If your name is ThomaS in that picture i see your rank is 13 238. There are no idem names, if you have name ThomaS and it's one more player with idem name on gt.rs will appear (1)ThomaS and (2)ThomaS, or just (1)ThomaS if you and that member have the same name. You can see your rank in servers with command /rank /stats /rankstats ( i don't know if this is implement ).

This could be caused by a plugin (creating an invalid entity) or by general memory corruption. I expect it is some plugin they have on the ESEA servers for some in game visual effect not quite working as expected. Make sure you have this write in console. rate 100000 cl_updaterate 100 cl_cmdrate 105 gl_vsync 0 fps_max 99.5 fps_override 1 (This is forced off in ESEA servers however). launch options: -nofbo -freq 120 -noforcemaccel -noforcemparms -w 800 -h 600

Hello, you have to specify if you do not hear them while you play or while you are on the server, if it is while you are playing you may have activated hotkeys and you have a button where you press it during the game and stop the sound. If this is the problem then either disable / delete all hotkeys or set another button.

There seem to be two main camps in gaming; one that embraces the new, and the other that longs for the good old days. I'm somewhere in the middle — I like playing new games, seeing where new technology takes us, but at times I just feel like going out, picking up an SNES or NES, and playing some of the old stuff. There's something more wholesome about the 1980s and 90s of gaming for me so that, at times, the modern onslaught of realistic graphics and complicated plots overwhelms and bores me. Luckily, this is why games like Last Dream: World Unknown exist. They save you the trouble of searching for an old console and provide old school mechanics with a new story. Last Dream: World Unknown is the sequel to White Giant RPG's Last Dream, and takes place in a brand new world called Firma. Here, your four heroes witness the destruction of one of the great cities of the world and have to uncover the history of Firma to save everyone. World Unknown does a really nice job of showing the world's history through flashbacks, and these little cutscenes give you a small window to see what happened and piece together how that affects your journey. What's lacking from the plot overall is your main party's involvement. While I understand the game is a love letter to the old Final Fantasy games on the NES, your party has no dialogue, and they feel very detached from what's actually going on around them. When you rescue a town from a siege, you've clearly influenced the plot, but when you're not involved in most cutscenes, there is no real reward. Your party of four can be likened to the four Warriors of Light in the original Final Fantasy. Depending on whether you've played the first Last Dream, you can transfer your party directly to the sequel. Otherwise, you get the chance to create your own party from 8 different classes and choose from a range of colour palates to make them look as serious or as silly as you want. The choice of classes range from genre staples such as the Knight, Black Mage, or White Mage to some that are a little bit different, like the Hunter, who is less a combat master and more a scavenger and survival expert, or the Gray Mage, who is like the Red Mage, but more physically orientated. I went with the Knight, Thief, Black Mage, and White Mage. Not the most original, but the most familiar and effective for my style. One of World Unknown's most interesting and fun additions is the characters' field abilities. Some classes are more suited to exploration, as mentioned above. The Hunter can tame enemies so you can ride them on the world map, making exploration much quicker. The Engineer has the ability to dig through many of the open holes you'll come across on the world map, and these act as shortcuts, cutting down on the number of battles you'll have to face as well as saving you from walking around miles of mountains just to get to the nearest town. There is much to explore in the world of Firma. The map is made up of several separate islands, and three major kingdoms — one ruled by elves, one by humans, and one by goblins. Everything is very animated and colourful, and each of the kingdoms feels different. The goblin kingdom is slightly more barren than the elven kingdom, which is half tundra beauty and half lush forests. A lot of thought has gone into designing the world of Firma and its inhabitants, including the monsters, who are all hand drawn and some wonderfully unique and grotesque takes on classics. The golems are much more like a cross between Final Fantasy's flan and the traditional bipedal rocky giants, and there are acid yellow one-eyed spiders. Though some of the towns and dungeons could do with a bit more variety in terms of design, the whole package looks very nice. You very quickly acquire a ship, which opens up the expansive ocean and the rest of the world early in the story. Of course, with such a large world, you'll also be getting lost fast, and this sets the tone for a lot of the game. Trying to find what island you need to go to in World Unknown is sometimes confusing. The world is fairly big, so it's very easy to lose track of where you're going and what you need to be doing. Even when you weigh anchor at the dock, navigating each of the islands is very fiddly. Your next location might be right in front of you, but it's more than likely blocked off by a river, a broken bridge, and a thick, impassable forest. This isn't helped by the awkward controls, which cannot be mapped to a control stick, so not only will you need to skirt around these mountains or rivers, but you'll probably walk into them more than once. It's not always clear which way your character needs to go, and there are a lot of dead ends on the maps too, meaning it takes 10 to 15 minutes (not including battle time) to get to somewhere that's essentially 30 seconds away. The more you explore, the more easily you'll notice the music for every island is different and reflects the theme of the narrative at that point. The first island of North Aldrin's theme is very rousing and stoic, preparing you for the arduous journey ahead, while the elven island of Huldra is more ethereal. This is carried through to the battle themes, and boss themes, with every single track being different based on the location. The battle tracks are very guitar and rock heavy, getting you pumped for battle, but they're not particularly memorable. That's the same for most of the soundtrack, and that's a bit of a shame, because a lot of work has gone into this. In terms of how much content there is, World Unknown prides itself on choice, as shown by the character classes, and you've even got a large amount of choice on how to progress the game. These range from tiny things like threatening your innkeeper for a free night's sleep rather than paying up front, to huge things such as deciding to plough through an army of over 40 enemies or head back and get some help. There are tonnes of sidequests and optional dungeons, which will only inspire you to get stuck in the world of Firma and explore, and a crafting system which, with a little bit of patience and resource gathering, is very rewarding. Just picking up the recipes from treasure chests can be a chore, but bringing them back to a town blacksmith and gaining an even more powerful weapon is a treat. I've talked a lot about variety, but the game's dungeon design does not follow suit. Each of these is either a cave, a mountain, or some kind of castle or prison, and consist of a series of corridors, dead ends, and extra rooms just to throw you off track. Navigating these areas is laborious at times. More often than not, you do get rewarded for being lost — cracks in the wall can be destroyed by a bomb and lead to hidden rooms, and you discover hidden treasure chests with healing items, armour and weapons. It's still very frustrating when you've been going one way for at least 20 minutes only to find it's a dead end and you've got to retrace your steps. The game's combat helps to break up this monotony. Fighting monsters in World Unknown is like putting on your best pair of socks because the mechanics are so familiar to anyone who's grown up playing classic turn-based RPGs. You input the commands of each of your four characters, then each of them takes it in turns to attack. There's nothing that is particularly innovative, but why would you fix something that isn't broken? It was nice to just watch the action play out and unfold, and reap the rewards after careful thought and strategy for a change. With a great amount of variety and choice, Last Dream: World Unknown is an RPG Maker game that deserves to be celebrated. The game is here to remind us that old school RPGs can still be fun, but it also brings back memories that we don't always want to admit — that some parts are best left in the past. Regardless, if you love the NES and early SNES days of turn-based combat, I highly recommend this game. Otherwise, the archaic dungeons, awkward world map navigation, and the basic plot might put you off.

