Maximum PC - Gaming

Double Fine Studios Featured in This Week's Humble Bundle

Chris Zele — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:22:20 +0000

$1 donation lets you snag some of developer's best games

The Humble Bundle is back after being on hiatus for a month. For you frugal gamers out there, you can donate $1 or more and receive a collection of titles from Double Fine Studios, the developer behind Psychonauts, Brutal Legend, and Stacking, this time around.

By donating $1 or more you’ll receive Steam keys for Costume Quest, Psychonauts, and Stacking. If you donate more than $8.26 (the current average), you’ll also receive Brutal Legend along with a few prototype games too. Donate $35 or more you’ll receive Double Fine’s upcoming game Broken Age. The highest tier is if you donate over $70 which will grant you a limited edition T-Shirt.

The Humble Bundle supports the developers who put their games on the service. You can also choose where your donation goes whether that be to Double Fine or charity (Child's Play Charity and/or the American Red Cross).

I Won a $3K Gaming Rig from Maximum PC

Josh Norem — Wed, 15 May 2013 20:15:05 +0000

Five questions with the winner of our Maingear/AMD giveaway

Last month we gave away a righteous rig (equipped with a i7-3770K CPU, two AMD Radeon HD 7970s in crossfire, and 8GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RAM in a sleek Maingear F131 chassis) courtesy of AMD and Maingear on our Facebook page, and a enthusiastic gentleman named Sean Pisto from Canadia was the lucky recipient of the prize. We asked him to share with us whether or not he thought he was going to win, what his old gaming PC was running, and what it was like to take it out of the box for the first time. The Q&A is posted below!

1. How old are you, where do you live, and how long have you been a Maximum PC reader?

I am 22, and I live on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. I've been reading and following Maximum PC for quite a few years. It started with me buying an issue every time I was on a ferry, and grew from there.

2. What are the specs of your current system?

The PC I had when I entered the contest featured the following:
Processor - Intel Core i5-3570K
Motherboard - ASUS P8Z77-V
RAM - 16GB Mushkin Enhanced Redline Frostbyte
Video Card - EVGA GeForce GTX 470
Case - Cooler Master HAF 922
Power Supply - Corsair 850TX

3. Did you think you had a chance of winning?

Not in the slightest. I enter tons of contests and the pattern is I forget about it after a few days and never hear anything again.

4. What did you think when you first received contact from us?

I was trying to remember what I entered. I finally Googled it expecting it to be a mousepad or something, and couldn't believe my eyes when I found the contest page again and saw it was for a $3,000 gaming system. Then my brain ran through the number of ways this could be a hoax, a joke, or a scam. Finally the truth set in and I got a wee bit excited.

5. What was the unboxing like, and what is the system like now that it’s up and running?

I knew it was supposed to come late on the Monday, so I sat in the front room of my house and frantically looked out the window every time I heard a vehicle. When it finally arrived I immediately took it out of the box and just stared at it in awe for a while. Finally I took the picture (above) and started setting it up.
So far it runs like a top. It's nice being able to crank up every setting in games without having to even worry about performance. On top of that it’s significantly smaller (and prettier) than my old PC, which will be awesome for LAN's. All in all, I can’t thank Maximum PC enough. This was truly unreal.

If you want to be notified about future contests, giveaways, and other generally cool stuff be sure to be a Fan of our Facebook page. The next giveaway is coming up soon, and without spoiling the surprise, well, we’ll just say that for the lucky winner it’ll be like a Dream come true.

No BS Podcast #200: Epic Videocast Edition

The Maximum PC Staff — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 23:30:06 +0000

Now with video!

Today the Maximum PC crew has crossed a huge milestone and present the 200th episode of the No BS Podcast! And because you guys have asked for it, this special episode is also in video format! Yay!

