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Bioware have released the E3 2011 cinematic trailer for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Bioware have released the E3 2011 cinematic trailer for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Sadly, there's no option to pay a monthly subscription fee and get an episode of these every month.
Classic puzzle-platform sequel Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus is getting an HD remake.
Classic puzzle-platform sequel Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus is getting an HD remake. Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus was the follow-up to Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee—only better, because you could possess your farts. Now, just like Abe's Oddysee received a New 'n' Tasty remaster, so to will Abe's Exoddus be rebuilt for modern times.
The "full ground-up remake"is possible thanks to the success of Oddworld: New 'N' Tasty. Fans can expect Exoddus to get the same treatment, with a similar graphical style to Abe's Oddysee's remake.
The New 'N' Tasty remake was a beautiful thing; giving Abe's Oddysee some beautiful 3D scenery. Andy Kelly reviewed it for us in the April issue of the magazine, giving it 86%. That Exoddus is getting a comparable upgrade is very good news indeed.
Last week we brought Dishonored into Skyrim, so this week let's bring The Elder Scrolls into Crusader Kings II .
. The Elder Kings modbeautifully transforms medieval Europe into Tamriel, a place I'm much more familiar with than medieval Europe because I play games instead of reading books. The mod introduces elements like birth signs, racial traits, spells, Dark Brotherhood assassins, and problematic monsters, plus new buildings, new council members, and a host of new decisions. Stick around long enough and a new Dragonborn might even pop up somewhere.
The entire continent of Tamriel is lovingly recreated, and all the familiar races are present to play: the beasties like Argonians and the Khajiit, elves such as Altmer, Bosmer, and Maormer, as well as humans like Imperials, Bretons, and Nords. Each race comes with its own attribute bonuses and penalties based on The Elder Scrolls lore. For instance, Nords get a bonus to their Martial ability (they're good at war) and a slight takeaway from their Learning (like me, they're not big on reading), whereas playing a Dunmer means you have a lifespan that could last hundreds of years but you take a hit to diplomacy, since the Dark Elves are mistrusted in Tamriel. As in The Elder Scrolls, your birth sign will also give you small bonuses to your attributes.
If you're a terrible ruler like myself, there's more to worry about than just angry peasants and cranky vassals. Become a slothful ruler or foster a poor stewardship rating, and the result will be a weakening of your holdings, meaning vampires, giants, trolls, goblins, or even plain old boring human bandits will begin encroaching on your lands, negatively affecting your economy and increasing the chances that peasants will revolt. Though I haven't had it happen to one of my characters yet, there's apparently even a chance of becoming infected with vampirism yourself if you're in an area where the bloodsuckers are present.
Luckily, even crummy rulers like me have help from our councils, and they've got some appropriately Elder Scrolls-y tasks they can be assigned to. Your High Priest can be sent to cure sickness and boost disease resistance in a province, chase cabals and local necromancers from their disgusting caves, or dabble in magic to add spells to your spellbook. Your Steward, in addition to collecting taxes and researching economy technology, can survey your own province in hopes of discovering treasure-filled Ayleid or Dwemer ruins or valuable deposits of minerals like ebony, orichalum, or other precious metals to boost your economy.
Other activities from The Elder Scrolls are available as well. If you're a Nord, you can go on a pilgrimage to High Hrothgar and climb the 1,000 steps, encountering various obstacles and decisions along the way. If assassination is your thing (and I think it is because any game with a button marked "Assassinate" pretty much makes it impossible not to assassinate someone), you no longer have to leave it up to some faceless plotter. You can summon the Dark Brotherhood (for a hefty fee) and have them dispatch your personal or political enemies with a higher chance of success.
Unlike the Game of Thrones mod Rich recently played, Technology is in full swing in Elder Kings, and you can invest in things like Magical Infrastructure, which allows you to create new types of buildings, such as labs for Destruction, Alteration, and Restoration, plus enchanted armories and apothecaries. You can also send your Spymaster to other realms to sabotage your enemy's research into the arcane.
Plus, you might even spot The Dragonborn, and whichever lucky NPC it is will get a hefty boost to their stats. Is there someone in your dungeon awaiting execution? Because that's generally how the most special people in Tamriel are discovered, right? In fact, I tried to execute a prisoner just to see if a remarkable series of events would allow him to escape to a grander destiny. Uh, no. He just totally got executed.
Along with everything I've mentioned, there's all sorts Elder Scrolls flavor added, like a pilgrimage to Vvardenfell, a visit to the Imperial City arena, and an optional music mod to give you some familiar Elder Scrolls tunes. I even wound up neighbors with M'aiq the Liar, and later went to war with him. Even later, I lost that war. I tried to assassinate him as well, but he's pretty slippery.