There are a number of reports of fake Ryzen processors being sold by third party sellers on retail sites such as Amazon and eBay. Although this is the first time we have seen fake Ryzen processor for sale, the scam isn’t new. In the past, we have seen counterfeit Core i7 processors sold by reputable retailers, as well as fake AMD A-Series A8-7600 processors making the rounds on Amazon. In this case, it seems the crooks behind the caper used low-cost Celeron processors for the scam. The process works something like this: The scammer buys a handful of legitimate high-dollar AMD Ryzen 7 1800X processors, scans the CPU heatspreader, and then prints a sticker and applies it to the face of the fake CPU (in this case an old Celeron processor). The scammer returns the counterfeit processor to the box, reseals it, and then sells it on eBay / Amazon. This type of scam works because the counterfeit processor looks authentic from the outside of the package. Sometimes, the fake product is actually meant to scam the retailer. As some of you are aware, retailers often place returned merchandise back in active inventory and resell it. It could also end up on Amazon’s Warehouse Deals site, after which the fake product ends up in the hands of a retail customer. It's unfortunate that these things happen, but there are a few things you can do to prevent falling victim to this type of scam. Avoid third-party sellers on sites like Amazon, Newegg, Wal-Mart, and others. Pay for purchases with a credit card or services like PayPal that offer hassle-free refunds. Make sure you check the AMD website for tips on recognizing a fake processor or check the serial number on Intel’s website to verify the processor you purchased is legitimate.

The Intel versus AMD battle is becoming more pitched. AMD is placing pressure on Intel with its new high-end desktop Threadripper models while also squeezing the low end of the market with the forthcoming Ryzen 3 models. Intel has its Core i9-7920X, the 12-core model in the Skylake-X lineup, waiting in the wings to challenge AMD's Threadripper, but the company has released little information on the new processor. The Core -7920X's sudden appearance on the company's July price list, though, suggests it will appear on schedule in August. We knew the Core i9-7920X would come bearing 12 cores and 24 threads, which will contend with AMD's 12-core Ryzen Threadripper 1920X, but the base processor frequency and cache allotment are new information. The Core i9-7920X features a 2.9GHz base frequency, which is a substantial decline from its ten-core Core i9-7900X counterpart's 3.3GHz. We anticipated the -7920X's moderate base frequency reduction compared to the smaller Core i9 models (that's a trend with higher core count processors), but the disparity is much wider than expected. It's going to be interesting to see how much further the 18C/36T flagship Core i9-7980XE falls. Threadripper comes in two models, and the low-end 1920X features a 3.5GHz base and 4.0GHz boost, which beats the comparable Intel processor handily. That helps offset some of Intel's IPC advantage. However, Intel's boost frequencies were one of the most surprising aspects of the Core i9 lineup. Intel's high core count models all boost to 4.5GHz, and although we can't be sure of the unannounced turbos of the -7960X and -7920X, Intel might hold the advantage. Intel's Turbo Boost implementation provides varying boost levels based upon the number of active cores. For instance, the Core i9-7900X's Turbo Boost 2.0 provides up to 4.3 GHz with two active cores, 4.1 GHz for up to four active cores, and 4.0 GHz for all ten cores. You also get an extra dual-core 4.5 GHz Turbo Boost 3.0 for two cores. Both Threadripper models boost up to 4.0 GHz, but AMD hasn't revealed XFR turbo frequencies. The Threadripper 1920X also retails for only $799, which is quite the savings compared to the Intel twelve core model, which weighs in at $1,189. It's notable that the Intel price list represents a whopping $10 price reduction compared to Intel's previously-announced -7920X pricing.

Accepted. Send me your pic when it's done.