In the epic podcast/videocast, Maximum PC Editor and podcast host Josh Norem invites Deputy Editor Gordon Mah Ung, Online Managing Editor Jimmy Thang, and Associate Editor Tom McNamara to discuss a wide variety of topics that include:

- The history of the Maximum PC No BS podcast

- Our awesome AMD gaming rig giveaway

- The Adam Orth always-online Xbox 720 controversy (Update following the podcast: He is no longer with Microsoft)

- Razer Edge review

- Your reader questions

- And rants from Gordon!

Let us know what you think of the video format!

If you want to catch future episodes, you can:

Subscribe on iTunes

Fan us on Facebook

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Check out our Windows 8 app in Microsoft's app store

Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com

Subscribe to our RSS feed

Leave us a voicemail at 877-404-1337 x1337

Thanks for listening all these weeks/months/years! We truly appreciate your support!

-Maximum PC Staff

Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm Review

David Murphy — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:40:00 +0000

Heart of the Swarm is one great (Zerg) rush

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. That, or tentacles – because it’s certainly not Sarah Kerrigan’s disposition that keeps cowboy-turned-space-marine Jim Raynor chasing after his queen in Blizzard’s Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm.

We’re not spoiling anything you haven’t already seen on any of the game’s trailers – or box art. Kerrigan is back and ready to lead her squishy-sounding army of Zerg to victory once again, flattening out any speed bumps in her way within one of the three plots Blizzard knows how to write nowadays: The good old Revenge Quest.

Kerrigan is back, and she's pissed!

The speed at which her allegiances flip would give Two-Face a run for his money, though we commend Blizzard for at least giving Kerrigan more of a Stannis Baratheon-like depth versus, say, the Terminator — as in, she’s more of an honorable badass than just a blatant killing machine (though she sure does her fair share of killing!).

The basic plot of the game takes 20 total missions to get through and two sentences to write out, not counting some of the campaign’s evolution-themed mini-missions (we’ll get to that in a bit). Kerrigan wants to kill Dominion Emperor Arcturus Mengsk because he tried to have her bumped off in Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. A stranger “find the origin of the Zerg” and “prepare for battle against the great unknown” storyline interweaves with the revenge plot, but it’s not nearly as exciting to kill regular, old Zerg or the religiously high-strung Protoss as it is to tear little humans limb from digital limb.

Heart of the Swarm's official trailer

We sound like we’re grumpy about the game; we’re not. Blizzard struggled to come up with an interesting plot that wasn’t downright guessable in Diablo 3; it continues to struggle in Heart of the Swarm. But, ignoring this bit, this title delivers plenty of engaging gameplay (and a lovely tweaked interface, to boot) that kept us satisfied through two full playthroughs.

Kudos to the company’s ingenious designers —Blizzard’s gotten much better at using the Starcraft II engine to stretch the limits of typical real-time strategy gameplay. We loved the diversity of the missions the game summons forth: Smaller Alien-like battles in ships or buildings (including a delightful bit where you evolve from a small, chestburster-like larva to a unit-pooping Broodmother by infesting innocent animals), frantic missions that require you to complete objectives before something horrible happens (like a giant Battlecruiser mowing you over), and missions that attempt to throw boss fights into a real-time strategy game.

One of our favorite campaign missions has you decimating the poor Protoss after they periodically get frozen still. Clearly, they never quite mastered space heater technology.

Granted, the major example thereof – the mission entitled "Supreme" — does contain a final battle that’s nearly a carbon copy of the Belial fight in Diablo III. We’ll forgive Blizzard for drawing from the same well on that one if for nothing else than our sheer surprise at seeing the faithful recreation in an RTS game. Also, it’s a pretty feisty challenge on “Brutal” difficulty.

Since Heart of the Swarm centers on Kerrigan for most of the campaign, the star of the show gains power as you complete various missions and the bonus objectives sprinkled therein. You aren’t going to want to overlook these extra bits, as a fully-stacked Queen of Blades is quite the force to be reckoned with – one that’s able to singlehandedly drive the pain train across a number of baddies even on the game’s toughest difficulty setting. Which brings us to one of our few beefs with the raw gameplay of Heart of the Swarm: It feels pretty easy.

