time has been invaluable to us PC enthusiasts, but alas, it was never meant to be.

Scythe Ninja 4

Stealthily lives up to its name

Scythe’s fourth-gen flagship CPU cooler – successor to the highly successful Ninja 3Rev. B – has just launched, and it’sabit of a whopper. But while measuring in at 130 x 130 x 155mm, and weighing 900g (with a fan), it still manages to be some 180g lighter than its predecessor.

Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti Arctic Storm

A low-temp, low-noise, beauty

At this point, we’re probably all aware of the power wielded by the GTX 980 Ti. It’s a graphics processor sitting somewhere between polygon perfection and a trip to your local loan shark. Granted, it’s quite a bit cheaper than a Titan X, and contains only half the memory and a couple of hundred fewer CUDA cores. Yet, with a kick in the overclocking chops, it’ll easily keep pace, if not outperform that juggernaut when push comes to shove. So what gives? Why are we looking at this card again? After all, it’s already in this month’s group test.

Asus STRIX R9 Fury Direct CU III OC

A flagship card oozing silent gaming fury

AMD has fallen short in the last month. With many of us hoping the red team would finally pull back a win from the boys in green, it was with disappointment that we witnessed those Fury X benchmarks come through. All in all, the battle seemed lost. The war was over. Until now.

Gigabyte P55K V4

Two chips. One laptop. What’s that remind us of...

OK, maybe not. But the Gigabyte P55K in this revised v4 format does come with plenty of interesting newness. Don’t let its familiar threads fool you. For starters, the fancy Core i7-5700HQ CPU debuts Intel’s new Broadwell architecture in quad-core format for laptops. In outright performance terms, it’s not a dramatic step forward over older Haswell models.

Asus Z170 Pro Gaming

The pricing isn’t premium, but what about the performance?

That gamer ‘look’ and great performance, but without the usual premium pricing. That’s the proposition-going-on-salespitch for Asus’s new Z170 Pro Gaming. It’s the affordable option for performance freaks. Of course, you could also say this ain’t no Asus ROG or TUF board. It’s a poverty-spec item you’d only buy if you can’t afford something better. So which is it, Barry bargain or false economy?

Meet Your Maker

Many tools have been released over the years that claimed to make game development accessible to all. Software like Klik ‘n’ Play and DarkBASIC promised an easy route into game design, either through simplified programming languages or avoiding coding altogether. But there’s a difference between making game design accessible, and making professional game design accessible.

That’s where the other apps fell short, and where GameMaker: Studio is different. “I think that when we released Studio, the product changed and the user-base changed,” says Stuart Poole, head of production at YoYoGames, the makers of GameMaker: Studio. “People are now using this as a tool to make a living.”

Dark Soul

The story behind THE WITCHER 3’s best quest, and the flawed, human character at its heart

When Geralt of Rivia arrives in Velen, searching for his adopted daughter Ciri, he finds a war-ravaged no man’s land. Dead soldiers litter the fields – the aftermath of a bloody war between Temeria and the invading Nilfgaardians – and deserters hang from trees, bags over their heads, swaying gently in the breeze. Yet despite this horror and devastation, Velen is also a place of startling natural beauty, of lush forests and rolling hills.

Remembering… Amstrad Sinclair PC200

This week, we check out an unfamiliar PC with a familiar name

Back in 1988, Amstrad had the idea that people may want to actually have a portable version of an IBM PC, and thus the Amstrad PPC512 and the Amstrad PPC640 came into being. Both had an 8MHz NEC V30 processor, 512KB of memory, a full-sized keyboard and a tiny LCD display. They both ran MS-DOS 3.3, and featured a number of business-based software packages.

Dropsy

A surreal adventure game about being nice to people

The key to Dropsy is the hug system. Anyone you see – and some inanimate objects – can be hugged. Dropsy may look like the stuff of nightmares, but he has a heart of gold. Not everyone will want to hug him at first, though. First you have to make them like you by completing sidequests. For every successful hug, Dropsy pins a picture of the hugee to the wall above his bed.He’s a serial hugger, whose hunger for hugs cannot be sated, and the most unlikely videogame hero of the year.

The Future of the GPU

It could be the perfect time to upgrade your current graphics card, but what do you need to prepare for the GPU future?