Today's Deal: Save 40% on Dreamfall Chapters!* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Sunday at 10AM Pacific Time

Today's Deal: Save 40% on Blitzkrieg 3!* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Saturday at 10AM Pacific Time

Dark and Light is Now Available on Steam Early Access and is 17% off!* Dark and Light is a vast sandbox RPG set in a world dominated by powerful elemental forces. Find your way in a meticulously crafted world, featuring breathtaking landscapes, a wide variety of mythical creatures, and limitless possibility to craft, build, and unlock dozens of powerful weapons, spells, and skills. *Offer ends Aug 3 at 10AM Pacific Time

Save up to 90% off selected Games Workshop and Warhammer universe titles!* In celebration of this event we're also having a big Warhammer gaming festival with new content! Many of your favorite Games Workshop universe games have exciting themed content updates “ all in the flavor of Skulls (or Khorne, or Chaos)! Krell comes to Total War: Warhammer, the Chaplain Venerable Dreadnought slams into Dawn of War III and a new character class in the form of the Interrogator Chaplain breaks through on Space Hulk: Deathwing... just to name but a few! *Offer ends Monday July 24th at 10AM Pacific

Right-click CS on the set launch properties and put it -nofbo -nomsaa After putting these settings in the video (that is, in CS). Add one of these lines in the set launch option to return to the initial settings: -w 640 -h 480> sets the resolution 640x480 -w 800 -h 600> sets the 800x600 resolution -w 1024 -h 768> sets resolution 1024x768 Then when you enter CS choose "Low video quality" in Option-Video.

Absolver is Now Available for Pre-Purchase on Steam! Purchase now to receive the Labyrinth Prospect Mask, Uring Priest Gear Set, and 10% off! Absolver is an online multiplayer combat game where players are placed behind the mask of a Prospect under control of the Guides, the new rulers of the fallen Adal Empire, who will determine your worth in joining their elite corps of Absolvers.

Save up to 80% on the BlazBlue and Guilty Gear series during this week's Midweek Madness*! *Offer ends Friday at 10AM Pacific Time

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is the kind of game that requires the right kind of taste to be appreciated. It’s unapologetically dark by design, doesn’t hold back from some pretty in-your-face violence, and replaces many traditional gameplay elements with an odd assortment of mechanics not normally found in adventures. Though it tasks players with investigating murders and solving them in courtroom scenes, similar to Capcom’s po[CENSORED]r Phoenix Wright games, it is a far cry from that series’ lighthearted approach and tongue-in-cheek humor. It’s more akin to an entry in the Saw film franchise, as directed by David Lynch. Originally a Vita exclusive but recently ported to PC and PS4, it’s a good game for those able to appreciate its bizarre sensibilities, but even more than most games, it certainly won’t be for everybody. Players take on the role of Makoto Naegi, a high school student who, much to his surprise, has been invited to attend the prestigious Hope’s Peak Academy, where only the most elite students are prepped for a life of success. Stepping into the school on orientation day, however, he quickly loses consciousness and wakes up in a classroom, disoriented. Meeting the other students, he discovers that the school is completely sealed up, effectively trapping them within. Worse, they’re soon informed by the cute and deceptively cuddly robot teddy bear Monokuma, and whoever controls him from behind the scenes, that they will stay trapped forever, unless they participate in a sadistic killing game, with the sole survivor being the “graduate” and released back into the world. Once the crux of the game has been introduced, the remainder of the narrative is split into six chapters, each leading up to a murder and ending with a trial. Whenever a murder occurs, the remaining students must participate in a class trial to try to discover the killer. If the correct culprit can be identified beyond a shadow of a doubt, he or she will receive a lethal and twisted punishment. Should you fail to establish guilt, all students but the guilty one – known as the “blackened” – are killed instead. Getting to know Danganronpa’s cast of characters is a big job, especially early on before you become more familiar with them. For starters, Makoto meets all fourteen of the others at once, within the first few minutes. Luckily, all of the character design are unique, colorful, creative, and, in several cases, humorous. Their over-the-top personalities are as memorable as their exaggerated features, like the otaku student Hifumi who cares more for the 2D world of his manga than his real-life companions, or the heavily-muscled world class fighter Sakura. The distinctiveness of the characters is a great help in getting your bearings early on, though the story is sadly a bit lagging during the first couple of chapters. As you get a better handle on the story and cast, the narrative also picks up considerably. At the beginning of each chapter when things are at their calmest, you will participate in the Daily Life section. Here, Makoto interacts with his fellow classmates in both scripted and exploratory gameplay segments. There’s generally a bit of housekeeping involved – moving to certain areas within the school to trigger conversation scenes to keep the plot moving along. During most chapters, you are also given designated blocks of time dubbed as Free Time, in which you can choose to visit any character you wish, deepening their relationship with Makoto. Though these sections can help flesh out some character details, they have no bearing on how the overarching narrative plays out, and often seem like filler. Of course, they can be skipped altogether by just going to bed instead, but this comes at the price of missing out on unlockable abilities and skill points that extend the timers during class trials or provide extra chances to answer questions. Wandering around the school is done in a free-roaming first-person mode, with an overlay map that can be toggled on and off. Entering a classroom or other location triggers a unique transition reminiscent of opening a cardboard pop-up book, where all furniture drops in, pops up, or unfolds itself in some way. Other characters are displayed in a similar way; while actual conversations feature big, static character portraits, all students not currently engaged are cardboard cutouts that always face the player, turning creepily on their own axis as you move past them. Controls work passably most of the time, though turning has a tendency to feel much more sluggish than it should. While some camera settings can be eased up on in the options menu, turning and moving with the PS4 controller’s two thumbsticks generally don’t work incredibly well together. The camera has an annoying habit of slowing whenever it locks on to an interactive object, delaying movement. While the overlay map shows the floorplan, it isn’t interactive in any way – there is a second, much more useful map, but it is only accessible by going through a separate menu screen. This is the map most players will reference the majority of the time, since it features fast-travel points to move from point A to point B in short order, and provides information on where to go to advance and reveal locations of all other characters. Before long, the story gets around to the discovery of a body. This is where Danganronpa really comes into its own. With such a large cast of characters, there’s plenty of suspicion to go around, and the game takes full advantage of this. The Daily Life segment ends, and the Deadly Life portion begins. Much like before, time is split between scripted dialog scenes and investigation sequences, where Makoto travels to various areas of interest and examines them, picking up clues and interrogating others. This is pretty hand-holdy, and the story will not move on until every clue has been uncovered, at which point the Class Trial starts.

