From Hell

How Id Software is calling on its past to help ensure its future

On stepping into Id Software’s Richardson offices we’re warmly welcomed by Donna Jackson, the company’s larger than life – and thoroughly Texan – office manager. Better known as Miss Donna or Id Mom, she sits behind a reception desk that’s positioned in front of a wall-to-wall glass cabinet stuffed full of trophies and Id history. “How y’all doing?” she asks, elated that we could make it all the way from England to visit. She joined the company 24 years ago, back when John Carmack was still wrestling with the task of repurposing the Hovertank 3D and Catacomb 3-D engine for what would become Wolfenstein 3D. Carmack, along with the rest of the company’s founders, has long since left, which makes Miss Donna – fittingly sat in front of a display that includes mint-condition game packaging and model Cyberdemons – Id’s longest-serving member of staff. She’s the studio’s last link to its formative era. We smile back, just as happy to be here as she is, but it’s a sobering realisation.

The Odd Gentlmen

The Pasadena developer whose co-founders went straight from students to studio directors

Matt Korba and Paul Bellezza were students at the University Of Southern California in Los Angeles in 2007. Just a year later, they found themselves running a game studio. Its first game – The Misadventures Of PB Winterbottom, a whimsical and beautifully drawn puzzler that enjoyed favourable comparison to Braid when it was released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2010 – was originally Korba’s graduate thesis. Having submitted it to the IGF and taken it to E3 with IndieCade, the pair ended up signing a publishing deal with 2K, and thus The Odd Gentlemen came into being. Appropriately, their very first office was in a University Of Southern California building, right above where they had worked on Winterbottom as students.

Darkest Dungeon

Developing Darkest Dungeon over the course of a year in Early Access must have felt a lot like playing it: spinning plates, struggling to reconcile nested systems determined to disagree. You spot a wobble, adjust and attempt to recover, but gravity takes hold – mathematically, you’re doomed. If you’re not clobbered by the game’s horrors, you might run out of cash curing heroes of rabies. Pushing them back into the dark too soon could induce a heart attack, or their minds might snap, or they could die of hunger. Every conceivable step is a further descent into insanity. It’s this astounding confluence of systems, in a perfect state of imbalance, that makes this one of the most enthralling games to crawl from the Roguelike cadaver.

The Climb

Crytek reaches for new heights in virtual reality

A product of Crytek’s virtual reality experimentation, The Climb has graduated from prototype to fully fledged Oculus Rift launch title. The game repurposes the glorious landscapes with which the studio made its name, dispensing with stealth and guns in favour of free climbing. The threat of bullets might have gone away but perched hundreds of metres above the ground and clinging to a rock face by your finger tips is no less dangerous a task.

Roberts Stream 107

Spotify Connect, internet radio and wi-fi streaming? Roberts, you're spoiling us. Packing streaming features into affordable radios has earned Roberts our Awards for three consecutive years. It is now offering the same features for an even more affordable price in the Roberts Stream 107.

It's a small radio, so we're not expecting bags of dynamism, bass or volume. True to form, the Stream 107 can't really muster much low-end heft, nor does it fill up a room with big, sweeping dynamics. But it does do voices well, placing them dead centre with enough character and punch so that personality and humour come through. It's good news if you to listen to news, breakfast radio or podcasts.

Lindy Cromo NCX-100

Sometimes you just want to be left alone with your music, but a crying baby on the plane or packed carriage on your morning commute can have other ideas. If the premium cost of having noise-cancellation onboard your headphones has left you resorting to turning up the volume until you get tinnitus or pressing them closer against your ears to drown out the sound, you may be pleased to know Lindy’s flagship Cromo NCX-100s are only £100. Even more so, knowing that, for budget noise-cancellers, they’re pretty good.

Intel NUC5PGYH NUC PC

Intel’s original Next Unit of Computing, or NUC for short, was released back in early 2013, and since then we’ve seen six different generations roll out. Each was powered by a different Intel CPU architecture, but they all had one annoying similarity – a lack of components. While other vendors of copycat small form factor PCs sold models that were ready to use straight out of the box, Intel deliberately left out system memory, a hard drive and an Operating System.

Asus RT-AC5300

Welcome to the fastest router. Asus’ new router combines three different wireless networks into one device to provide oodles of bandwidth for users that need to connect a large number of devices. In fact, if you’re not connecting more than ten devices to this beast, you’re wasting its potential.

Acer Predator 17

The Acer Predator 17 is an old-school gaming laptop; it’s big, heavy, and mighty expensive. But it’s also kick-arse fast, able to whip through The Witcher 3’s highest settings without batting an eye-lid. In this era of ultraportable, wannabe, gaming laptops that struggle to run Solitaire, it’s refreshing to see Acer hark back to the old days. Yet it’s not the only bruiser of a gaming machine around – how does it compare to other 17in behemoths?