The mod is still largely a work in progress. Not every feature is complete, and there are some placeholder graphics and temporary portraits, but it's still quite playable and enjoyable. There are even submods in the works, such as one aimed at letting you play as a Draugr! This is going to be a great mod to watch as it develops further. Check out their forums here.
Installation : The download contains a self-installing .exe file. Fus-roh- done .
Listen now... We're kicking off 2011 with a change and this newlogo is the first of many tweaks to come to your favourite gaming podcast over the course of the year. Regular listeners needn't fret, mind, because there'll still be the 'accurate' journalism that you've come to expect from the men of GamesRadar UK. Fact. Episode 70 sees us dish out the first audiological treat of the year as Justin, Cundy
Earlier in the year we reported how thousands of MS-DOS games were now playable in your browser thanks to the Internet Archive.
thanks to the Internet Archive. Well now things have moved on a bit - you can now embed and play DOS games in Twitter .
Never before have I been more irritated that we can't embed Tweets here, but I can at least link you to oneI may have posted as an example for this story.
There's still questionable legality surrounding the Archive making all of these games available for free, but at the same time there's a very genuine reason for it - we need to preserve these games, and we need somewhere we all know we can go and find out about those who came before.
And play Prince of Persiahalfway through having a Twitter spat with a celebrity.
From me to you... Above: I call this one'The Skittles Effect'after everyone's favourite Kinectimal. Roll over, Skittles! Above: This one's called 'Spiky'. I was lucky to catch the very second this cop hit my spike strip Above: I didn't know Chris Cornell was into street racing, but then he does like to burn that gasoline... Above: The most subtle advertising you'll ever see. Crashing Porsche's brake
Have you ever said to yourself, "Do you know what I need to really make my life complete?
Have you ever said to yourself, "Do you know what I need to really make my life complete? A Mega Manmovie!" If you have, then you will be pleased to peaches to hear that, according to The Tracking Board, one is actually being made.
Mega Man's been around for quite awhile now, having debuted in 1987 on the NES. Nine sequels and numerous spin-offs have followed over the years, including a few PC releases. Most recently, he appeared in the Mega Man Legacy Collection, a "faithful reproduction" of the first six Mega Man games that hit Steamlast week. He's been on television, in comics, and even the subject of a novel, but he's never starred in a feature film—until now.
The Mega Man movie is being developed by 20th Century Fox and Chernin Entertainment, with Peter Chernin, whose previous credits include Planet of the Apes (Rise Of, Dawn Of, and War Of), Oblivion, The Heat, and Exodus: Gods and Kings, producing. There's no indication whether it will be an animated or live-action flick, although, without any evidence whatsoever, I'd put my money on the latter. That's all we've got to go on right now, but we'll keep you posted.
Earlier in the year we reported how thousands of MS-DOS games were now playable in your browser thanks to the Internet Archive.
thanks to the Internet Archive. Well now things have moved on a bit - you can now embed and play DOS games in Twitter .
Never before have I been more irritated that we can't embed Tweets here, but I can at least link you to oneI may have posted as an example for this story.
There's still questionable legality surrounding the Archive making all of these games available for free, but at the same time there's a very genuine reason for it - we need to preserve these games, and we need somewhere we all know we can go and find out about those who came before.
And play Prince of Persiahalfway through having a Twitter spat with a celebrity.
Above: You can click here to watch the trailer on YouTube in order to increase the number of views The new trailer highlights exactly what you'll be playing for: the Dodge Viper SRT10 Final Edition, Bentley Continental Supersports and the Lamborghini Murciélago LP 650-4 Roadster. So off you go, get to doing Hot Pursuit's advertising work – the marketing department's loss is the DLC division's gain, after all. Dec 6, 2010 Topics Racing Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit We recommend By Zergnet Load Comments
The Mega Man Legacy Collection is a "faithful reproduction" of the original six Mega Man games, spiffed up with a hi-def paint job, two new modes of play, and leaderboards with integrated video replays.
The bundle is being developed by Digital Eclipse and will be built on its Eclipse Engine, which "rebuilds the original games from their source elements," Capcom explained. "The result is a sharp, clean picture that proudly displays these iconic sprites in lovely 1080p, and presents the games as they existed in their original forms."
The six games will be playable as they always have been, but the Legacy Collection also adds a new "Challenge Mode" of increasingly difficult trials created from mixed segments of gameplay taken from all six games, and "Museum Mode," featuring "a massive repository of history and art collected from the era," including hi-res official art, concept pieces, and sketches, all scanned at "absurdly high resolutions to make them as clean and clear as possible."
The Mega Man Legacy Collection will be released digitally later this summer, and will go for $15.