Inspiration for adventure games has come from a variety of sources over the years, but it’s quite unusual for one to be based on an opera—and Fidelio is not just any libretto; it is the only opera composed by Ludwig von Beethoven, perhaps history’s greatest composer, telling the story of a brave European gal named Leonore who, at her own peril, rescues her husband Florestan from political prison. Those overarching themes of love and sacrifice amidst political turmoil are the framework for The Fidelio Incident, a compelling but imperfect narrative exploration game from new developer Act 3 Studios. The game begins with a fiery plane crash off the coast of Iceland. The plane—itself named Fidelio—separates violently as it goes down, distributing our two main characters, Stanley and Leonore, to very different parts of a frozen island. We don’t know much about them at this point, other than how glad they are to be leaving their former home in Ireland behind, but we learn quickly that there is something mysterious and troubling in their past when Leonore frantically declares: “They can’t find out who we are!” The remainder of The Fidelio Incident follows you in the first-person role of Stanley, with Leonore occasionally communicating via radio. Stanley’s situation is a desperate one initially, as Leonore is immobile after her crash and helplessly calls for Stanley’s help. Your radio is broken and unable to transmit, so all you can do is listen without responding. All she can tell you is that there is a lot of black smoke coming from her position. As Stanley, you can see the smoke high in the distance, but on the treacherous slopes and peaks of this Icelandic coast, there’s no easy visible path to the other side of the mountain. Oh, and the temperature is freezing and you have no immediate source of warmth. Staying unprotected in this tundra for too long will lead to an ugly death. Fortunately, the island has a couple pleasant surprises to combat your developing hypothermia. One is the wreckage of your plane, which scattered small piles of hotly burning debris in helpful even distances. These small fires serve as constant checkpoints, providing a path to move you from one part of the island to the next and keep your general direction in sharp focus. If there’s no accessible fiery wreckage to be found, the island also curiously has plenty of valves that, when turned correctly, provide a nice bath of shooting volcanic steam, which is another way to raise your temperature up to an acceptable level. When away from a heat source, the game simulates your freezing by slowly crystalizing your mask from the outside; once your entire field of vision starts to blur, you better hustle back to the nearest heat source and try to get your bearings again. As you work your way from fire to fire and valve to valve, the tale of Stanley and Leonore’s romance and dark history is revealed through the pages of Leonore’s diary, which were also individually scattered all over the island after the crash. The pages are not in chronological sequence, though they really can only be found in one order, and the designers take advantage of this by cleverly filling in bits of information and slowly revealing the backstory. The details should not be spoiled here, but suffice to say that the two main characters were deeply involved in the Northern Ireland political turmoil of the 1980s, known as the Troubles, and both have done things that have forever impacted their lives and their family. If you have some existing understanding of that period of European history, perhaps you will be a bit more impacted by the ultimate revelations. Personally, I was underwhelmed and felt the backstory as finally told did not match the urgency and suspense of the introduction. The tale is supplemented by some extremely well-produced and unsettling flashback scenes in the middle act of the game, as Stanley finally escapes the freezing outdoors and finds his way inside a mountain bunker, releasing a flurry of memories from his prior life of incarceration. The story beats themselves are not nearly as compelling as the visual storytelling. These scenes use vision blurring and shadow effects to tremendous effect, along with brilliant sound design. The experience is at its most emotionally resonant when walking through a flashback sequence with significantly impaired ability to see your surroundings. The flashbacks transition into a full-on bout with insanity and hallucination, and visuals such as a seemingly endless stair loop surrounded by infinite closed doors effectively drive home the madness, while the sound echoes frantically and the volume of nearby voices fluctuates in such a way to ensure you feel crazier by the moment. Once you escape back to the outdoors from the underground, the environment will be changed in a very surprising way, which if you’ve been paying any attention at all to your surroundings is a complete telegraphing of the final twist. This last chapter highlights The Fidelio Incident’s biggest shortcoming: while trying to be a narrative-focused exploration game and fill in some interesting backstory, it’s quite determined to still be game-y in some moderate fashion, but too nervous about impeding its story to offer much resistance. So the compromise is a series of annoying steam pipes, valves, and levers. The levers get flipped to turn the pipe in the right direction, and the valve gets turned to release the steam, clearing the environment to move you along the path. There is no possible way that any of this could be considered a puzzle, because you’re literally just traversing the available path to get to the next thing you can click. Clicking to interact is the only aspect of the interface other than walking; there is no crouching or jumping (which actually feels frustrating and unnatural in places where a small jump should easily get you up to a ridge that is instead unreachable). There are a total of four interactions you’ll perform throughout the game: pick up diary page, open door, flip lever, and turn