Maximum PC - From the Magazine

Logitech Z323 Review

Michael Brown — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:20:24 +0000

2.1-Channel Speaker System offer cheap thrills

Logitech has built more computer speakers over the years than just about any manufacturer, and it’s learned a thing or two about building decent low-cost models. Take the 2.1-channel Logitech Z323 system: We could name any number of speaker systems that sound better, but few that are priced better.

The satellites tilt up to project sound at your ears.

You can literally see some of the ways that Logitech hit that low price point: The satellite cabinets are made from cheap ABS plastic with permanently attached cables that plug into the subwoofer. Each satellite has dual, 2-inch, concave-dome drivers (one is mounted in the front of the cabinet and the other in the back, to deliver what Logitech describes as “360-degree sound”). So the system performs best if there’s a wall behind the satellites for the sound waves to bounce off. Each satellite also has a front-facing port. There’s a volume control and power switch on the right-hand cabinet, plus one 1/8-inch headphone output and one 1/8-inch stereo input, to support a digital media player.

The compact subwoofer cabinet (it measures 8.7x5.9x7.2 inches) is fabricated from the typical medium-density fiberboard. It houses a small amp and a tiny (for a sub) 4-inch down-firing dome woofer. The amp delivers six watts (RMS) to each of the satellites and 18 watts (RMS) to the subwoofer. The sub has its own volume control, along with a pair of RCA jacks that serve as a second auxiliary input for a gaming console, DVD player, or what have you (handy features in a speaker system priced this low).

The Z323’s favorable price/performance ratio, however, applies to games much more than music. Playing games such as Borderlands 2, we were pleased with the Z323’s ability to render the sound of gunshots and explosions, and the conversations with friendly characters and the taunts of enemies alike were rendered crisp and clear (well, with the exception of those babbling psychos).

When we listened to music, on the other hand, the vocals sounded weirdly detached from the rest of the band—and it didn’t matter whether the singer was male or female or even what style of music was being played. We tried several singer/songwriters, including “Crossing Muddy Waters,” from the John Hiatt album of the same name, Marc Cohn’s “She’s Becoming Gold,” from The Rainy Season, and Nanci Griffith’s cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Techumseh Valley,” from her record Other Voices, Other Rooms (in all three cases, the tracks were ripped from CD and encoded as 16-bit, 44.1kHz FLAC files).

This sonic detachment wasn’t as much of a problem with instrumental selections, but that’s not to say the Z323 system delivered a stellar performance. When we played Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, which the composer recently remastered for Bowers & Wilkins’s Society of Sound label, the album (available in both Apple Lossless and 24-bit FLAC formats), sounded somewhat lifeless and flat compared to what we heard on more expensive speakers (including Corsair’s stellar SP2500 system). But you could almost buy four Z323 setups for the cost of one SP2500, so that’s to be expected.

f you’re working with a tight budget and need speakers primarily for gaming, Logitech has a good set in the Z323. If listening to music is your core interest, on the other hand, you should keep looking.

$70, www.logitech.com

Velocity Micro Raptor MultiPlex XL Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:30:48 +0000

Is there still room for big a HTCP?

It’s hard to talk about the Velocity Micro MultiPlex machine without thinking back more than 15 years ago, to the earliest days of “PC-TVs” and “PC Theaters.”

Back in the late 1990s, vendors such as Compaq and Gateway were pushing Pentium II–based PCs capable of watching DVDs, displaying electronic programming guides, and browsing the Internet, along with other futuristic capabilities, on gigantic 36-inch CRT televisions (we say that both literally and sarcastically).

The MultiPlex is a traditional HTPC, but fully capable of playing Big Picture Steam games, too.

In comparison to those early pioneers of living room PCs, the Velocity Micro MultiPlex is like a starship dropping out of warp speed while you look on from a covered wagon trying to get over Donner Pass without having to eat your fellow travelers.

The MultiPlex chassis harkens back to those early PC-TVs, but rather than sporting a 266MHz Pentium II, a whopping 2GB hard drive, 32MB of RAM, and an analog TV tuner, the MultiPlex is pretty much state-of-the-art: liquid-cooled Core i7-3770K clocked up to 4.3GHz, 16GB of DDR3/2000, a GeForce GTX 680, 240GB SSD, and 3.6TB of RAID 5 storage. Besides Gigabit and 802.11n, and the Blu-ray drive, Velocity Micro opted for a Ceton quad-channel CableCARD tuner to help fill that massive RAID 5 array.

That RAID array, for the record, is made up of three 2TB WD Caviar Black drives. If one drive fails, you won’t lose it all—we’re just not so sure we’d care if we lost it, though. Since the MultiPlex is intended to quietly sit in the living room sucking up television through the Ceton card, a drive failure wiping out, say, every episode of Glee or The Walking Dead, wouldn’t be as bad as losing 2TB of your family videos and pics. Frankly, we think that a straight 6TB JBOD array would be just fine on a PVR box, but if you do intend to store your memories on the machine, the RAID 5 is warranted.

Performance of the box was in line with our expectations. Obviously, up against our zero-point system’s hexa-core and dual-GPU setup, it’s no contest. But against HTPC/gaming boxes like Digital Storm’s Bolt and Falcon Northwest’s Tiki, it’s pretty much a tie, as all three feature overclocked 3770K parts and GeForce GTX 680 cards. Of course, you might wonder if it’s fair to compare the MultiPlex against those much smaller HTPC machines. That’s a good question. Both the Tiki and Bolt are more likely to be used as simple SFF gaming boxes in your office, or in your living room as “Steam Boxes” running Big Picture mode. Recording terabytes of TV isn’t likely to be high on the list of their usage scenarios.

That’s actually where the MultiPlex comes in. It’s far more traditional-HTPC shaped and sized for the PVR chores, yet has plenty of firepower to run games at 1080p resolutions. Our one complaint might be that it’s a tad loud for pure PVR duties. If you’re watching, say, a Michael Bay flick, you’d never hear the fan and drive noise, but if you’re trying to catch the nuanced acting in, um, Jane Eyre on Blu-ray, you could find those sounds distracting. This won’t be an issue in gaming, of course, but it’s worth noting.

Pricing for the rig is fair. At $3,200 it’s a full grand cheaper than the Falcon Tiki we reviewed last September. The Tiki did, however, pack a pair of 512GB SSDs, which adds up, but then the MultiPlex has three drives plus a CableCARD tuner.