Blizzard’s writers might not be able to create a plot, but its CG department can sure make some breathtaking cutscenes.

To clarify, we’re not Starcraft II experts; Bronze League is where we spend most of our time, the lowest challenge tier within Blizzard’s multiplayer matchmaking. Still, Heart of the Swarm’s single-player campaign is more of a cakewalk compared to its predecessor, Wings of Liberty. To say Kerrigan is overpowered is a bit of an understatement. Combining her formidable powers with decent strategy and plenty of Hydralisks and Roaches took us to victory after victory without nary a sweat being broken.

Part of the Heart of the Swarm’s appeal lies in the fact that the Zerg – biological creatures that they are – can benefit from a variety of upgrades that you can use to customize each unit you bring to the battlefield (technically, hatch) based on the kind of Starcraft player that you are. And that’s what made our second playthrough just as fun as the first: The ability to try out different combinations of units and unit upgrades – not to mention Kerrigan’s powers – are wickedly fun for those looking to spice up the campaign with a little creativity.

Sometimes, Heart of the Swarm gives you a ton of units and says, “Hey, go destroy stuff.” And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Blizzard’s smart, as encouraging players to experiment with diverse tactics also teaches you how to think strategy like a true multiplayer Starcraft player. To get even more meta, many of the campaign missions themselves gently introduce you to techniques that you’ll want to master — like micro control (to win the campaign’s boss battles) and macro strategy (when a campaign mission forces you to divide your attention as far as it’ll go) — if you expect to have any hope of beating your online peers.

Each of the races get a few new goodies to play with in the multiplayer matches, and it appears that no one faction has really been able to dominate the competitive landscape with any of the additions (go figure; the Protoss Mothership Core isn’t sealing victories left and right). In fact, the Protoss are still the least-used of the races among the top-20 Starcraft players in the Americas region as of this review’s writing, but we wager everyone will realize just how cool these bravado-gushing warriors are once the game’s second expansion, Legacy of the Void, hits shelves.

Heart of the Swarm even tips its hat to the popular “Defense of the Ancients”-style gameplay that originated as a Warcraft III custom map.

If anything, the Zerg get hosed on the home field advantage in Heart of the Swarm’s multiplayer. Again, this depends on your playing style – if you’re big on casting units, you’ll love the insidious Viper, though we never found much joy slapping the Zerg’s new “Swarm Hosts” slash mobile guard towers in a defensive position. Give us something with big teeth and painful punching any day – or explosions. We’d rather burrow some Banelings.

The Protoss get nothing but flyers: The aforementioned Mothership Core, which you can ultimately upgrade to the game’s biggest multiplayer insult, as well as the ever-annoying Oracle and a flying homage to the Siege Tank, the Protoss Tempest. Terrans can shift their speedy Hellions into Hellbats, which ups their ability to pour painful flames over ground troops even more. Widow Mines, the second new Terran unit to join Heart of the Swarm, are just downright gleeful to plant around potential expansion chokepoints. Your friends will quickly learn to never again try to sneak in a base expansion using a lone worker.

If Dune’s sandworms belched fire, well, that’s about what you’d get for this boss battle in Heart of the Swarm. Spoiler: Avoid the fire.

We also commend Blizzard for doing everything it can to ease a tentative gamer’s transition to multiplayer in Heart of the Swarm. The game’s built-in training mode, a “Versus A.I.” that automatically adjusts difficulty based on an analysis of your Starcraft skills, and the game’s comprehensive replay feature (and the minutia of its per-match data dumps) couldn’t possibly hold a gamer’s hand any more in those first, nervous steps before one starts sending waves of units to their online deaths.