valve. Searching for the next lever/valve to clear your path and potentially freezing if you take too long to find your next heat source are only minor inconveniences that allow this to be considered a game instead of a visual novel, but will not increase the playing time above the two-hour mark for any player. And actually, the fact that exploring this world never becomes irritating despite its time-limit obstacle is a testament to The Fidelio Incident’s incredible visual design. The unwelcoming frigid coast of Iceland is hardly varied in its wintry scenery, but the terrain details are exceptional. The dark cascading clouds in the sky and the whitened peaks of distant mountains, the uneven snow-covered surfaces, and the immaculately detailed rocky walls all come together brilliantly to paint a striking visual picture of this frozen and dangerous land. Close up, the visuals are just as impressive, with black smoke pouring out of the lively fires and a visible frozen wind constantly blowing around you. The music is equally brilliant, an unsettling original classical composition by Michael Krikorian that incorporates themes from the overture of the namesake Beethoven opera. The full orchestral soundtrack is downloadableas separate DLC and is worth listening to as background music, but the outstanding sound design also amplifies the effect as the score seamlessly fades in and out at the right moments to let you explore and comment on your circumstances. There are only two characters in the game with speaking roles, other than a couple brief interludes during a flashback sequence. Stanley is played by Glenn Keogh, an Irish actor who brings fully believable authenticity to his part, and pulls no punches in his devastated emotional reactions when various things go wrong in the search for Leonore. Unfortunately, Bess Harrison’s performance as Leonore is much less convincing and does not sound genuinely Irish. Her lack of emotional range is a problem when her character narrates the pages of her diary; I frequently found myself clicking to make her voice go away so I could just read the text myself, in sharp contrast to Stanley, who I never tired of hearing speak. Act 3 Studios is a new California-based developer with a strong pedigree, founded by Ken Feldman, art director of the impressive God of War III, so it is therefore no surprise that The Fidelio Incident’s beautiful visuals, technical excellence, and exceptional use of the Unreal Engine are the game’s biggest strengths. The actual story is hardly discussion-worthy for the average gamer, unless it appeals to your particular interest in history, and the attempts to create obstacles are repetitive and more annoying than challenging. However, with its short playtime and great sense of bleak atmosphere, you’ll likely be willing to overlook the shortcomings and enjoy the intense narrative experience enough to do exactly what I did: play through the entire game in one sitting, and then find yourself with a sudden urge for a very warm beverage. Inspiration for adventure games has come from a variety of sources over the years, but it’s quite unusual for one to be based on an opera—and Fidelio is not just any libretto; it is the only opera composed by Ludwig von Beethoven, perhaps history’s greatest composer, telling the story of a brave European gal named Leonore who, at her own peril, rescues her husband Florestan from political prison. Those overarching themes of love and sacrifice amidst political turmoil are the framework for The Fidelio Incident, a compelling but imperfect narrative exploration game from new developer Act 3 Studios. The game begins with a fiery plane crash off the coast of Iceland. The plane—itself named Fidelio—separates violently as it goes down, distributing our two main characters, Stanley and Leonore, to very different parts of a frozen island. We don’t know much about them at this point, other than how glad they are to be leaving their former home in Ireland behind, but we learn quickly that there is something mysterious and troubling in their past when Leonore frantically declares: “They can’t find out who we are!” The remainder of The Fidelio Incident follows you in the first-person role of Stanley, with Leonore occasionally communicating via radio. Stanley’s situation is a desperate one initially, as Leonore is immobile after her crash and helplessly calls for Stanley’s help. Your radio is broken and unable to transmit, so all you can do is listen without responding. All she can tell you is that there is a lot of black smoke coming from her position. As Stanley, you can see the smoke high in the distance, but on the treacherous slopes and peaks of this Icelandic coast, there’s no easy visible path to the other side of the mountain. Oh, and the temperature is freezing and you have no immediate source of warmth. Staying unprotected in this tundra for too long will lead to an ugly death. Fortunately, the island has a couple pleasant surprises to combat your developing hypothermia. One is the wreckage of your plane, which scattered small piles of hotly burning debris in helpful even distances. These small fires serve as constant checkpoints, providing a path to move you from one part of the island to the next and keep your general direction in sharp focus. If there’s no accessible fiery wreckage to be found, the island also curiously has plenty of valves that, when turned correctly, provide a nice bath of shooting volcanic steam, which is another way to raise your temperature up to an acceptable level. When away from a heat source, the game simulates your freezing by slowly crystalizing your mask from the outside; once your entire field of vision starts to blur, you better hustle back to the nearest heat source and try to get your bearings again. As you work your way from fire to fire and valve to valve, the tale of Stanley and Leonore’s romance and dark history is revealed through the pages of Leonore’s diary, which were also individually scattered all over the island after the crash. The pages are