Overall, the MultiPlex brings a lot to the table if you’re still living in a cable world—we’re just not sure how many of us there are in today’s post-cable environment.

$3,200, www.velocitymicro.com

MiniX Neo X5 Review

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:14:04 +0000

Meet the android on TV box

We have some bad news for you and you’re not going to like it, as few parents ever want to hear anything negative about their baby. Well, here it is: Your so-called Smart TV really isn’t that smart.

The Android on TV box idea may be the future, but probably not this one.

Sure, the guy in the blue shirt said that your fab 60-inch plasma was top of its class and graduated cum laude, but the truth is, your TV spent most of its schooling playing beer pong and is a actually a class-A moron. The only reason it’s called “Smart” is because it was pledged as a legacy.

That’s where the MiniX Neo X5 comes in. Running Android Ice Cream Sandwich, this inexpensive black box gives your TV an actual browser and access to applications that aren’t coded in the language Ass++.

The Neo X5 sports a dual-core Rockchip RK3066 ARM processor with a quad-core Mali 400 graphics chip, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage. For connectivity, it has 802.11n, Bluetooth, HDMI 1.4a, Fast Ethernet, and an optical S/PDIF out. For additional storage, the Neo X5 has an SD slot. MiniX even includes a short HDMI cable and USB OTG cable. For those of you who don’t subscribe to Obscure Ports Quarterly, OTG lets you use the box’s Micro USB port as a standard USB port, or—if we could figure it out—hook the Neo X5 to a PC’s USB port to use as a storage device. Think of it as a USB port that swings both ways.

As we said, we couldn’t figure it out and that’s perhaps one of the most vexing problems with the Neo X5. It’s pretty much stock Ice Cream Sandwich, but a lot of things were simply not intuitive or not working. We couldn’t, for example, figure out how to zoom in or out, and many apps that are intended for touch just didn’t work correctly for us. Granted, we were using it with a wireless keyboard and mouse, but that’s how the device would normally be used in a living room since the remote it ships with feels like it came out of a gumball machine.

The performance of the Neo X5 didn’t impress us, either. It felt sluggish in most instances, with a subpar user interface. Some benchmarks told us otherwise. We compared it to a Tegra 3–based Nexus 7 (admittedly not the most direct comparison, but a good measure of relative Android performance) and the X5 took most of the wins. The Nex7 certainly felt smoother but that’s likely due to Jelly Bean and its Project Butter improvements.

Overall, the Neo X5 feels underspec’d to us. Even the display at 1080p output looked so soft we had to double-check which mode it was in. Security is also an issue, as there is no way to secure the unit. Since you’d be logged into your Gmail account at all times on it, you’re leaving your email fly down for anyone on the device.

The Neo X5 is mainly marketed as a media player and it does fine there—to an extent. We could play various MP4 files, from GoPro cams to handycams to still images without hiccups, and there is an extensive set of codecs supported. Netflix was also fine but did exhibit more compression artifacts than we expected. YouTube videos were also pretty low-res despite being checked off as “HD.”

What we have here is essentially a work in progress. As is, it’s still far more usable and much faster than 95 percent of the “Smart” televisions on the market, but there’s much improvement to be had. MiniX is promising a Jelly Bean update at some point that may greatly change the experience—which it needs.

$110, www.polywell.com

Hitman Absolution review

Chris Zele — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:43:38 +0000

Hitman Absolution review: Equal parts frustration and fun

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything from IO Interactive’s popular stealth hero, Agent 47 (no pun intended). The star of the popular Hitman franchise is back for a fifth installment with Hitman: Absolution, and it’s about time, as the last game—Blood Money—was released way back in 2006. This time around, the agency employing Agent 47 is tired of paying for his benefits package, so they decide to assassinate him. This sets Agent 47 on a mission to dispose of his would-be disposers, taking him, and you, through 20 wide-ranging missions in an effort to stay alive while simultaneously sending the folks who are conspiring against him to the morgue. The premise is great, but we found the game’s execution—again, no pun intended—to be a mixture of awesome and awful.

You’ll need to use your environment well to effectively hide from your enemies.

Like the previous titles, the game consists of missions that require you to assassinate predetermined targets. To help you accomplish your objectives, you’re given a range of weaponry, intel, and abilities, and it’s up to you to put all three to good use. The most useful is a powerful stealth skill called Instinct, which helps you blend into your surroundings, see through walls, and sneak past guards. At the beginning of each mission, you’re given a small amount of this ability—your supply can be monitored on the HUD—which depletes as you use it, but is replenished by incapacitating foes and reaching checkpoints. Instinct’s X-ray vision comes in handy when planning assassinations, allowing you to gaze through a wall at a potential target from relative safety. It’s a really fun skill to use, especially when it lets you slow down time and kill multiple enemies quickly. We were disappointed, however, with how quickly it was depleted—the quick drain forced us to stray from our mission priorities and kill people randomly just to replenish our stores.

In addition to Instinct, there’s an array of weaponry lying around the levels that you can use to your advantage, ranging from a simple kitchen knife to a 50-caliber sniper rifle (both the kitchen knife and sniper rifle provide one-hit kills, whether up close or from a distance. Good times.). Our favorite killing tool was Agent 47’s signature weapon, the Fiber Wire, which we used to garrotte scumbags and then quickly drag them out of sight in order to remain undetected. We also enjoyed his other signature weapon, the Silenced Silver Baller. Its rapid fire-rate combined with the Instinct ability let us take down multiple targets quickly and with plenty of panache. While we preferred the game’s stealth weapons, they aren’t the only options by a long shot. Attention-getting weapons such as a shotgun or 45-caliber handgun are also available. Be warned, however, that using any of these loud hand cannons will almost always result in the arrival of a ridiculous amount of enemy backup—which we consider a flaw in the game’s design. In addition to the weapons provided, you can also use random objects lying around the environment, including a rusty screwdriver, a kitchen knife, and a doctor’s scalpel, to name just a few. We favored the knives because they are silent and reusable from one kill to the next.

In addition to the usual indoor environments, Absolution also has several huge outdoor missions, like this one in a sprawling refinery.