The graphics card is the component most responsible for PC gaming performance. Above everything else in your PC. You could have the most powerful, £800 octo-core Haswell-E CPU in your rig, but if you’ve got a weedy GPU backing it up, you’re never going to be hitting the graphical heights that today’s PC games deserve.

The hidden cost of Windows 10

Barry Collins warns that you always end up paying, even for “free” OS upgrades

It wasn’t so long ago that Apple and Microsoft routinely got away with charging for upgrades to their operating systems. Now, the very idea of paying to update Windows or Mac OS X seems as ludicrous as making Wayne Rooney the poet laureate.

We’re all suckers for a freebie. As soon as an alert pops up informing us that there’s a new version of an OS for our phones, tablets or computers, we eagerly tap the ‘Update’ button... and then spend the next eight hours regretting it while swearing at slowmoving progress bars.

Best New Mapping Tools

We’d be lost these days without Google Maps, but there are plenty of other good mapping tools that offer features it lacks. Robert Irvine directs you to the best

Try the new and improved Bing Maps

Microsoft’s mapping service (www.bing.com/maps) has always been overshadowed by Google’s, but it recently relaunched with a much-improved design that makes it faster and easier to use. Bing Maps lets you switch instantly between road, aerial, birds-eye and street-level views; see real-time traffic information, including roadworks, closed lanes and accidents; save collections of your favourite places; and get accurate directions and journey times based on traffic and transport conditions. If you haven’t checked Bing Maps for a while, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The Great Windows 10 Swindle?

One month on from the launch of Windows 10, we expose the hidden costs that undermine the ‘free’ upgrade, reveal how to tweak its most annoying settings and explain how to fix common problems

From early indications, Windows 10 is looking like a success for Microsoft. The reviews have been mostly positive, users are reporting that the new operating system is fast and easy to use, and thus far there has been no sign of the major backlash that followed the arrival of Windows 8.

Smart mirrors

You can ask smart mirrors a lot more than if you’re the fairest of them all, such as if you may be unwell. David Crookes reflects on these innovative new devices

What is a smart mirror?

Smart mirrors go beyond simply showing your reflection as you groggily peer into them in the morning. Instead, they act as large screens that deliver useful, targeted information and even an analysis of your overall health. Their makers say they will revolutionise our daily routines and prompt us to take better care of ourselves.

Linksys RE6700 Wi-Fi Range Extender

You don’t want your Wi-Fi extender hogging a power socket. Andy Shaw tests one with a pass-through option

Network dead zones are the most annoying thing about Wi-Fi, but wherever you put your router, the chances are that there will be places in your house that your network can’t reach. One answer is a range extender. This new model from Linksys is as fully featured as they come, operating across both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks, and even boosting the latest 802.11ac routers.

Corel PaintShop Pro X8

Andy Shaw tests the latest version of a classic Windows image editor

PaintShop Pro is a PC classic. Originally developed by Jasc Software and released as shareware, it was one of the first full-featured image processors available for the PC, rivalling Adobe’s Photoshop (at the time only available on Apple computers and aimed at professionals) for a fraction of the price.

Corel took over the PaintShop Pro brand in 2004 and while the software has been tweaked and refined over the years, it essentially does the same job it always has: providing you with tools to improve your photos. Whether they just need a crop and straighten, or more complicated retouching, there are plenty of tools available.

BubbleUPnP

Accessing and streaming media from one device to the next has never been easier

The power of a modern mobile device is truly amazing. Not only can we play some devilishly clever games on them, but they can also play back a wealth of media file types with perfect clarity and in most cases, in glorious high definition. Thanks to the continuing development and improvements to DLNA, which started off life as something of a pain to get going, we can now utilise the impressive abilities of our mobile devices to stream content to and from various sources around our digitally connected homes.

Top 5 Things That Are Only Okay On Social Networks

Sometimes, what happens online should stay online... And for good reason

1 Following Strangers

In the ’Twitterverse’, having hundreds, thousands or even millions of followers is a badge of honour, a mark of your worth. People want you to follow them. Offline, that same attention-grabbing behaviour would, at best, attract funny looks and insults... but for the follower, it would probably land them in the dock. Yes, for some reason being online makes following complete strangers okay, and somehow the word ‘stalker’ never comes into it.