It can be said that Blizzard’s only real reason for providing a campaign within its Starcraft series is to encourage tentative gamers to jump into the real reason for the game’s existence: online multiplayer. Heart of the Swarm’s poor plot and relatively easy gameplay does seem indicative of that fact, but it doesn’t mean that you won’t have plenty of fun laying waste to planet after planet in Kerrigan’s (not quite) epic tale of revenge.

Blizzard saves much of its designer polish for the raw game itself: Heart of the Swarm looks great, plays great, and comes with plenty of ways to extend your interest in the Starcraft universe as a whole once you’ve strolled your way through the game’s core campaign. We only hope that Blizzard hasn’t made its game too tight to tweak; a few extra new units, a new building or two, or even bringing some of the upgrade focus of the game’s single-player campaign into the multiplayer world could have really blown the Heart out of this Swarm. But we still love it so.

Price: $39.99 (requires Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty to play), www.starcraft.com

ESRB: Teen

PAX East 2013: Cosplay Gallery

Adam Harshberger — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 21:20:48 +0000

40 images from the PAX East 2013 show floor

What are conventions without cosplay? Freaking boring! We spent last weekend having a blast at PAX East, and found no shortage of cool get-ups to drop our jaws at. The dedication, time, and craft that these folks put into their outfits is formidable, as we learned first-hand in Boston. Take a look through and see some amazing costumes that range from hulking space marines to a gender-bending Batman! Or should that be Batwoman? Either way, check out the gallery below!

Note: Our CMS automatically crops to the middle of each image for the previews. You can click on each individual photo for the full-size shot.

PAX East 2013: Indie Games Roundup

Adam Harshberger — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 22:00:30 +0000

Highlighting 11 indie games from PAX East 2013

At PAX East, indie games booths often lack the flair and sheer bombast of the imposing fortresses that the AAA games inhabit. But venture inside and you’ll often find games that boast more sheer imagination and passion than what major studios are producing. We took it upon ourselves to dive headfirst into the bass-booming, fanboy-shrieking, awesome-stuff-riddled show floor to find the coolest indie games. Take a gander through the gallery below to see what caught our eyes.

50 Pictures That Defined CES 2013

Jimmy Thang — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:28:00 +0000

Boothbabes, new wacky gadgets, and more

Didn't have the chance to attend CES 2013? No problem! Allow our 50 images to show you the highlights from the show floor. Everything from booth babes, wacky gadgets, and the products of the show are featured in the gallery below.

If you could have seen one thing from this year's CES, what would it be? Let us know in the comments!

20 Games You Might Have Missed in 2012

David Murphy — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:22:08 +0000

The best indie games of the past year

With 2013 here now, one of the big items remaining on your to-do list – is to take a few days of R&R to catch up on all of the awesome games that you may have overlooked during 2012.

The problem? You haven’t exactly been keeping a “must play” list. You know there are plenty of titles that you saw and thought, “I should really give that a try,” and probably even more titles that completely escaped your radar entirely. Such is the state of the PC gamer – and we’re here to help.

A bunch of other gaming sites have offered plenty of coverage to all the AAA games out there, but we wanted to give some of the lesser-known, more independent games a spotlight. In the list below, you'll see 20 games spanning a wide variety of genres: RPGs, action games, and more.

FTL: Faster Than Light, $10

It might be easy to look at this game’s graphics and think, “Pssh, I’ll pass.” That would be the wrong decision, however – and get used to the concept, because this simulator’s many decision-making moments will make or break your little spacefaring life.

Hotline Miami, $10

Carnage. Complete, top-down carnage. This title reminds us a lot of the action from the old, old MicroProse PC game based on The Punisher – same kind of “murderous rampage” gameplay!

Avernum: Escape from the Pit, $10

The plot for this one is simple: You’ve been banished to the underworld. Get out. This is “classic RPG” at its finest, packed with plenty of quests, awesome writing, and killer content – at the expense of graphics, of course.