Easily our biggest complaint about Absolution is that it’s not just difficult, it seems unfairly difficult. We were frustrated by the sense that we were playing missions over and over—in what is billed as an “open environment”—just to get through the missions the way the developers apparently felt we should. There’s a tutorial, but it’s of little use once the game drops you into a “real” mission, where you have no idea where enemies or objectives are located. We found that it took almost six hours to really get the hang of the gameplay and the assassination moves necessary to be successful, and getting to that point was a mostly trial-and-error exercise that was simply monotonous. We had to play one of the game’s early missions around 20 times to make it to one of the checkpoints, and almost rage-quit the game many times because it was so aggravating.

The game’s main campaign took us nearly 14 hours to complete, and once we had, there was little reason to return to it, unlike in Dishonored, where there are many ways to progress through the levels, as well as totally different endings according to our playing style. Hitman tries to add replayability by giving you a ranking at the end of each level based on how many people you killed and how many people spotted you, and it automatically uploads your score to a global leader board. This peer-pressure tactic could compel some people to redo levels to get a better score, but we had so much trouble finishing the levels the first time that we had zero desire to try them again. The game also climaxes early, which made the last half of the game drag on way too long.

In Absolution, you often have to use large crowds to conceal yourself.

Aside from the main campaign, there is also a Contracts mode that lets you play missions that you or other players create using the built-in mission editor. This mode is always available, and lets you participate in ranked assassination attempts, but in order to unlock all the necessary weaponry and gadgets, you’ll need to progress through the main campaign first. All in all, it’s an excellent addition to the game, as there are thousands of user-created missions available through the game’s online lobby, which lists them with descriptions and popularity rankings.

The graphics in Hitman are impressive, with sharp textures and a variety of well-made environments, ranging from a dirty inner city to the dusty deserts of the Deep South. The game also played very well on our overclocked Intel Sandy Bridge system with an Nvidia GTX 660 Ti video card, averaging 88fps with all settings maxed-out at 1080p.

In the end, Hitman: Absolution is a challenging stealth action game with impressive visuals, but it’s marred by a steep learning curve, too much trial and error, and a campaign that drags on too long. We liked the open-ended nature of the missions and the variety of options and weapons available to us, but ultimately found ourselves so frustrated we just wanted to finish the game and never play it again. We appreciate the added Contracts missions, but found the overall experience of this game to be underwhelming.

$60, www.hitman.com

Far Cry 3 Review

Josh Norem — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:30:51 +0000

Far Cry 3 review: The best Far Cry game yet—but it’s not without flaws

There we were, driving down a bumpy, pothole-ridden dirt road, when the onscreen indicator for enemies suddenly lit up like the muzzle flashes from the car we had just driven past. Several of the other car’s passengers fired some rounds into our beater car’s engine block, forcing us to bail out while the aggressors flipped a U-turn to come back and finish the job.

Tagging enemies shows their location and status, and planning these ambushes is the best part of the game.

We watched as the car full of enraged maniacs approached, and then giggled as it careened over the edge of the rocky path, its driver unable to control the car’s rapid acceleration on the narrow road. Curious about their fate, we sauntered over to the area where the vehicle swerved off the path and suddenly heard the engine of another car coming toward us from just up ahead, so we instinctively ducked into the bushes since we were low on ammo. As we watched the second car stop right next to our now-burning vehicle, we saw the bad guys dismount to have a look-see; then our car suddenly exploded, which caused their car to explode as well, killing all of them and creating a massive, bloody fireball. As we stared at the smoldering wreckage and bodies strewn everywhere, we were just about to congratulate ourselves for a well-executed skirmish when from out of nowhere a royally pissed-off Cassowary—think Big Bird, but blue—appeared and mistook us for a human scratching post. After putting him down as fast as we could, we took his pelt then leapt off the nearest cliff, gliding in our wingsuit to a camp down below to replenish our ammo.

Blowing up enemy vehicles with a grenade launcher is an orgy of explosive carnage.

Of course, none of this was scripted or even part of the game’s main story; it was just a random encounter we had while en route to an actual part of the game, and it’s what makes Far Cry 3 one of the most entertaining—and unpredictable—games we’ve played since Skyrim. This is one game that, like Skyrim, will be different for everyone who plays it, and the game excels at the times when it lets you do whatever the heck you want to do, which is about 90 percent of the time. Sadly, you can’t always do whatever you want, and are forced to jump through very specific hoops a lot of the time, or sit through cutscenes and boring dream sequences way too often throughout the game’s lackluster main storyline.

Once the main story cuts you loose, you get back to the real meat of the game—hunting wildlife and clearing enemy outposts. However, in order to unlock all of the game’s special skills, such as running faster, taking less falling damage, etc., you must progress through the game’s story, which by the end leaves you cold and ready to leave Rook Island, never to return. To put it bluntly, this is a game that starts out extremely strong, and slowly gets worse as you progress through it, though it is punctuated with some of the best first-person combat we’ve ever experienced on the PC.

The game begins with one of the best opening sequences in recent memory, as it shows you and your friends living it up on a tropical island, only to pan out to discover you’re watching a video of your exploits from the confines of a bamboo tiger cage, held captive by an extremely well-acted psychopath named Vaas. After a harrowing escape from the prison camp and some hand-holding by one of the locals, you’re set free to pursue the main quest, or just explore on your own. And explore you will, as you must climb radio towers to remove scrambling devices that obscure the island’s map, which also allows the local gun shops to receive new shipments. Pirates control local outposts, too, so you have to clear those in order to buy new weapons, replenish your ammo, configure your weapon loadouts, and fast-travel from base to base. Clearing outposts is easily the most thrilling part of the game, and you can clear them at your leisure, too, or not—the game doesn’t punish you either way, but creeping up on a base undetected, tagging all the enemies with your camera, then moving in stealthily to take them out one by one before any of them hits the alarm—or disabling the alarms first—is the highlight of this game. And each of the 34 outposts are a serious challenge and a thesis on open-world gameplay done right.

In addition to clearing outposts, climbing radio towers, and the main quest, you also must hunt wildlife in order to upgrade your ammo packs, wallet, holsters, arrow quiver, and syringe holder. Each lets you hold more ammo, health syringes, grenades, Molotovs, and more. This isn’t Deer Hunter, either, as hunting is a challenge—you have to bag leopards, Cassowarys, rabid dogs, tigers, bears, and lots more. Additionally, clearing outposts opens up Wanted Dead and Path of the Hunter quests that require you to kill certain animals with specific weapons and take down a nearby kingpin using only your knife, but sadly, once all the outposts are clear, not only is the world devoid of bad guys but there are no more of these quests, either.