You don't hear much about screensavers these days, but over on the Adventure Game Studio forums a user named Arj0n has released one that might be worth a moment of your time, especially if you're a retro game fan.
You don't hear much about screensavers these days, but over on the Adventure Game Studio forums a user named Arj0n has released one that might be worth a moment of your time, especially if you're a retro game fan. It's an homage to the four-color CGA era, containing more than 1000 DOS games and over 1200 CGA screens.
The stand-alone screensaver makes games selectable by genre, and will also optionally display information about each game—developer, publisher, year of release—above or below the screenshot. All screens display at 640x480, and if music is your thing there are 15 chiptune tracks that can play in the background while the images pass by.
It's a silly little thing, but fun, too, especially if you've been around long enough to point at the screen and yell, "Yes! I remember!" when the Temple of Apshai screen pops up. I noticed a couple of them that were out of place—Double Dribble, for instance, shows up in the RPG section—but as Arj0n wrote in a follow-up message, putting together the information for all of the games in this screensaver was a "huge task."
The results of his effort, I think, are very cool. And it may not be done yet: Arj0n released a 1.1 version of the package on Saturday, ensuring proper resizing and bit depth of all sprites, and reducing the size of the project in the process. Grab it here.
Want free DLC for your copy of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit? Then you better get your ass over to YouTube and watch the official game trailer because if it hits one million views, EA will give out a dose of holiday cheer. Within hours of EA announcing the promotion, views of the video has spiked. When this story was being written up, it was around 420,000 hits. So it's sort of a cheesy promotional gimmick
In celebration of Mega Man's 25th anniversary, Capcom announced today that it will release a new fan-made Mega Man game exclusively as a free PC download on December 17th.
that it will release a new fan-made Mega Man game exclusively as a free PC download on December 17th. Street Fighter X Mega Man, revealed at the Street Fighter 25th Anniversary Grand Finals, is an 8-bit styled crossover which bridges the anniversary celebrations of the two franchises.
Mega Man will battle Rolento, Dhalsim, Urien, Ryu, Blanka, Rose, C. Viper, and Chun Li in pursuit, as always, of their powers...and there's also probably a reason the little blue guy has it in for his franchise siblings. The creator is Seow Zong Hui, a competitive Street Fighter player from Singapore who approached Capcom Senior VP Christian Svensson with a prototype at EVO 2012 -- we'll have an interview with him soon. In the meantime, get trailer'd above.
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Hands up if you owned a computer in the 80s!
Hands up if you owned a computer in the 80s! After making some tentative steps in the late 70s, the 1980s saw home computing really take off. Back then, no young adult’s bedroom was complete without a computer, tape deck, and trusty joystick on display.
Home computing proved to be so popular it seemed like every company wanted a slice of the digital pie, with model after model released on an annual basis, all vying for dominance in the ultra-competitive marketplace.
Some efforts, such as the Commodore 64 and Spectrum, were hugely successful and went on to sell millions. But for every success story there were many more that failed to make the grade, with some models even being released and then going out of business the same year.
Here, Maximum PC presents 25 of the most memorable and noteworthy computers of the 1980s. Join us as we relive the golden age of home computing.
1982 - Sinclair ZX Spectrum
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1982 - Commodore 64
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1982 - Jupiter Ace
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1982 - Sord M5
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1983 - Epson QX-10
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1983 - Acorn Electron
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1983 - Apricot PC
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1983 - Camputers Lynx
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1983 - Oric 1
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1984 - Apple Macintosh / II
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1985 - Atari ST
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1985 - Commodore 128
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Arise, battered and discarded sequel; your service is required once more.
Arise, battered and discarded sequel; your service is required once more. After Yager's deal to develop Dead Island 2collapsed in mysterious circumstanceslast year—causing the dissolution of the Yager Productions division—the future of the Dead Island franchise beyond misjudged MOBAs and HD remakes has been in limbo. Now it has a developer once more: the UK's Sumo Digital.
I feel like we should have called it—Sumo is heavyweight champion when it comes to working with third-party IP. Disney Infinity, Forza, LittleBigPlanet and Sonic have all passed through its doors. It'll also be taking charge of the PC port of Rock Band 4 on the off-chance Harmonix's Fig campaignpulls through.
"Sumo showed so much understanding of the brand, had creative ideas and an excellent vision that was aligned with our own,” Koch Media (Deep Silver's parent company) CEO Klemens Kundratitz told MCV.
Contrast this with the scant informationwe have surrounding Deep Silver's divorce from Yager, a lone statement in which Yager CEO Timo Ullman explained that "Yager and Deep Silver's respective visions of the project fell out of alignment."
Sumo Digital, may your vision be ever aligned.
