No Man’s Sky

Hello Games’ Sean Murray is steering No Man’s Sky’s debug camera from a few inches of dirt on the surface of a desert world up to a view of the planet from orbit. Up, then down. Up, then down. From the ground he swings the camera upwards, where another planet hangs low in orbit on the horizon. I can see hills, valleys and forests on its surface.

“That planet is being fully generated, just at a low level of detail,” he says. “The planet you’re stood on is also fully generated. When you’re stood on a mountain you can see forever - to the curvature of the planet.”

There are no loading screens or pauses as the perspective of the debug camera races from ground to space, from world to world, just a slight fading effect as terrain closer to the player is rendered at a higher level of detail. The reason there are no loading screens is because No Man’s Sky isn’t reliant on reading content from a hard disk. In fact, none of this data is contained in a file at all.

Asus Strix Pro

A good headset can provide a very big edge in gaming, and Asus have demonstrated their understanding of this concept in the form of the Strix Pro Gaming Headset. It joins the Strix range of components and peripherals (for those who like uniformity) as a multiplatform stereo headset that really delivers the goods.

And it looks good too. The Strix logo (owl eyes and eyebrows, essentially) has been cleverly worked into the design; the powerful 60mm neodymium drivers are housed behind clear panels in the ear cups, are accented with a bright orange. When the ear cups are folded down (they rotate a full ninety degrees) and the headset is laid flat, this element, combined with the shape of the ear cups, looks just like the logo. It’s a nice touch when all is said and done, and one that speaks volumes about the design approach taken for this product.

Destiny

Some evolution required…

Destiny is Bungie’s first title away from the confines of its Halo universe. Published by Activision, this much hyped “MMOFPS” provides the player with something new from the studio that created one of the bestselling FPS franchises out there. But under the weight of Activision’s extreme hype engine and the pressure of delivering a title that breaks several moulds and boundaries, Bungie seems to have lost sight of certain elements in the overall construction of the game.

It needs to be said, right off the bat, that Destiny has been receiving a general raw deal in terms of reviews. Perhaps buying into the hype machine soured more than a few views of the game, and it has been getting a beating in reviews that it doesn’t necessarily deserve. That said, it certainly doesn’t live up to the lofty promises made by marketing departments and press releases. To be fair, Destiny is a good game, and it delivers a lot of fun. But it isn’t what we were told we would get.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor

A hype-machine mishap? Or a revolution in gaming?

The Lord of the Rings is not an easy intellectual property to take on. First you have to contend with the fact that Tolkien, the master that he was, created such a tightly woven and immense body of lore that simply trying to find a gap in the narrative of Middle-earth is an immense task in and of itself. While small details may remain obscure, by and large the collected works of Tolkien represent a breathtaking display of an imagination that has created a world rich with a history seemingly as complete as anything that real life has to offer. What has naturally followed is a mass of adherents utterly opposed to anything that would attempt to rewrite or alter the canon of Arda, let alone introduce a completely new chapter to the saga. This is the task that Monolith have chosen however, and while the developer, best known for Alien versus Predator 2, No One Lives Forever and F.E.A.R., might have been somewhat absent over the past decade, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is looking to place Monolith firmly in the spotlight once again.

The Fallout Of A Hack. Celebgate, Double Standards And iCIoud Weaknesses

A nightmare for those involved and a mixed blessing for the mainstream press. John Moore looks at the two-sided tale of the recent iCIoud hack...

The massive release of stolen celebrity pictures that began at the imageboard AnonIB, an affair that's since been dubbed Celebgate (or The Fappening, if you really want to be crude), must have caused some fevered meeting among newspaper and website staff on Sunday 3rd September. They had a fine line to walk when working out exactly how much salacious content they could get away with, without crossing the line. Seriously, if infamously amoral celeb blogger Perez Hilton - who has a long track record of publish-and-be-damned insouciance - is pulling photos from his site and sites like Gawker are wringing their hands about this breach of privacy, others needed to tread carefully, because the legal rottweilers must be on the loose. Or was this change in attitude more than just the result of legal approaches?