Just like real wildlife, the animals in the game don’t take too kindly to strangers.

The main problem with the game is that you spend the first half of it going on epic adventures to upgrade your packs, open the map, and increase your skills, but by the time the game is half over, we found ourselves almost maxed out completely in every area possible. We had a huge wallet that was constantly full, all the weapons that were available, and almost every skill on the three separate trees, giving us little motivation to keep exploring. You can also find 120 scattered relics and 20 randomly located letters from WWII-era Japanese soldiers, and compete in contests such as knife-throwing, shooting, and driving, but they provide little benefit aside from a test of skill and extra money, which is usually unnecessary. The game also provides a dozen side missions that are so boring a lot of them left us wondering why the developers even bothered including them.

We absolutely loved this game for the first 15 hours or so, and were even considering it as the Game of the Year. But after plodding through the second half of the game, repeating a lot of the same tasks over and over, and suffering through the game’s hackneyed story and deplorable ending, our opinion changed. We still highly recommend it; just savor your time on the first island—it’s one of the best FPS experiences we’ve ever had.

$60, ubi.com

Ceton Echo Windows Media Center Extender Review

Michael Brown — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:45:01 +0000

Xbox? We don’t need no stinkin’ Xbox!

Until the Echo hit the street, the Xbox 360 was pretty much the only Windows Media Center Extender still on the market. Companies such as D-Link and Linksys discontinued their extenders years ago—probably because they couldn’t compete with the subsidized price of Microsoft’s gaming console.

You’re looking at the best Windows Media Center Extender we’ve tested.

In case you’ve forgotten what a Windows Media Center Extender is, here’s a quick refresher: Plug one of these networked devices into your TV, pair it with a Windows computer on the same network, and the Windows Media Center user interface from that PC—along with all the movies, photos, and music that PC can access—will stream though the extender to the TV.

If the paired PC is outfitted with a TV tuner, you can also stream live TV. We tested the Echo with an over-the-air USB ATSC tuner (AVerMedia’s model H826SK) connected to an outdoor antenna and got great results. If you subscribe to cable TV and equip your Media Center PC with a CableCARD tuner (from Ceton or any other manufacturer), you can stream any channel you subscribe to, including premium channels such as HBO and Showtime (but not on-demand programming). On top of that, you can record live TV onto the PC’s hard drive, much like a TiVo or other brand of DVR that you might rent from your cable company.

The Echo sells for $180—about the same street price as a 4GB Xbox 360. But being about the size of a paperback book, the Echo is a fraction of the Xbox 360’s bulk, and Ceton claims that it draws about 90 percent less power.

The Echo connects to your TV via HDMI, and it draws power from a supplied USB power adapter. It requires a hardwired Ethernet connection, and the company recommends that the host PC also be hardwired to your network. If you don’t have CAT5 cable in your walls, the company recommends deploying either a powerline or MoCA (Multimedia over Coax) network.

The Echo user experience is pretty much identical to using a DVR, with a couple of exceptions: Ceton’s remote control is craptastically generic. More importantly, you can fast-forward and rewind recorded TV; but unlike a DVR, you can’t rewind live TV unless you’re also recording it. You can cure the first problem by purchasing Ceton’s Companion app for Android or iOS devices ($5 each) to turn your phone or tablet into a remote.

As with those “whole-home DVR” systems you see advertised on TV, you can pause playback on the TV that’s connected to your PC in one room, go to a TV connected to an Echo in another room, and pick up where you left off. Up to five Echo devices can be linked to a single PC running Windows Media Center, and if that PC is equipped with multiple tuners, each Echo can tune to a different channel.

If you want to stream Internet video and media stored on your network, something like Western Digital’s WDTV Live is a better choice; out of the box, the Echo supports only the media formats that Windows Media Center supports. That list includes codecs such as MPEG-2, H.264, and MP3, but not container formats such as MKV or lossless audio codecs such as FLAC. If you want to tune into and record cable or broadcast TV, and you don’t care about Xbox games, the Echo is the way to go.

$180, www.cetoncorp.com

Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 Review

Jimmy Thang — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:56:58 +0000

A good idea and a great value

What’s not to like about the Lenovo IdeaPad Y500? Imagine a 2.4GHz Core i7-3630QM CPU notebook armed with two GeForce GT 650Ms, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB hard drive with a 16GB caching SSD, all for $1,250!

If the impressive specs weren’t enough, the Y500 is also quite handsome with its sharp angles, rounded corners, and brushed aluminum finish. It eschews the “extreme” gaming laptop design in favor of a simple and clean aesthetic, but a flaming-red, LED-backlit keyboard adds just enough flare to keep things interesting. Its 15.2x10.2x1.4-inch chassis also makes it much smaller and more portable than our 15.6-inch MSI GT60 zero-point laptop, and the Y500 weighs in at just six pounds, 6.8 ounces. Although it may not be Ultrabook-light, it’s lighter than the very-slim Razer Blade gaming laptop (reviewed Holiday 2012), but it’s much heftier power brick does increase its carry weight by more than a pound.

One unique design feature is the Y500’s modular ultrabay underneath the notebook, which allows you to swap in different components. Our unit came with a second 650M GPU, but you can easily unlock this and swap it out with Lenovo’s expanded 750GB HDD tray ($190), a DVD burner ($70), or cooling fan ($30). The extra flexibility is appreciated, as it allows you to transform the gaming laptop into a workstation or entertainment system.

You’ll be able to enjoy each configuration with the Y500’s excellent JBL speakers and sharp 15.6-inch display. Even though the 1920x1080-resolution screen is a TN panel, it offers very good viewing angles all around, and the audio is loud and crisp, partially thanks to Dolby’s Home Theatre V4 software. While it can’t quite compare to a dedicated 2.1 setup, laptop speakers don’t get much better than this.

We also really liked the chiclet keyboard and found the keys to be quiet and responsive. Unfortunately, the trackpad was a big letdown. It supports all of Windows 8 multitouch gestures, like swiping in the Charms bar and pinch-to-zoom, but we often found ourselves triggering these gestures on accident. Though we were able to disable these features, which largely fixed the annoyances, but there were still occasions where the trackpad proved unresponsive. In addition, because both click buttons are clunkily integrated beneath the trackpad rather than being separate buttons, we often found ourselves unintentionally sliding the cursor when clicking.

