Sony HT-XT3

Looking for a soundbase to boost your TV's sound and get to grips with your music needs? Look here, says Mark Craven

The HT-XT3 is a soundbase with a Smart heart. Sony's £450 newbie flaunts Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, app control, multiroom support, screen mirroring and media streaming, while its conservative rivals off er little more than an optical audio socket. And it does all this remembering that sound quality still matters.

PMC Twenty Series 5.1

Mark Craven luxuriates in the clear, crisp waters of PMC's Twenty Series speakers

With its early '90s origins in the world of pro audio, PMC is a well-known marque in hi-fi circles. It has collected accolades for its range of speakers that aim, in the company's own words, 'to replay the purest intentions of the artist without colouration.' It doesn't, in case you were wondering, make a soundbar.

Sony STR-DN860

Sony’s entry-level 7.2 receiver fails to scale new heights, puns Steve May, but that might not matter to you

The STR-DN860 AV receiver may be light at just 8.3kg, but it arrives with a weight of expectation. Its predecessor was a bestseller for Sony, and this update boasts cool new multiroom functionality, improved HDMI connectivity and some luscious hi-res audio playback compatibility.

The receiver opts for a solid, streamlined look with no pull-down drawbridge. The only fascia acne are headphone and mic inputs, plus USB. As £400 AVRs go, it's among the best-looking ones out there.

SparkyLinux 4.0

Wars have been fought over what is the best Debian-based distribution, but Shashank Sharma is convinced that this ready-to-use OS is a contender

Apart from being one of the first Linux distributions (distros), Debian also has the distinction of fathering, or inspiring a large number of other distros. Several of these descendants, such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint have since gone on to achieve fatherhood in their own right. Despite the choice of different repositories (repos) as their base,most projects prefer Debian Stable as the foundation for their distro. But the Stable repos features thoroughly tested, albeit older, software which makes it ill-suited for distros that wish to serve only the latest of everything to their users. SparkyLinux is one such distro and it uses the Debian Testing repository as its starting place.

Fuze T2-B

10 PRINT “Jonni Bidwell goes back to Basic, much to the chagrin of Edsger Dijkstra’s ghost”

A Raspberry Pi starter kit that includes a chunky, retro-styled case, a breadboard with all manner of components and (optionally) a robot arm. Also included is Fuze Basic 3.0 so kids can get coding in the very same language that frustrated their parents. A handy reference guide is included, as well as a number of programming project cards.

Planetside 2

MMOre than we bargained for

Okay, imagine if you ever actually met King Kong, like, on the way to the shops or something. Without the wide panning shots of a masterly film director to call upon, chances are you’d hardly drink in the grandeur of this magnificent beast so much as get a mushful of gorilla toenail action. Some things are simply too big to absorb with our measly human abilities of perception. This ludicrously large scale, free-to-play sci-fi shooter is one such thing.

N++

You wait forever for a plus, then two come along at once

A little known fact about N++: it was originally supposed to be a PS4 launch game back in the retro year of 2013, but it’s taken almost two extra years to finish it off. And within seconds of booting up the game it becomes blindingly obvious that N++ has been under the coding knife for far, far longer than originally planned.

Yatagarasu: Attack On Cataclysm

Bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? Even without its subtitle, Yatagarasu is still too much of a tongue-twister, but fret not, we’d like to propose an alternative. How about Fourth Strike? The three-person dev team may be composed of former SNK staff who built careers by working on the King Of Fighters series – and some of its features, like super jumps and short hops, feature here – but it’s a Capcom game to which Yatagarasu owes by far the greater debt. So great, in fact, that at times it feels more like a spiritual successor to Street Fighter III: Third Strike than a brand-new game.

Tembo The Badass Elephant

Let’s address the elephant in the room: Tembo, your game isn’t very good. The problem isn’t visual, the art style oozing a quirky ’90s ’tude. And if you have to build a platforming moveset by pilfering from animal mascots, you could do worse than to borrow Yoshi’s flutter jump and ground pound, or Sonic’s dash from Rush and his ability to curl into a ball of destruction. But mixing both? That’s an identity crisis right there.