Digital Bards

Videogame stories have come a long way since the times of text crawls, but have they gone in the right direction? Paul Walker-Emig speaks to devs about the challenges they face when telling us their tales

“I think videogames are pretty terrible for telling stories,” Jonathan Blow, the man behind Braid and The Witness, tells us. A provocative statement and one that we expect most players and developers would react to with hostility, but he puts forward a compelling argument.

Unity 5

Rick Lane revisits the Unity engine, which is now capable of some stunning graphical feats, including real-time global illumination

When we last looked at Unity in 2013, it was a rapidly growing mid-tier engine. Big on flexibility and community support, it lacked the power of mainstream packages such as Unreal and CryENGINE. Two years and two major updates later, and Unity is much more powerful, more comprehensive and, for all but the biggest developers, completely free.

It’s firstly worth recapping what Unity 4 brought, especially its DirectX 11 support, which brought it in line with other mainstream proprietary engines. Unity 4 also affixed a whole new animation system called Mecanim to the program, and switched to smaller, more frequent updates, including rendering and physics support specifically for 2D games, and broader coverage of mobile devices.

Phanteks Enthoo Evolv ITX

Phanteks has typically focused on the premium tower case market with its Enthoo range, but after a long wait, it’s finally turning its attention to smaller form factors and lower budgets. The Enthoo Evolv ITX is the company’s first dedicated mini-ITX chassis, and it comes in at a very attractive £55 inc VAT price, or just £50 without a window.

Not surprisingly, the Evolv ITX has a similar design to the original micro-ATX Evolv, albeit with smaller dimensions. There’s a slightly indented front section, sharp angles and minimalist panels – it’s a clean-looking chassis.

HP EliteDesk 705 G1 Desktop Mini PC

The HP EliteDesk Mini PC is a part of the 705 G1 range of desktop PCs, aimed mostly at the larger, enterprise business user. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the small office or even home user can’t enjoy its diminutive dimensions.

There are a number of G1 models available, and this particular 705 version features an AMD A4-7350B APU at 3.4GHz, 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3 memory and a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive, with a copy of Windows 7 Pro.