Fortunately, the internal components performed quite well—beyond what we’d expect given the Y500’s affordability. This is the first time we’ve reviewed a laptop with two 650M GPUs in SLI and we’re happy to say it had no problems blowing away our zero-point’s single GeForce 670M. In both our STALKER and 3DMark 11 graphics benchmarks, it smoked the zero-point by more than 20 percent. The only issue we experienced was that we had to enable SLI in the Nvidia control panel, as it was disabled by default. The Y500’s Core i7-3630QM’s100MHz advantage over the GT60’s Core i7-3610QM gave the former a marginal advantage—Lenovo’s biggest lead here was 2.5 percent in the multithread-hungry x264 benchmark.

In our experiential gameplay tests, the Y500 handled Portal 2 like a piece of cake, as it were, and achieved average frame rates in the 130 range. On the much more graphically formidable Far Cry 3, it achieved a 40fps average at 1080p on the default medium settings, which we consider to be in the realm of playable. But the laptop does falter when it comes to battery life, as it only lasted 163 minutes in our test—24 minutes less than the GT60.

While we’re withholding a Kick Ass rating on account of the lackluster battery and frustrating trackpad, those issues can be mitigated if you carry a mouse and charger with you. In general, this is a handsome, portable notebook that can compete in performance with laptops that cost hundreds more. True to its name, the IdeaPad sounds like a great idea to us.

$1,250, www.lenovo.com

7 Unsung Heroes of the PC Universe

The Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:13:39 +0000

Honoring the PC components that don't get the credit they deserve

If you built your first PC more than a decade ago, you know that PC building has come a long way. Modern conveniences like cases with holes for cable routing, motherboards with labels, and right-angle SATA cables certainly help with the cumbersome bits. This article aims to pay respect to these unsung heroes of the PC universe. You can check out our picks in the gallery below.

Did we forget an unsung hero? Let us know in the comments!

Column: Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition is a Disappointment

Thomas McDonald — Fri, 03 May 2013 18:25:35 +0000

If only it were as good as the XCOM remake

For the second time in as many months the Ghost of Games Past has visited my PC to remind me of classic games... and how much better they are now.

The Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate doesn't enhance much of anything

This time, the ghostly visitor in the night is Baldur’s Gate, the game that put BioWare on the map and brought the classic D&D experience from the Gold Box age into a whole new epoch of awesome. Unfortunately, the new Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition couldn’t repeat the magic that turned X-Com (one of the best PC games ever, and now almost wholly unplayable for anyone but nostalgia-sadists) into the brilliant XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

In fairness to the makers of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, they didn’t have the deep pockets and vast resources of 2K/ Firaxis. Beamdog/Overhaul just doesn’t bring that much stick to the table. Rather than getting a reinvented Baldur’s Gate, or even a heavily upgraded one, we get something significantly less impressive.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a great example of what a remake should look like

I say that with the understanding that “significantly less impressive” is relative. Baldur’s Gate is still one of the best RPGs ever. It’s also still on my shelf, and available online for about $10. Nothing in the Enhanced Edition diminishes the original game, but it doesn’t enhance it that much, either.

This is Baldur’s Gate with Baldur’s Gate II improvements, a graphics bump, a better journal, and a tedious arena mode. They say they fixed or added 400 things to this version, but pathfinding is not among them. Also, it’s buggy and crashy as all hell. You can save your money, load up the original game, install the Tutu mod and a few others, and get a fine BG experience.

The bigger problem is that Baldur’s Gate is an old-school game that just hasn’t aged all that well, and remains little more than a nostalgia act. The fussy combat and bland narrative is something for a younger, more tolerant era of computer gaming. The most bizarre part is that you can trace a straight line from the concepts of BG right through all of BioWare’s products. Dragon Age and Mass Effect are Baldur’s Gate, done better. Why would we want it done worse?

Zombie Games Roundup

Evan Lahti — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:05:47 +0000

In the zombie apocalypse, your worst enemies might actually be humans.

The rules used to be simple: Don’t get bitten; destroy the brain. Zombie games like Left 4 Dead, Killing Floor, and Resident Evil shared a vaguely similar approach, even as they offered terrific takes on one of horror’s most ubiquitous subgenres.

But zombie games have matured. They've mutated beyond simply being zombie-themed shooters, and redefined what we know as the zombie FPS into more of a genuine survival game. You still have to get headshots and avoid getting gnawed, but there are new threats to manage. Thirst. Hunger. Darkness. Scarce resources. Untrustworthy strangers.

Who knew trying to survive the zombie apocalypse could be so fun?

A gun can’t solve every problem you have in DayZ, The War Z, and No More Room In Hell, in other words. These zombie games demand different skills: communication, leadership, a knack for navigation over open terrain, nerves of steel, and even a little deception will help you survive. In short, they’re the zombie games we’ve dreamed of: demanding and realistic survival simulations that ask a lot of you, but reward players with unforgettable, self-authored stories of sacrifice, horror, and survival. If you're unfamiliar with any of these games, make sure to read on to prepare yourself for the horro that's in store.

DAYZ

Everything you learned about surviving the zombiepocalypse was wrong
In April 2012, an unfinished mod developed by a former New Zealand military officer quietly released. The add-on was designed for Arma 2, a niche military simulation game from Czech studio Bohemia Interactive, known most as the creators of Operation Flashpoint.

Initially, DayZ arrived with little fanfare. “I developed it, essentially, in secret and that removes a lot of ego, it removes a lot of promises,” creator Dean Hall told PC Gamer last year. But DayZ would catch PC gaming by complete surprise. In just four months, it had drawn 1 million unique players. Hundreds of 50-player custom servers hosting the still-incomplete, alpha version of the mod sprung up in a matter of weeks. Almost 200,000 people were playing every day at the peak of the mod’s popularity in August 2012. The zombie game that gamers had openly fantasized about on message boards - an open-world, do-anything, go-anywhere survival game—had appeared out of thin air, albeit in a rough and half-realized form.