Legend of Grimlock, $15

You know a role-playing game is going to be good when you have no problems sitting at the title screen and letting the music loop – we call that the Baldur’s Gate effect. Legend of Grimrock is a first-person RPG that’s packed with puzzles, combat, and exploration. What more do you need?

Sins of a Solar Empire, $40

Sins of a Solar Empire isn’t a “new” franchise by any means. However, its latest expansion – released in mid-2012 – features a new user interface, splinter groups within the game’s primary factions that you can now play as, and a bit of rebalancing that makes one of the better 4X titles on the market even more playable.

Torchlight II, $20

It's unfortunate that Torchlight II came out under the shadow of Diablo III because in many ways the top-down action RPG is better. Unlike Blizzard's dark and more serious take on the genre, Torchlight II places players in a large and vibrant world. The game features four different character classes to fit a variety of gameplay styles. What's not to love?

Mark of the Ninja, $15

If you like stealth games, then Mark of the Ninja is a no-brainer. The 2D platformer features beautiful hand-drawn visuals combined with thought-provoking, challenging gameplay. Plus, who doesn't love ninjas?

Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013, $10

If you played the 2012 version of this title, you might be asking yourself what publisher Wizards of the Coast could possibly throw into a sequel. The answer: A lot

Defender’s Quest: Valley of the Forgotten, $15

Oh, tower defense. Just when you thought this genre had delivered all it possibly could to the world, a title like Defender’s Quest comes along and throws some RPG elements into your standard, “stop the bad guys from getting to the good place” mix. We like it!

Chivalry, $25

Realistic knight-on-knight warfare, castle-sieging, and running like hell to avoid burning oil to your face? If this first-person shooter/brawler doesn’t get your inner Game of Thrones tingling, we don’t know what will.

Scribblebauts, $30

While we hate clichés, the one about how you’re only limited by your imagination is perhaps the best way to describe this object-filled puzzle game. Do whatever you can to solve the games’ puzzles – and we mean anything, from summoning all sorts of objects to help you out to creating your own on the fly!

Lego: Lord of the Rings, $30

We confess; half the point of playing these games nowadays is just to see how Lego approaches serious storylines with its usual blend of farce and silliness. Lego: Lord of the Rings is no exception, thanks to it combination of addictive, brick-filled gameplay and hilarious story treatment. Surely Lego Hobbit can’t be that far off…

Natural Selection II, $25

Ahh yes, the ol’ “FPS/RTS” hybrid. We applaud this game’s commander/grunt relationship, which puts you on the front lines – or directing the action from afar – depending the particular role that you’re taking alongside up to 15 other players at once. And, yes, you can play as aliens too.

Ace of Spades, $10

This super-new title transforms one’s shovel into the strongest weapon you’ll ever lay hands on. Here’s what we mean: This Minecraft-looking title lets you shoot, construct, and destroy all at once. Take out players, build walls, tunnel miles under an enemy base – this is Minecraft griefing at its finest.

Orcs Must Die! 2, $15

We loved the original indie tower defense game Orcs Must Die when it was originally released last year, problem is the tower defense game didn't support co-op. Orcs Must Die! 2 changes all of this and provides you with more orcs than you and a buddy can shake a stick at.

Dear Esther, $10

This one’s weird; no way around it. It’s less of a game in the traditional sense of the word… more an exploration. The Source engine helps to deliver a title that’s unique and beautiful with every playthrough – a story-driven experience that doesn’t use choices or quests to push you forward through the experience, just narrative elements.

Deadlight, $10

You owe it to yourself to pick up this indie puzzle-platform title if for nothing else than its gorgeous visuals. Oh, and zombies. You like zombies, right?

Thomas Was Alone, $10

You’re going to take one look at this game’s screenshot and wonder how in the heck indie developer Mike Bithell packed a story into a bunch of colored blocks. Just you wait – you’ll be as surprised as we were with this team-focused title.

Super Hexagon, $3

Good luck. That’s all we’re going to say about this fast-paced action title. Thumping beats and lush, bright graphics will at least keep your spirits high as you give your reflexes the ultimate test.

