Rime

The light at the and of the tunnel. After years in the shadows, Rime finally reveals its true nature.

“When you are responsible for other people – for the wellbeing of their families – sometimes you can get a lot of vertigo. But the sooner you get used to the feeling of always falling the better, because in life you often find yourself falling forever.”

Tequila Works’ CEO Raúl Rubio knows that the development of Rime is like no other. For the better part of four years, his studio has been home to one of the most anticipated independent adventure games of recent memory. But for the longest time it has also existed only on the periphery, as a project that found itself plunged into darkness as quickly as it was pushed into the light.

Fresh Hell

A short history of modern horror games – with Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s Thomas Grip

Traversing the decaying, twilit corridors of the Baker residence, we’re lost. We’re yet to find a map for this section of the swampy compound, we’re short on bullets, and we can’t work out what combiney-item thing we’re supposed to do with that clock. We’re confused, frustrated even, but also thrillingly helpless and terrified. It feels almost profound that a game can make us feel this way. Resident Evil, the series that inspired the term ‘survival horror’ yet had long since strayed from its rotten roots, has been reborn, and this year’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard has become the clearest testament to the resurrection of the genre in recent  years. But the credit for that return to form doesn’t go to Capcom, or to Sega for the nerve-jangling Alien: Isolation. Back in 2010, while the Resi series was goofing around with co-op and the Aliens licence was being torn a new one by Gearbox and Rebellion, a little-known Swedish developer had caught the gaming world’s imagination with its quiet release of a first-person horror game on the PC.

Download Paid-For Software That’s Now FREE!

Not all tech prices are rising – in fact, many have been scrapped completely. Wayne Williams picks the 20 best formerly paid-for programs and apps that you can now download for free

We’re so used to reading about tech prices going up – from broadband to iOS apps – that it’s both a surprise and a pleasure to learn that a onceexpensive product is now available for free.

Obviously, as you see, plenty of brilliant free programs and apps around, but Premium and Pro versions of software have the advantage of being unrestricted, offering many more features and being free of ads and nags.

Over the last year, many quality tools you previously needed to pay for have become completely free. In this feature, we round up our favourites – full software, not free trials – and explain why you should download them.

Our list of newly free products includes image editors, photo filters, professional video tools, system and security software, iOS and Android apps, and much more, and will save you a grand total of at least £1,327. We also show you how to use two of our favourite new freebies.

What your phone LEAKS about you

Here we revealed what personal info is shared by your browser. In part two, Robert Irvine looks at the privacy hole in your pocket

Reboot anything from anywhere

Nothing fixes problems as quickly as turning a device off and on again. Edward Munn explains how to reboot your router, PC and phone, wherever you are

Best safer-browsing tools

Since Web of Trust (WOT) lost the confidence of web users, Andy Shaw has been testing the alternatives

Our guide to fake news

What you’re about to read is completely true, unlike many stories you see online. David Crookes exposes the facts behind fake news

What is ‘fake news’?

The term ‘fake news’ refers to stories that look real, but are deliberately false and misleading. Widely shared on social media, they entice people with their clickbait headlines and fool them with potentially damaging disinformation. By doing so, they have become one of the web’s most pressing problems, making it ever more difficult to distinguish between myth and reality.

Onkyo DP-X1 - entertainment for your ears

The DP-X1 is Onkyo's take on the personal hi-res audio player, but as Ed Selley notes, there's more to it than just a measured performance with tunes

Not content with making an AV receiver for all occasions, Onkyo has been busy beefing up its music credentials over the last few years. It's curated its own hi-res music portal (Onkyo Music), launched headphones in collaboration with Iron Maiden and courted two-channel love with a growing range of hi-fi separates. Now comes its DP-X1 personal audio player, which promises to deliver high-quality listening on the go and give your smartphone a break. If you're the kind of technophile who's amassed a hi-res library (FLAC, WAV, AIFF, ALAC, DSD, etc) but wants to set it free from the confines of your home cinema, this pocketsized gizmo is for you.

Top extensions for securing your web browser

Every now and again in this column, we like to go through and update our list of the best add-ons for securing your browser

These are the very top add-ons for making you safe from tracking cookies and metrics, from malicious website code and from hackers trying to intercept your browser traffic. They will block ads and bypass geoblocks and content filters as well — the latter particularly relevant now that certain websites are being blocked by Australian ISPs. All of these are available in the Chrome Web Store and in the Firefox Add-ons directory.

Minimising mobile data usage

Short on your gigabytes when out and about? Here are the tools you need to grab yourself some extra data

While monthly quotas for landline broadband services have (thankfully) finally grown to the point at which you generally don’t have to stress over your data usage, the same is not true for mobile services. Most mobile services offer only a few gigabytes per month, the kind of quota that can be easily wiped out with system and app updates, plus casual browsing. Worse, most post-paid mobile services will charge a ludicrous excess usage fee if you do accidentally go over your quota.

Luckily, there are tools to help you deal with quota anxiety. This month, we’re going to look at some of the top techniques to reduce your mobile data usage.