Even with placeholder animations, annoying bugs, and incomplete features, DayZ had a death-grip on gamers’ attention. Relative to the zombie games that preceded it, it offered unprecedented freedom and made other facets of the apocalypse—including fellow survivors—as much of a threat as the undead. Its style of realistic zombie arose partly from the inspiration of its creator. Hall had originally pitched the mod as a zombie-less training simulator, having endured survival training himself during an exchange program with the Singaporean military.

A lot of DayZ’s appeal is owed to Arma 2, whose Real Virtuality engine forms a foundation for its authenticity. Arma 2’s creators went to great lengths to create high-fidelity game technology, and DayZ benefits from sharing systems that model for vehicle fuel consumption and modular vehicle damage, a real-time night/day cycle, a working compass and detailed topographical map, voice chat that’s affected by proximity, and an engine that can render objects over long distances.

Loot is everything in DayZ. Your carrying capacity depends on the size of your backpack—a rare ruck can become a literal target on your back. DayZ’s rigid and unintuitive inventory interface, unfortunately, is a well-documented shortcoming.

A particular asset is Arma 2’s ballistics modeling, which distinguishes it from every shooter in gaming. Bullets travel parabolically in Arma 2 and DayZ based on their caliber, so the behavior of a hunting rifle, revolver, and M4A1 assault rifle, for example, is all significantly different. Getting a knack for your weapon is as important as just finding one—someone that knows the nuances of a low-end gun like a Lee Enfield (a bolt-action WWI rifle) is arguably more dangerous than someone holding an AS50 anti-material sniper rifle but doesn’t know how to dial-in its scope. Guns emit different amounts of noise, too—snipers usually find it safest to operate in teams for protection, as a single shot can ring a dinner bell for zombies two or three hundred meters away. For this reason, silenced sidearms and rifles are some of the most prized items in the game.

Chernogorsk (aka “Cherno”) is DayZ’s largest death trap. Erm, city.

To get your hands on high-end equipment, you need to scour the game world. You don’t complete quests or levels or experience points in DayZ, so typically you’re just worried about gathering useful gear—tools, food, and weapons—within the game’s enormous sandbox. One of DayZ’s masterstrokes is that the drive for gear always feels self-motivated; your needs and emotions naturally drive your goals. When you enter DayZ for the first time, you’re unarmed. You instinctively want to find a gun, but to do it you need to put yourself in danger: weapons and items only spawn inside structures, and zombies lurk where structures dwell. Other survival mechanics operate as motivators too. You need to eat. You need to drink, but true to Arma’s fidelity, you can’t fill your canteen in the ocean. I’ve been in situations where I would’ve traded grenades for a can of pasta, or nightvision goggles for a soda. If you’re injured, depending on your ailment, you’ll need to find morphine, painkillers, or antibiotics.

Surveillance is one of the pleasures of DayZ. It’s a game that makes looking and listening a genuine skill. Scouting an area for dangerous players (which you’ll need binoculars or a rangefinder for) is a good habit.

This isn’t a game where your health regenerates automatically, in other words. Actually, the quickest way to restoring your life in DayZ isn’t even something that can be done by yourself. Eating food slowly restores any blood you’ve lost from injury, but in order to use a blood transfusion bag, you need another player—meaning friendship (or temporarily trusting another player, at least) is roadblock to healing yourself. And interacting with strangers in DayZ—other players that, like you, want to find better gear—is inherently dangerous.

These intricate mechanics play out in one of gaming’s most detailed worlds. DayZ borrows Arma 2’s map, Chernarus, a 225km² country that’s actually a satellite-modeled slice of the Czech Republic (see comparison photos and maps here). Basing Chernarus on real topographic data grants it a feeling of authenticity that isn’t present in other virtual environments. Hills roll into unexpected ponds and forest valleys. Road signs are printed in Cyrillic. Powerlines run perpendicular to ruined castles. Villages and dense cities cling to the coast. The only downside is that Chernarus’ realistic scale? To get where you want to go, you might have to run three or four kilometers in real time.

DayZ’s Chernarus map is actually one of several playable worlds available for DayZ. Modders have ported other player-made Arma 2 maps into the mod, including the tundra of Namalsk, the jungle of Lingor Island, and a dense urban desert called Fallujah.

It’s worth noting that modders—the ever-busy carpenter gnomes of PC gaming—have ported several Arma 2 custom maps into the game. A popular one is Namalsk, a connected by a half-kilometer railway bridge. You can spy it and the other four currently-available landscapes here.

DayZ’s biggest innovation is the trust it places in players to find their own fun. Compared to conventional shooters, it’s barren of any cinematic content. But DayZ leverages complex systems and difficulty in a way that produces incredible stories and interactions that don’t exist in other games. Banal tasks like watching another survivor through binoculars and trying to determine where they’re going or if they’re friendly are meaningful safety measures. YouTube is full of funny, scary, and fascinating interactions between strangers and survivor groups, bandits and self-described axe murderers, do-gooders and kidnappers. For the patient player, the search for water in DayZ can be just as heart-pumping as a shootout. It’s the first zombie game to emphasize stories over shooting, and the first that makes human nature an implicit part of everything you do.

Click the next page to read about The War Z

THE WAR Z

A sincere form of flattery

In July 2012, faster than you could horde canned goods, a DayZ imitator emerged. Within a month of DayZ’s flash of popularity, a new studio told the gaming world that it was hard at work on its own player-versus-player and player-versus-zombie, open-world survival sandbox.

The announcement of The War Z was met with skepticism and cynicism flecked with curiosity. Its features were uncomfortably familiar: a huge, verdant open world dotted with mundane and military loot, a first-person and third-person camera, and dedicated servers, all laid out to support unscripted, persistent gameplay between zombies and other players. Even the look of its characters--baseball cap-wearing, backpacked survivors--resembled DayZ’s. The War Z wasn’t being subtle about its inspiration.

Using separate real-money and in-game currencies, The War Z allows players to purchase some basic items—like melee weapons and food—before they spawn into the game. If you die, anything you’re carrying is dropped.

But if this blatant borrowing of ideas resulted in a good game, would it matter? More details snuck out as gaming press got early access. The War Z would include a player-written questing system, appearance customization, the ability to place bounties on other players’ heads, an RPG-style skill system, and a microtransaction store for items. Perhaps most interesting was The War Z’s promise to offer something called Strongholds—small, private instances like a cabin in the woods, a farm, a small town on a cliffside, or a trainyard that clans or individual players can rent for money. Even if these features don’t appeal to you personally, they painted a picture of a game that was less of a clone than originally thought.

