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.