Troubleshooting Android bugs

Android is a fantastic operating system, but its numerous versions and thousands of hardware variations mean that frustrating bugs do pop up from time to time.

Most of these nasty bugs can be fixed quite easily, but the more stubborn ones can take a little digging to find and rectify the root problem. To help get you started on troubleshooting, we’ve put together a guide to the most common potential issues and how to fix them. We tested with a Nexus 6P running Android 7, so your phone’s menu layouts and options may vary somewhat.

Manage your monitor settings

Like much of the news these days your monitor isn’t always as accurate as it should be. Mike Plant reveals the tools to fine-tune your screen so that it displays everything flawlessly

Before you start reading this article (and certainly before you start applying any of our tips here), open a photo on your PC and take a few seconds to look at it. Though it might look perfectly fine, the chances are that its reds aren’t really red, its blues are far from blue and its greens… well, you get the idea.

That’s because monitors don’t come pre-calibrated to suit the unique conditions of the room you are in, meaning what you see on screen is a far-from-accurate rendition. In fact manufacturers of PC monitors and TVs often crank up the brightness levels and oversaturate colours so that their screens look vivid – even garish – in order to stand out on the shelf of your local PC World store.

That’s why it’s important to properly calibrate your monitor’s brightness, contrast and colour settings. This not only helps reduce eye strain, but displays photographs and images as they should be. Here we’ll explain how to tune up your monitor for a truer picture.

SuperB new uses for your old tablet & phone

Don’t just dump your old portable devices. Anthony Enticknap explains how to dust them off and give them a new lease of life

Unlike PCs, when tablets and phones get too old and sluggish to be useful anymore, there’s no easy way to upgrade them. Instead, we simply buy new ones. The question then is: what should you do with the old one?

You could bin it, but that feels like a waste. You might even donate it to a friend, family member or charity. But we all know most devices get consigned to cupboards or drawers, where they lie forgotten, gathering dust. If this sounds familiar, it’s time to dig out that old tablet or phone, because there are plenty of ways you could still make use of it.

Tinker Board

Asus’s new computer blows raspberries at its British rival

What is it?

A new single-board computer that’s being touted as a serious rival to the hugely popular (and British-made) Raspberry Pi. Made by Taiwanese company Asus, it runs a customised version of Linux – like the Pi – and is the same credit-card size.

Elite Speak

We sit down with one of gaming’s most influential developers, David Braben, to discuss the future of space travel and Elite’s long-awaited PlayStation debut

Elite Dangerous: Horizons changed forever on 5 January. Before then, the PC and Xbox One sci-fi simulator was a deep-space adventure filled with inter-player wranglings, political flashpoints and only small hints at there being something larger at play. But on 5 January a major event occurred: Commander DP Sayre was ripped out of a hyperspace jump and his ship was temporarily stripped of power as a massive alien Thargoids ship made first contact.

Speed Up Windows 10

Give Windows a shot in the arm by cleaning up and optimizing your PC

Spring is in the air, so it’s the perfect time to take a virtual vacuum to your computer. Every year, it’s the same old story: Despite your best intentions, you rapidly lose control of what goes on to your PC, as programs are installed and forgotten, while gigabytes of files — from documents to photos and videos — are copied multiple times to a myriad locations, clogging up your hard drives. The result? A computer that’s slow to start, performs sluggishly, and is approaching the limits of your storage capacity.

Recover Your Data

Nothing is lost until you’ve looked for it

IMAGINE WITH US: The worst has happened. Everything you held dear is gone. You ignored the clicking of the hard drive, those error messages, that suspicious-looking file for too long. You clicked the thing you shouldn’t have clicked. You emptied the Recycle Bin out of habit after letting your kids near your PC. And now? Now your photos are gone, your documents are dust, those precious family videos cast to the wind. Windows has gasped its last breath. All is lost.

Intel Core i7-7700K

Here we have it, the premier consumer enthusiast chip from Intel’s seventh generation of processors: Kaby Lake. The Core i7-7700K is the replacement for the Skylake family’s Core i7-6700K, and is a fully unlocked quad-core CPU with each core running at 4.2GHz with a 4.5GHz Turbo Boost clock.

It’s important to appreciate the extent of Skylake’s success since launching a couple of years ago and, in turn, the weight of expectation that Kaby Lake chips such as the Core i7-7700K carry on their pin-freckled shoulders. Architectural improvements to the Broadwell generation’s 14nm manufacturing process made for even more power-efficient processors, which both paved the way for a host of long-lasting yet reasonably powerful laptops and 2-in-1s, and enabled enhanced performance for desktops.

Skylake thus became the only kind of CPU worth bothering with, except for the occasional budget PC build. For portability, gaming or getting serious work done, however, Intel dominated, and will likely continue to do so until AMD finally launches its much-anticipated Ryzen chips.

What your browser LEAKS about you

Every time you go online, you reveal more personal info than you realise. Robert Irvine explains how to identify and plug these leaks

Do We Trust The Web of Trust?