“In fact, we’re fans of the mod,” The War Z Executive Producer Sergey Titov said to VG247 in October last year when asked about DayZ. “Ultimately, we hope gamers end up playing both The War Z and the DayZ standalone. It’s difficult to compare at the moment, but although there are similarities, we tried creating a game that was a little bit easier to access and play, and that would allow players to be creative and create their own scenarios.”

There’s some consensus that this isn’t a “there’s only room for one of us in this town” situation, but a sign that this sub-genre is simply in the process of losing that prefix. Competition between companies usually benefits consumers, and The War Z has a lot to live up to. Being built atop a military simulator, DayZ carries a lot of inherent traits that lend itself to survival simulation, and not all of them are easily reproducible. But the other side of that coin is that The War Z isn’t burdened by some of DayZ’s inherent quirks, and seems to benefit from being coded from scratch. It’s offers a few simple antidotes to some of DayZ’s issues, like confusing inventory management, inaccessible weapon handling, and rigid animations.

It’s also favoring accessibility more than DayZ. The War Z does have permadeath--if you die, you lose that character and their items forever--but only if you’re playing with a Hardcore mode character. Normal mode simply temporarily locks your ability to play that character for 24 hours and removes any items they were carrying. Likewise, you can get a leg up on a new character by spending in-game currency that persists across all characters, so it’s easier to recover from a death.

A stamina mechanic is one of the small-but-significant differences separating The War Z from DayZ. You can’t run forever, but the undead can—sprinting into a town while out of breath might be all it takes to doom you.

The focus on accessibility extends to gameplay itself, where weapon behavior is more akin to games like Battlefield 3. An assault rifle or a pistol handles with the lightness and responsiveness you’d expect in an ordinary multiplayer FPS. You’ll still have to keep noise in mind when firing—letting loose with a sniper rifle will make you awfully popular in your part of the map. There are also small but significant difference between DayZ and The War Z in player movement. You can crouch and go prone in both games, but The War Z has a jump button. But more realistically, you can’t sprint infinitely in The War Z—running depletes a stamina meter that recharges over time, so you’ll want to conserve your sprinting until you really need it.

The War Z also features a few imaginative zombie types. “Sleeper” zombies deceptively lie dormant on the ground, but rise if they notice you nearby. The developers have also promised a rare “stem cell-carrying” zombie that only appears at night. “Visually they’ll look very different from other infected, they’re much more aggressive, fast and agile. They’re rare, they hunt only at night, so the best place to find them will be larger cities at night time,” says Titov. Killing one of these superzombies will yield stem cells, which are kind of a special currency within The War Z that can also be used to create a vaccine. Hammerpoint hopes that the relative difficulty of bagging one of these zombies will inspire some creative teamwork and competition among players.

Nighttime in The War Z is inherently dangerous. Flares, chemlights, and flashlights will help you find your way around, but any light sources will inevitably draw attention from other players.

These corpses lurk in a world about 160km² in size—about 70 percent the size of Chernarus in DayZ. Encouragingly, Hammerpoint has said that anyone who buys The War Z will receive additional maps that are released. The game’s stock map is inspired by Colorado, a rocky wilderness pocked with outposts, lakes, and small towns.

Click the next page to read about "No More Room in Hell"

NO MORE ROOM IN HELL

Expect at least half of your team to die.
Unlike The War Z and DayZ, No More Room In Hell doesn’t fit into the newly-born “outdoor survival game” category. It’s fairer to call it an advanced, hardcore take on conventional cooperative zombie games like Left 4 Dead. In development for a decade before releasing over a year ago, the Source engine mod was selected through Steam Greenlight to release as a full, free game on Steam, but you can play it now by downloading it from www.nomoreroominhell.com.

What NMRiH shares in common with DayZ (other than an awkward name) is the unapologetic way that it throws you into a brutal post-apocalyptic scenario with almost no instruction. You’re fragile. Bullets are scarce. And zombies will infinitely spawn until you complete the map’s tough (and partially randomized) objectives, like switching on generators or finding the keycode that unlocks a door. NMRiH’s unforgiving approach to zombie co-op practically guarantees that a few of your teammates will need to die as you trudge from your spawn area to the end of the level. Your eight-person survivor group is twice the size of Left 4 Dead’s, and a given round typically sees your team whittled down as players inevitably get separated, surrounded, and eaten.

Though it resembles Left 4 Dead, what No More Room In Hell shares in common with DayZ and The War Z is that it often makes fleeing from and avoiding the undead preferable to fighting them.

Most of NMRiH’s zombies are of the slow, vintage variety. They’re easy to evade, but much more durable in combat, so the danger arises from their numbers and players’ modest agility. You can only sprint for a brief period of time, so wandering into a cluttered garage with a single exit, for example, is sometimes all it takes to doom you. A handful of speedier zombies jog after survivors (some of which—harrowingly—are children), but NMRiH otherwise lacks any undead with special abilities like leaping, acid-spitting, or tongue-lassoing. This gives the game a more grounded feeling; the molasses-speed creep of the horde gives you room to react, but the absence of a revival mechanic and the relative weakness of weapons has a way of turning small mistakes into permanent death.

Also refreshing is NMRiH’s emphasis on immersion. Like DayZ, the volume of voice communication is based on distance, meaning a far-off teammates’ cries for help may go completely unnoticed. The game also doesn’t place any interface, crosshairs, or HUD on the screen by default, and all of its maps are pocked with corners that are absolutely saturated with opaque, impermeable darkness. A small antidote to this is the flashlight. It mercifully doesn’t require fresh batteries, but just as you’d expect in real life, you can’t hold it and swing a sledgehammer or operate an M16 simultaneously. This design makes the seemingly banal role of “flashlight holder” a vital role for guiding teams through unlit corridors—being the guy responsible for shining the light on enemies while your teammates whack away with shovels or chainsaws is genuinely helpful.

The melee weapons themselves take a lot of finesse to operate. Most of them swing slowly (and with a wind-up animation much lengthier than Left 4 Dead’s), meaning they’re nowhere near the weedwackers you wield in Valve’s co-op zombie game. And despite their decomposing state, the undead are durable, taking multiple hits to bring down unless you skillfully connect with their skull. A typical hand-to-hand fight is a tense tango of bobbing and weaving, angling to position yourself to just the right distance where your axe or machete can clobber a zombie but the zombie can’t hit you. This limited room for error makes individual zombie kills feel like a heroic effort.

