How Do You Solve A Problem Like GamerGate?

How did a piece of parochial tittle-tattle turn into a row that has exposed a divisive rift in the gaming community, and what will be the long-term fallout? John Moore takes a look.

No story that begins with a blog post from a disgruntled ex-boyfriend claiming infidelity by his former girlfriend is likely to end well, but no one really had a clue quite how deep the GamerGate rabbit hole was going to be. For the past month, it's been a war of words that's sectioned off its own increasingly bitter and murky corner of social media and progressively leaked into the mainstream gaming media. If you have no idea what we're talking about, here's a quick synopsis.

Intel Core i5 4690K

There is a common trend in pretty much all corners of the PC market, whether processors, graphics cards or motherboards. There’s a series with a super high-end component - seriously powerful, but probably very expensive. That’s the aspirational part. Then there’s the real low-end stuff, the components that share the same DNA but have been technologically hobbled to justify a far lower price. And then you have the middle siblings: they’ll generally have a good percentage of the power of the high-end, but with a generous drop in price.

These are the parts of interest to gainers, and the latest К-series i5 is a perfect example. It’s a powerful processor, with many of the qualities of the top-end Haswell Core i7 CPU, but with a few strategic omissions from its specs list. However, what has been removed to ensure a lower price doesn’t stop it from being the finest, best value gaming processor available.

Sunset Overdrive

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Sunset Overdrive feels like a return to the sunny, arcade inspired skies of Sega’s Dreamcast. Its chunky, colourful visuals, cheery abandonment of realism and narrative logic, and its breathless rhythm all conspire to create a reassuring sense of nostalgia. But more importantly, Sunset Overdrive feels like a proper Insomniac game, a return to form after the studio's first foray away from PlayStation hardware, Fuse, which struggled to find an identity within its generic looks and lacklustre implementation.

The one thing Sunset Overdrive does have in common with Fuse is a focus on co-op. Find one of the photo booths dotted around the city and up to seven other players can join you in a mode called Chaos Squad. This plays out across the same city as the singleplayer campaign, and you get to keep your character, too, but the group votes on which o: the proffered co-op-specific missions to attempt. Each new voting opportunity presents players with two choices: one mission will increase the Chaos level - which equates to higher difficulty and greater rewards - in your world, while the other will provide the team with buffs, ammo or health, but only slightly increase the Chaos level, if it does at all.

Counterspy

Part-Metal Gear, part-XCOM, part-successful.

Good intentions and clever planning only win you half the battle. None of that means anything if you can’t deliver the goods on the day. An agent for a neutral, third-party spying collective caught in the middle of a thinly-veiled Cold War parody, your task is to infiltrate the bases of the US and USSR in order to stop either side from nuking the moon. Because nukes are bad and the moon is awesome.

Each 2.5D, randomly-generated stage contains up to four of the 20 pieces of the intel required to interrupt Armageddon, so depending on which missions you tackle (you always have a choice of one from each nation), you could ‘finish’ Counterspy in a few hours or a couple of days.

WWE 2K15

Will Sports Entertainment’s PlayStation 4 main event suplex the demons of the series’ past? Matthew Pellett travels to SummerSlam to run the ropes with WWE 2K15’s new-gen debut.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages – er, so long as you’re 16 or over in order to comply with the likely PEGI rating, that is. After an extended exile in old-gen territories, the WWE series has finally made its way onto the PS4 card thanks to an alliance between old developer Yuke’s and new publisher 2K’s NBA team Visual Concepts.

WWE 2K14 was too far into development under the THQ badge for significant changes to be made when the license fell into 2K’s hands at the start of 2013, so WWE 2K15 is being billed as the first true title of the 2K era – and before I’ve even thrown my first in-game chop it’s clear this year’s grappler is significantly different from all of those that have gone before. Though 2K’s asset team wouldn’t want you to know it with this meagre selection of screens, the jump in visual fidelity is as big a leap as when WWE switched from standard definition programming to Full HD.