Betrayed by a browser: The scandal surrounding the snooping ‘Web of Trust’ add-on for Chrome and Firefox proves that when it comes to the internet, there’s no escape from data collectors

An alleged 140 million internet users use the Web of Trust (WOT) browser add-on to protect them from data snoops, hackers and rip-off artists when they’re using the internet. However, the manufacturer (myWOT) was caught offering highly volatile user data on the data market: Lists of all the web addresses that millions of WOT users visited within a period of one month – In fact, the sample data set acquired by NDR reporters contained the detailed surfing histories of millions of WOT-users. An anonymous statement provided by the manufacturer claimed that it was just an accidental slip-up, and promised that the situation would be fixed.

Make Your Computers Boot Faster

If your long-serving computer keeps booting up at a slower speed, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to buy a new one. How you can more than double the boot-up speed?

It’s usually only a matter of time before the boot-up speed of a Windows computer starts dropping.

This often happens because of a magnetic hard drive that is gradually getting filled up. Such a hard drive may contain several tools of varying degrees of usefulness, which automatically boot up along with the operating system. This is combined with the everincreasing fragmentation of the system files.

Make Online Payments Secure

Online payment services can only score if they strike the right kind of balance between security and comfort. Using Germany as an example, we’ll tell you how you can do just that

Cash or card? Online payments aren’t as simple as payments that are made at the shop. When it comes to the virtual checkout counter, you have to choose from an average of five different payment procedures. In addition to classic offline methods such as those involving bills, direct debits and credit cards, the group also covers online payment systems such as PayPal, giropay and paydirekt. When it comes to being an intermediary between customers and retailers, these are the services that are more or less trustworthy. In addition to being both quick and easy to use, they do not force the buyer to hand payment data over to the online shop. We took a closer look at the most popular online payment services, and we’re going to point out the pros and cons. The table at the end of the article contains a compact expert assessment of the security and comfort levels.

Joy Division

Part console, part handheld: can Nintendo Switch put the house of Mario back on top?

The first real moment of magic comes, inevitably, in Breath Of The Wild. Disappointed as we are by Nintendo’s decision to set Link’s Switch coming-out party in  the same area of the game as E3 2016’s Wii U demo – this is our fourth playthrough of the new Zelda game’s opening section – that’s not really what we’re here for. After pottering around as Link, using the new Pro controller, for a few minutes, it is time: we slide the Switch from its dock and, instantly, the biggest Zelda game to date is running on a 6.2-inch screen in our palms. We have played bigscreen games on handheld displays before, of course, but the transition has never been so elegant, the results never so natural in the hands. A few minutes later the process is reversed, the tablet returned to its base station, the action returning seamlessly to the TV, resuming as quickly as we can pick up the Pro controller.

Sinclair Resurge Ltd

The ZX Spectrum is back – and there’s no need to dig out your tape recorder

Have you ever wondered what inspires Bossa Studios to dream up oddball games such as I Am Bread? Look no further than gamer-in-chief Henrique Olifiers, who had his childhood mind scrambled by eccentric ZX Spectrum games such as Jet Set Willy.

Firefox vs. Chrome vs. Edge

Most of us use the humble web browser more than any other program. These ubiquitous apps act as portals to the Internet, and because we use them daily, we want them to be reliable and easy to use, as well as secure. By far the most popular browsers on Windows are Chrome (with 57.1 percent of the market in November 2016) and Firefox (with 11.1 percent). Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has fallen from grace, but the software giant is pushing its new browser, Edge, in Windows 10, in a bid to gain its lost market share. There are other browsers, such as Opera, but we’re looking at the three major players, to see which is best.

Intel Core i5-7600K

Third time lucky with 14nm

Pull up a seat, and get comfortable. The following is gonna get philosophical, maybe even a little epistemological. The new Intel Core i5-7600K is very cool, you see. But it’s also kinda crappy.

Forensically examine your PC’s processes

Take a peek at the inner workings of Windows with Task Manager

Ever wondered what goes on under the hood of Windows? If your PC is running smoothly, doing its job, then probably not. It’s when things start to go wrong — your PC slows to a crawl, or non-responsive application errors keep popping up— that you suddenly take a keen interest. There are plenty of tools out there that promise to speed up your computer, fix errors, and make things as good as new again (whatever that means), but there’s always an element of risk involved in trusting your PC to a program that doesn’t really explain what it’s doing, failing to point out that cleaning out the Registry doesn’t—on its own, at any rate — speed things up, and, more often than not, introduces problems you later can’t unpick to resolve without a refresh or, worse still, full-blown reinstall.

Secret Tips For PrivaZer

Access advanced scanning options, manage cookie removal and delete any folder or file permanently

Best extra tools for your OFFICE SOFTWARE

Are you getting the most from your office suite? Mike Plant explains how to find and install brilliant extras that will revolutionise Microsoft Office and LibreOffice

Adding useful features (also known as add-ons) to web browsers – such as ad blockers, search bars and password managers – has changed the way we use the internet. But, despite the likes of Microsoft Office and LibreOffice offering their own extra tools, few of us do likewise with our office software. Here, we’ll reveal where you can find these handy extras (which Microsoft in their wisdom calls add-ins) for your office software. We’ll also explain how to install (and remove) add-ins, and tell you about those we simply can’t do without.