Warlock Master of Arcane, $20

Take the Civilization series, toss in a spellbook, pepper it with your typical fantasy-themed bad guys, and you have a pretty similar – but engrossing – experience. Admittedly, the game’s tutorial is a bit lame for all the strategy you’ll want to master to succeed in this title, but you’ll find a bit of fun in this war-driven 4X title.

Did we overlook any overlooked titles? Let us hear your recommendations in the comments below!

AMD Radeon HD 7970 vs. Nvidia GeForce GTX 680, Take Two

Josh Norem — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 23:20:51 +0000

We test the latest Beta drivers to see who is the single-GPU champ

Earlier this year both AMD and Nvidia released all-new 28nm GPUs, resulting in AMD taking the single-GPU performance crown momentarily with its HD 7970 before Nvidia swiped it away a few months later with its GeForce GTX 680. It’s been awhile since we’ve even thought about either of these cards as we’ve been busy testing their binned counterparts for most of the year, but this past week AMD released a new Beta driver that it claims provides "significant" performance improvements for its already-potent HD 7000 series cards. Just one day later Nvidia pounced, releasing its own Beta driver which also claimed to boost performance in a wide variety of popular titles. This happens all the time; as soon as one manufacturer holds an advantage the other strikes back in order to help drag the performance crown back to its own camp, typically via an overclocked card, improved drivers, or both.

EVGA’s GTX 680 card is a bit boring to look at but it certainly makes up for it with sizzlin’ performance.

The difference this time is that AMD is not only claiming its new driver offers a substantial performance improvement, but it’s also throwing in a killer game bundle for its 7000 series cards as well, and prices have also dropped quite a bit since launch. All these factors could make quite a compelling case to go GPU shopping in the AMD aisle during the holiday buying season. But then again, all this could be trumped by the fact that the Nvidia card is still faster despite not having a game bundle to motivate shoppers. And maybe Nvidia’s newest drivers would wipe out any performance gain AMD might have achieved with its newest driver as well. With new drivers from both manufacturers on-hand, and the holiday season around the corner, it was clear we had to retest both cards with the newest drivers to see where the two cards stand.

We’d normally roll our eyes at a “gaming bundle” but this one’s legit — 3 AAA titles with any HD 7970 is a great deal (unless you’re not into shooters).

Benchmarks

2560x1600

1900x1200

Best scores are bolded. Our test bed is a 3.33GHz Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition in an Asus P9X79 motherboard with 16GB of DDR3/1600 and an AX1200 Corsair PSU. The OS is 64-bit Windows Ultimate. All games are run at their noted resolution with 4XAA except for the 3DMark tests.

Conclusion

With both Beta drivers loaded on our Core i7-3960X test bed we fired them up and ran through our standard testing gauntlet at both 2560x1600 and 1900x1200 resolution to see what difference the new drivers would make in the cards' performance. As you can see from the benchmarks the two cards are excruciatingly close, enough to almost call it a draw — almost. The HD 7970 takes victory in five out of nine games at 2560x1600 and in six out of nine games at 1900x1200, but the GTX 680 takes the cake in our synthetic benchmarks. Also, two were very close in every test we ran with the exception of Borderlands 2 which makes liberal use of PhysX effects to shower you with debris every second of the game. The AMD card simply chugged in scenes with heavy PhysXeffects, so if Borderlands 2 is your game there's no question Nvidia's cards are superior at this time. For the other games though it was a nail-biter, with the advantage going to the HD 7970. That alone might not be enough to bring you over to the red team, but adding to the AMD card’s attractiveness is the fact that it is throwing in free copies of Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution, and Sleeping Dogs right now. Whether or not all of this will be enough to move some HD 7000 series cards remains to be seen, but one thing is certain — AMD is certainly putting up one heck of a fight.

Note: This story was updated to reflect lowered prices on the Radeon HD 7970.