EVGA GeForce GTX950 FTW 2GB

A new mid-range graphics card that’s excels at pretty much everything

The GTX950 mid-range graphics card has now been released, amid much anticipation over the last few weeks; including a leak of the specs a day or two before the actual launch of the card. This is a card that’s designed to be value for money, without sacrificing performance, especially when it comes to 1080p gaming.

Onikira: Demon Killer

We enter feudal Japan for a spot of demon bashing

There’s something about a side scrolling 2D beat ‘em up that takes you back to a more simple time in gaming. To make a decent 2D scroller, though, you need a concept that will grab the attention of the gamer. It needs to have a story that you actually care about, it needs to be fast and energetic enough to be competitive but not impossible and it needs a certain sense of style to lure in those playing.

Xenta Laser Wireless

Xenta tries to create the perfect laptop mouse

Experience tells me that the phrase ‘ergonomic mouse’ has been horribly abused over the past three decades. Not least because hand size and shape can vary so wildly, that what’s perfect for one person is much less so for another. The Xenta Laser Wireless Mouse tries to address that issue in an interesting way: while providing the sort of ideal wireless device for laptop users.

Brother DS-920DW

Have scanner, will travel... and scan, probably

The Brother DS-920DW is a scanner that offers double-sided document scanning and its own wireless network functionality hence the 'DW' part of its model number. Unlike more familiar flatbed scanners that reside on desktops, either as standalone devices or part of a multi-function product, the DS-920DW is a page scanner that has been designed to be portable for those whose workplace is on the move.

Logitech BCC950 Conference Cam

Our evil robot overlords have dispatched their minion to watch our every move

I’ve reviewed some weird looking stuff in these hallowed pages, but Logitech’s BCC950 Conference Cam deserves an award for being one of the wackiest ever. It’s how I would imagine the pet that a Dalek comes home to each night would look – and you can make it even odder if you put the spherical camera on the vertical pole that’s included in the box. In case you were wondering, it’s not telescopic... That would be just too much craziness for this reviewer to handle.

Gigabyte P37X Gaming Laptop

We take a look at a high performance mobile gaming setup

Gaming laptops have come a long way in recent years, there's far more to them these days than a simple boost over the clock speed of other laptops. Indeed, many feature CPU, GPU and memory specifications that would make a decent desktop blush with embarrassment.

Eurocom M5 Pro

One year later, Nvidia’s GM204 is still the king of mobile GPUs

Last october, Nvidia wowed the world with its potent new Maxwell 2.0 GPUs, and it pulled a doubleheader by launching the mobile variant right after the desktop parts. Since that time, if you wanted a topperformance gaming notebook, there has only been one question: Do you want GTX 980M, or will GTX 970M suffice? Eurocom’s M5 Pro gives you the power to choose, though our review notebook goes the “more sensible, less extreme” route with a single 970M, and pairs it with a nice 4K Samsung PLS display for good measure.

X out of 10

Windows has leapfrogged nine and gone all the way to ten, but is still missing a trick that Apple sussed years ago

At the time of writing, Windows 10 has just dropped and the verdict from those who’ve tried it appears to be broadly positive. At the very least, it washes away most of the taste of sheer evil that Windows 8 had left in everyone’s mouths. It’s a smart, modern take on Windows, even if it worryingly underpins the theory that Microsoft gets it right precisely every other major update. Hold your breath next time around, then.

Choosing A Monitor. What The Jargon Means

Looking for a new monitor but aren’t sure what all the technical information means? Let us fill you in

If you’re a desktop PC user, you’ll have some form of monitor connected to your system. Laptops, all-in-ones and tablets have no such concern, as they all have their own built-in displays, but the more traditional PC is not so lucky and needs to be accompanied by the ever present monitor.

These have changed greatly over the years, embracing new technology and offering increasingly better image quality, but one thing has remained the same: the confusion many face when it comes to buying a new one.

Best of British. A Celebration of Technological Innovation

Mark Oakley glows with pride as he takes a look at some of the developments, hardware, apps and games that showcase Britain’s technological prowess

If you could indulge me for just a moment, could I ask you to take a look around your computer workspace. Really take a look at it and think about where all the technology that you use everyday comes from. The chances are that the people who put your computer together, shipped your peripherals, buffed up the glass on your monitor, manufactured the console perched on the end of the table, boxed up your hard drive… well, the chances are that they came from all over the world.