not in chronological sequence, though they really can only be found in one order, and the designers take advantage of this by cleverly filling in bits of information and slowly revealing the backstory. The details should not be spoiled here, but suffice to say that the two main characters were deeply involved in the Northern Ireland political turmoil of the 1980s, known as the Troubles, and both have done things that have forever impacted their lives and their family. If you have some existing understanding of that period of European history, perhaps you will be a bit more impacted by the ultimate revelations. Personally, I was underwhelmed and felt the backstory as finally told did not match the urgency and suspense of the introduction. The tale is supplemented by some extremely well-produced and unsettling flashback scenes in the middle act of the game, as Stanley finally escapes the freezing outdoors and finds his way inside a mountain bunker, releasing a flurry of memories from his prior life of incarceration. The story beats themselves are not nearly as compelling as the visual storytelling. These scenes use vision blurring and shadow effects to tremendous effect, along with brilliant sound design. The experience is at its most emotionally resonant when walking through a flashback sequence with significantly impaired ability to see your surroundings. The flashbacks transition into a full-on bout with insanity and hallucination, and visuals such as a seemingly endless stair loop surrounded by infinite closed doors effectively drive home the madness, while the sound echoes frantically and the volume of nearby voices fluctuates in such a way to ensure you feel crazier by the moment. Once you escape back to the outdoors from the underground, the environment will be changed in a very surprising way, which if you’ve been paying any attention at all to your surroundings is a complete telegraphing of the final twist. This last chapter highlights The Fidelio Incident’s biggest shortcoming: while trying to be a narrative-focused exploration game and fill in some interesting backstory, it’s quite determined to still be game-y in some moderate fashion, but too nervous about impeding its story to offer much resistance. So the compromise is a series of annoying steam pipes, valves, and levers. The levers get flipped to turn the pipe in the right direction, and the valve gets turned to release the steam, clearing the environment to move you along the path. There is no possible way that any of this could be considered a puzzle, because you’re literally just traversing the available path to get to the next thing you can click. Clicking to interact is the only aspect of the interface other than walking; there is no crouching or jumping (which actually feels frustrating and unnatural in places where a small jump should easily get you up to a ridge that is instead unreachable). There are a total of four interactions you’ll perform throughout the game: pick up diary page, open door, flip lever, and turn valve. Searching for the next lever/valve to clear your path and potentially freezing if you take too long to find your next heat source are only minor inconveniences that allow this to be considered a game instead of a visual novel, but will not increase the playing time above the two-hour mark for any player. And actually, the fact that exploring this world never becomes irritating despite its time-limit obstacle is a testament to The Fidelio Incident’s incredible visual design. The unwelcoming frigid coast of Iceland is hardly varied in its wintry scenery, but the terrain details are exceptional. The dark cascading clouds in the sky and the whitened peaks of distant mountains, the uneven snow-covered surfaces, and the immaculately detailed rocky walls all come together brilliantly to paint a striking visual picture of this frozen and dangerous land. Close up, the visuals are just as impressive, with black smoke pouring out of the lively fires and a visible frozen wind constantly blowing around you. The music is equally brilliant, an unsettling original classical composition by Michael Krikorian that incorporates themes from the overture of the namesake Beethoven opera. The full orchestral soundtrack is downloadableas separate DLC and is worth listening to as background music, but the outstanding sound design also amplifies the effect as the score seamlessly fades in and out at the right moments to let you explore and comment on your circumstances. There are only two characters in the game with speaking roles, other than a couple brief interludes during a flashback sequence. Stanley is played by Glenn Keogh, an Irish actor who brings fully believable authenticity to his part, and pulls no punches in his devastated emotional reactions when various things go wrong in the search for Leonore. Unfortunately, Bess Harrison’s performance as Leonore is much less convincing and does not sound genuinely Irish. Her lack of emotional range is a problem when her character narrates the pages of her diary; I frequently found myself clicking to make her voice go away so I could just read the text myself, in sharp contrast to Stanley, who I never tired of hearing speak. Act 3 Studios is a new California-based developer with a strong pedigree, founded by Ken Feldman, art director of the impressive God of War III, so it is therefore no surprise that The Fidelio Incident’s beautiful visuals, technical excellence, and exceptional use of the Unreal Engine are the game’s biggest strengths. The actual story is hardly discussion-worthy for the average gamer, unless it appeals to your particular interest in history, and the attempts to create obstacles are repetitive and more annoying than challenging. However, with its short playtime and great sense of bleak atmosphere, you’ll likely be willing to overlook the shortcomings and enjoy the intense narrative experience enough to do exactly what I did: play through the entire game in one sitting, and then find yourself with a sudden urge for a very warm beverage.