Zombies spawn endlessly in No More Room In Hell; this isn’t a game that’s afraid to overwhelm you with enemies. Some maps stack dozens of zombies directly outside the spawn room, only giving you a handful of bullets and melee weapons to deal with them.

Firearms are also handled with a modicum more realism than Left 4 Dead. They’re scarce, and pistols don’t have infinite ammo—when you pick one up, it might have a meager six or seven shots waiting for you in the magazine. More, they’re tough to aim: shots that look like a sure thing through ironsights won’t always produce a kill. And like DayZ, most guns have a discrete ammunition type —you might find handgun ammo, but if it’s .45 ACP and the only pistol you have is the 9mm Beretta M9, it’s not going to help you.

Appropriately enough, a lot of NMRiH’s scares arise from the lack of room in its levels. Structurally, they resemble Left 4 Dead’s meandering, point-to-point sprints, but because aggressive collision detection between zombies and even other teammates means that it only takes a few zombies to block a doorway. About a half-dozen maps, with the community and the development team filling in more.

“Behind you!” The snail-speed crawl of zombies in NMRiH makes room for communication and decision-making in a way that isn’t present in most zombie-themed shooters.

My favorite, called Cabin, begins with a leap of faith. You spawn in a secure attic, and begin by combing dark corners for melee weapons, flashlights, and whatever you can find. But to start the level, you have to drop straight through a hole in the ceiling—a one-way trip that usually makes the first survivor in instantly popular . My usual tactic is to have this leading player lure zombies away from the entrance so the rest of the team can safely descend. They usually get beat up in the process, but it’s preferable to throwing everyone into a crowded, panicked melee.

A final twist on all this layered brutality is NMRiH’s infection mechanic. Zombies will occasionally grapple you, and if you or a teammate is unable to shake them loose, you’ll get bitten. You know what happens next: within minutes, you’ll drop dead, and rise again as an AI-controlled zombie. It’s surprising that the mod is the only zombie game we know of to model this classic horror trope.

NMRiH is a stand-out take on zombie survival, and the scariest multiplayer game I’ve ever played. Unlike Left 4 Dead, trying to kill every zombie you meet is the surest way to have your human card revoked.

Click the next page to read about the five most important zombie games.

THE FIVE MOST IMPORTANT ZOMBIE GAMES

OVER THREE DECADES, THESE TITLES HAVE SHAPED (OR WILL SHAPE) THE ZOMBIE GENRE AS WE KNOW IT

Zombie Zombie

1984 (on ZX Spectrum), Spaceman Ltd.
One of the first games to feature zombies as its subject. Zombie Zombie had a very indirect way of dealing with the undead: You had to lure zombies up to tall buildings and then trick them into falling off to their doom. Coincidentally, it was one of the first games to use two-channel sound.

Resident Evil 4

2007 (on PC), Capcom
The RE4 PC port was particularly bad, but the game still stands as the best “actionization” of the zombie genre. Japanese difficulty, boss design, and pacing tempered by Western playability and an over-the-shoulder camera spawned hordes of imitators. Weapon customization lent meaningful progression to the dozens of brushes with undead creatures.

Left 4 Dead

2008, Valve
The reigning champ in zombie co-op, L4D’s mildly forking level design and “zombie director AI” combined to create movie-like campaigns that wickedly and dynamically threw threats at your survivor group as you progressed through each chapter. Another L4D innovation, asymmetrical multiplayer, has been copied in games such as Dead Space 2.

The Walking Dead

2012, Telltale Games
Telltale’s adventure spin-off of the Robert Kirkman comic book series has taken a novellike, “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” approach to the genre. Though it’s modest on interaction, choices you make—from whom to rescue to which friend should get a candy bar—affect the content of future episodes. The five-episode series has already been renewed for a sequel.

Dead State

2013, DoubleBear Productions
Zombie shooters have been done to death; Dead State is a turn-based RPG. Described as Fallout-meets-The Walking Dead, it’s being helmed by Vampire: The Masquerade writer/ designer Brian Mitsoda. You play as the leader of a group of survivors that’ve holed up in a Texas elementary school. The game earned $332,635 on Kickstarter in July 2012.

Click the next page to read about the five most incredible custom Left 4 Dead 2 campaigns.

FIVE INCREDIBLE LEFT 4 DEAD 2 CUSTOM CAMPAIGNS

L4D2 MAY LACK REALISM, BUT IT’S STILL THE BEST ZOMBIE-THEMED ACTION GAME AVAILABLE. THE MODDING COMMUNITY HAS CREATED HUNDREDS OF FANTASTIC CUSTOM CAMPAIGNS THAT ARE A CINCH TO INSTALL

Questionable Ethics

Fight your way through a white-walled, underground, secret research facility filled with traps (like a ceiling that drops cars on you) and endless tricks. Almost Portal-like in its devious cleverness, Questionable Ethics is the work of a Korean modder. Play the sequel after you’re done.

Helm’s Deep Reborn

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’ iconic castle siege is reproduced here with almost 1:1 authenticity, with the exception of L4D’s menagerie of uglies swapped in for Uruk-hai. This multistage survival map has you meat-grinding through hundreds of zombies, climaxing in a defense of—and then escape from—the throne room. Nonstop violence and calamity.

GoldenEye 4 Dead

An amalgamation of settings drawn from the 1995 Bond film, including a dam, runway, and a hidden space base in Aztec ruins. G4D is more than a pile of references: It’s a genuinely taxing and creatively designed campaign, and one that takes clever liberties with its source material. Be on the lookout for Easter eggs.

Let's Build A Rocket

Instead of a sprawling campaign that has you racing to the safe room as a finish line, Let’s Build A Rocket gathers the survivors around a small launch pad and hangar. Using a computer panel, you research new technology to unlock L4D2’s weapons as zombies harass, juggling these tasks as you and teammates slowly construct a rocket to escape Earth.

Suicide Blitz 2

A great example of the indulgent set pieces , Suicide Blitz 2 pushes the survivors through a bowling alley, maximum security prison, and finally to the 50-yard line of a football stadium for a titular stand-off against hulking zombie Tanks in football jerseys.

Zombie games have come along way and are continuing to evolve. What's your favorite Zombie game?