The words “first-person shooter” used to be anathema to many adventure gamers, what with the tendency of games like Doom, Quake and their progeny to emphasize frantic action, explosions and often mindless bloodshed. But then Portal came along a decade ago to arm the more cerebral gamer and show us that guns don’t make transportable rifts in space, people do. Yes, equipped with a very special kind of ammo and a more thoughtful mandate, we learned that weapons could be used to solve tricky environmental obstacles as well, fighting not for peace, just peace of mind. Other games have picked up the gun-toting-puzzle-solving mantle since then, but arguably none have ever bettered it (other than Portal’s own brilliant sequel). The latest such challenger to the story-driven physics puzzler throne is The Turing Test, a game that wears its inspiration proudly on its sleeve. It’s thoroughly derivative in every respect, except for its own gameplay gimmick around which the entire experience revolves. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as there’s something to be said about honing a tried-and-true formula if executed properly. And for the most part this game succeeds in delivering an engaging problem-solving experience, provoking thought on two levels at once, though its sci-fi story seems ill-fitted to the actual on-screen events, and its central mechanic wears out its welcome before the end of its substantial 8-10 hour play time. The Turing Test is named after the trials of its protagonist, Ava Turing, but her name, in turn, is really a nudge-wink allusion to Alan Turing’s famous test of a machine’s ability to think and behave like a human being (or to be more precise, a test of whether a human can tell the difference). This theme is prevalent throughout the game, as it continually explores the notions of morality, free will, logic vs. emotion, and self-preservation vs. the greater good. While this is interesting enough as an intellectual exercise, it’s surprisingly disconnected from the actual gameplay on anything but the most superficial level. The discourse between human and A.I. was vital to the Portal experience, but here it’s mainly narrative white noise, affecting nothing tangible until an easily predictable “twist” in the middle and finally a confoundingly absurd endgame scenario. Players control Ava, an engineer for the International Space Agency who is awoken early from cryosleep aboard a ship orbiting the research station on Jupiter’s moon Europa. All communication with the ground crew has ceased, and the facility’s artificial intelligence T.O.M. (Technical Operations Machine) sends Ava to the moon’s surface to investigate. Once there, she quickly discovers that the entire base has been reconfigured into a series of sixty-plus obstacle courses – challenges that can only be completed by a human being, not a sentient machine. This is your test. Over time, the questions of why the crew has gone to such measures and why T.O.M. needs Ava to be his physical representation are touched upon, but never truly justified. The former is nicely explained in a way that should make you ponder questions with no easy answers, only to render it irrelevant at precisely the point it matters most. To its credit, the game also makes an attempt to rationalize its lab-rat setup, just not convincingly. For one thing, the sheer enormity of the complex precludes a small team of scientists from achieving such a construction on their own, but more importantly, we’re told that these are puzzles that can only be solved with creative thinking a machine is incapable of. Plausible theory, torpedoed by the fact that nearly every obstacle is overcome by making thoroughly logical connections between mechanical operations. In fact, I’d wager money that a machine could come up with solutions to each puzzle way faster than a person could. Really the sole purpose for your presence comes down to one simple fact: Ava has hands and feet, and T.O.M. does not. Saying that would have saved a lot of inconsequential chatter. So okay, the thin premise doesn’t hold up, and the whole man vs. machine thing proves to be nothing more than a stimulating philosophical backdrop in the end, but really the puzzles are what The Turing Test is all about. I’m tempted to say that the result is a mixed bag, but in truth the only problem is that the bag doesn’t have enough to mix. Oh, there’s no shortage of quantity, but every single stage depends on one particular conceit: transferring energy from one end of a level to another. Energy comes in two different forms, module blocks that can be picked up and carried, and balls that can be shot and remotely retrieved from your gun. You’ll find various obstacles blocking the way and gain access to a few other room-specific tools, and often these are repackaged in clever ways as you progress, but there’s definitely a sense of déjà vu before all is said and done. The tasks start out simply enough as you learn the standard controls, primarily WASD to move, left/right mouse clicks to fire/retrieve (or equally intuitive gamepad operations). Once you’ve mastered the basics in single small rooms, then you’re on your own to figure out how to power up light bridges, use levers to rotate columns, maneuver heavy ceiling magnets, weigh down pressure plates, remote-operate robots and cameras, channel laser beams, and synchronize hydraulic lifts, eventually spanning numerous rooms and multiple floors. Energy balls also come in three different flavours, each colour having its own distinctive characteristic. New hurdles are parceled out slowly but surely, so you shouldn’t ever feel too overwhelmed, but make no mistake: the difficulty does ramp up. A mechanical engineer could probably blow through them with ease, but I ended up looking at a walkthrough twice, so maybe I’m a robot after all.The Turing Test succeeds far more as a pure puzzler than as an “adventure game” with a properly integrated narrative. It scores marks for trying, but other than the one obvious twist and endgame disappointment, really you could play with the sound off and probably not notice it was missing, such is the practical insignificance of the story. The puzzles themselves, though they suffer a bit from excessive padding before the end, are enticing far more often than not – complex enough to be challenging, but always logical enough to work out with a little thought and elbow grease. It’s not quite good enough to truly be a Portal “clone”, but for a would-be imitator with its own gameplay gimmick, it’s probably worth a look if you’ve got the energy and the will.

v2, border, text and effects.

Sooner than anyone expected, Nvidia has rolled out its latest uber graphics card. It’s the new Titan X. It’s undoubtedly the fastest and bestest PC graphics board ever and probably by some margin. And it will cost you $1,200 and probably a similar post-VAT sterling figure back in the old, disintegrating empire. Call me a desiccated old cynic, but this is getting silly… Before I invite a comment-thread flaming with my philosophical observations, let’s get a sense of Nvidia’s new pixel-pumping machine courtesy of the speeds and feeds. The latest Titan X – for it is thee, there’s no ‘GeForce’ or ‘GTX’ branding – is part of the new 16nm Nvidia Pascal family and thus closely related to the GeForce GTX 1080 I had a sniff around a few weeks ago. Where the mere £600 / $600 GTX 1080 has 2,560 pixel-prettifying shaders, the new Titan X has 3,584. Nvidia hasn’t dished the details on some of the other specifics including things like texture units and pixel outputs. Be we do know it has a large if conventional 384-bit memory bus hooked up to 12GB of 10GBPS GDDR5X memory. For context the old GTX Titan X from the now defunct 28nm Maxwell family of chips rocked 3,072 shaders and 12GB of memory, albeit much slower 7GBPS memory. Oh and Nvidia has bumped the GPU speed versus the old Titan by nearly 50 per cent to a peak clockspeed of 1,531MHz. Beautiful board, beastly price… When you throw numbers around like that, it all gets a bit baffling. So, for a rough feel of the raw computational impact of this new chip, try this for size. It’s good for 11 TFLOPS of simple number crunching prowess. One can argue the toss over the relevance of that figure for rendering and indeed playing games. But it’s still bloody impressive and not far off twice the 6.6 TFOPS figure attained by the old Titan X, which was not exactly a slouch. As it happens, the question of whether this board is really for gamers or number crunching of a different kind is where things get complicated with the new Titan X. It seems that it’s based on an entirely new and separate GPU from the GP100 monster that Nvidia revealed back in April as part of its new Tesla P100 compute board. If we are to believe Nvidia, and at this stage I wouldn’t entirely take everything at face value, the GP100 chip in that Tesla board is a 15-billion transistor hunk where the new Titan X uses a hitherto unseen chip known as GP102 with 12 billion transistors. For the record and at risk of getting swept away by a torrent of codenames, the GTX 1080 uses yet another chip called GP104 that clocks in around the seven billion mark. The new Titan has 40 per cent more, er, rendery bits than the feeble GTX 1080 Anyway, the point is that at first glance the latest Titan looks like a pure graphics product without any of the compute-centric features of some earlier Titans. However, for the first time, Nvidia is touting this card’s INT8 performance, which is a measure of neural network or so-called deep learning performance and thus very much a non-graphics application. The messaging, then, is a little mixed – is this an out and out gaming card or something else? Whatever it is, you’re getting 40 per cent more functional units than a GTX 1080 for 100 per cent more money. If that doesn’t sound like a great deal, the new Titan X also has a lower GPU clock than the 1080, so in at least some situations you won’t even get 40 per cent more performance. The Titan X does have 50 per cent more memory bandwidth than the 1080. But however you slice it, the value proposition looks laughable. I doubt, for instance, that even this new Titan X will prove a total single-card solution for 4K gaming. Oh my god, it’s full of shaders That’s even more true when you consider the likely manufacturing cost of the new GP102 chip. At 471mm2, it’s much smaller than the 601mm2 of the old Titan X. In fact it’s nearer in size to the GM104 chip in the old GeForce GTX 980, which comes in at 398mm2. The point is that, generally, the bigger the chip, the more costly it is to produce. But in this instance, Nvidia has released a smaller chip and then ramped up the price. Actually, that’s exactly what it did with the GTX 1080, too. The chip in that measures just 314mm2. Admittedly, there will be variables with new processes, but the pricing of this new GPU family looks positively punitive to me. At this point I was planning on penning a semi-serious dissertation about what I think is going wrong. It would involve near negative real-world interest rates, quantitative easing, epic inequality and how this thing strikes me as being the graphics card Donald Trump would sell you. Instead I’ll recall how excited I used to be when a mega new GPU was launched. I remember when the GeForce 6800 Ultra was launched with 16 – yes, 16! – pixel pipes. Even then it was known Nvidia didn’t always play a straight bat, especially not after the partial-precision / four or eight pixels per clock / leaf blowing shenanigans of the FX 5800 series. In the good old days, men were men and graphics cards had pixel pipes But somehow it was so much easier to rejoice in the sheer technical majesty of a GPU capable of smoothly rendering Far Cry’s stunning vistas at 1,600 by 1,200 pixels. That was way back in 2004. Adjusted for inflation, at most that was a £600 graphics card. There’s actually a parallel to be drawn with my other occupational muse, the car market, in which wheel-heeled punters beat eat other to a metaphorical pulp to sign on for the latest limited-edition Porsche, paying 200,000 euros for cars which are so over subscribed that they’re worth three times that much on the open market the moment the first examples are delivered. It’s total madness, which is where all that cheap money I mentioned comes in. But maybe I’m just a desiccated old hack. Maybe I should be celebrating the mere existence of master works like the Nvidia Titan X and Porsche 911R. On the other hand, surely there’s a point when the price gouging becomes so vulgar you just have to gag? I don’t know about you, but £1,200/$1,200 for a graphics card certainly sticks in my throat. Or maybe cards like this just aren’t relevant to PC gamers and are best ignored? The problem with that notion is that the whole market is being dragged upwards. The new high end is £1,200, the new enthusiast is £600 and the new mainstream is nigh-on £300. I have a hands-on with the new GTX 1060 in the works and a jolly nice mid-range board it is, too, in many ways more impressive than the GTX 1080. But it’s 300 bleedin’ pounds for the version I have and even the cheapest 1060s are well over £200. AMD to the rescue with the Radeon RX 480? Hold that thought…

Does this count as PC gaming? I think it counts. A modder has made a mini Nintendo Entertainment System out of a Raspberry Pi. It even has working cartridges and a tiny, adorable gamepad. Just when he completed the project, Nintendo announced their $60 NES Classic. But it was too late. They had been beaten to the finish line.

“Pinch and a punch for the first of the month”, we used to say in the EU meatculture days. Now we all drift in the post-Brexit cybercloud, we get a pinch, a punch, and a price hike on cybergoggles for the first of the month. I can’t keep pace with modern life. The price of HTC Vive cybergoggles today goes up up by £70, “due to recent currency valuation changes”. You know, how our currency’s done a falling-over since the referendum over leaving the EU. Good times. Proper japes.