Shadowgate was a brutally-hard Mac (and later NES) adventure game, where one failed puzzle could murder you and force you to start all over.
was a brutally-hard Mac (and later NES) adventure game, where one failed puzzle could murder you and force you to start all over. The remake that Zojoi Studios has coming updates those visuals for the modern age, but keeps the puzzles difficult and the atmosphere dark. When I spoke to developer Karl Roelofs last month about the game's progress, the team still wasn't sure about its release date. Now that date is set, and Zojoi has exclusively revealed it to us, along with a trailer that shows off Shadowgate's commitment to its history.
August 21 is that date, when Shadowgate will launch on Steam for the PC. It's also the date when modern gamers will realize just how difficult puzzle-adventure games of this type were back in the good old days. I've played a few hours of Shadowgate's beta build, which challenges you to enter the "living" Castle Shadowgate and defeat an evil warlock using only your wits and whatever you can find inside, and it does not mess around. Choosing the wrong path means instant failure, though thankfully this new version is much more generous with your save game options. It also includes new difficulty levels that simplify the puzzles, if the faithfully reproduced dangers are too much for you.
Staying faithful to the original is what this new trailer is all about. It shows side-by-side comparisons of Castle Shadowgate from the NES original and the new reboot. For even more info, read my chat with design director Karl Roelofs, where we talk about the process of bringing Shadowgate back to life.
Jump to Section: Best Price Comments Pros The best racing game of the year Drifting for boost is like an integrated minigame The online could be the greatest race on the net Cons Not having an internet connection Being reminded of a finish line crash by a pal's pic Having curse words filtered on the Autolog. F*** that! Go to page: Page 1 Page 1 Page 2 The Need For Speed franchise has had a couple of
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Our Verdict
It might not have the sheen of Grand Theft Auto, but Saints Row IV is both gloriously stupid and stupidly good.
need to know
Expect to pay: £40 / $50
Release: Out now
Developer: Volition
Publisher: Deep Silver
Multiplayer: 2 player co-op campaign
Link: Official site
This is the only game I've ever had to pause because I was laughing too much to play. I want to tell you about the exact section that caused me to crease up. I want to sit you down, do the voices, and perform a poor recreation of the whole thing. And I want you to know about the other hundred-odd moments that physically contorted my real-life face into real-life grins or my real-life mouth into real-life laughs.
I won't tell you about all of them because I'll spoil them. But I want you to know because they're so joyful, so playful, that they turn this third sequel to an average Grand Theft Auto clone into one of the most fun videogames I've ever played.
Like Saints Row the Third, Saints Row IVis set in the city of Steelport. Except it isn't. The game starts with an alien attack on Earth, with you as president of America. Except technically it doesn't do that, either – the game actually starts once you've infiltrated a terrorist base to find a nuclear missile, and clambered up the side of it mid-flight, yanking vital bits of wiring out, as Aerosmith's 'I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing' blares. The missile explodes, you fall to earth, and manage to crash through the ceiling of the oval office. Congratulations, you're president!
I'm including this precise description because it sets SRIV's tone early, and better than I could with words like 'madcap' or 'anarchic' or 'what?!' This tone continues throughout – throughout the subsequent alien invasion, throughout your incarceration in a Matrix-esque simulation of Steelport (see why it technically isn't the same place?) – and all the way through the ten-hour campaign and twenty-plus hours of side missions.
It's even present in the character creation screen. Long ago, PC Gamer developed the concept of 'maximum face': mutants produced by pushing every slider to full. The overweight, hollow-cheeked, elfeared weirdo you see in these screenshots is a product of that. For the first three hours, simply seeing his face kicked me into fits of giggles.
I played my hero for laughs, dressing him in a towel, then in Lara Croft hotpants, then as a giant foam hotdog. But you're also free to play him straight, a man in a suit amid the madness of an imperfect simulation of an already-mad city. Or you're free to play as a her. Or as a him with a her voice, or a her with a him voice, or a her with a her voice pitch-shifted to 100%, or even as a him with Nolan North's voice. Or, if you really fancy, you can play as a small white hovering toilet.
If you really fancy, you can play as a small white hovering toilet.
I created a monster, with an ageing wrestler's body, a pencil moustache, and giant buggly eyes, and gave him a cockney voice pitch-shifted to 60%. He talked like Jason Statham huffing a birthday-partyful of helium balloons and loomed out of the screen like a child's drawing of a nightmare. By the end of the game, I loved him. I'm still not quite sure how that happened.
But I think I've got an idea. SRIV is surprisingly inclusive. It trades on ridiculousness – but unlike its raison d'etre Grand Theft Auto, it's never sneering or cruel. Where GTA lauds movies and music as cultural touchstones, SRIV takes on games. Mass Effect is one of its most visible targets. Punching out of the alienrun Steelport simulation for the first time, I got my own spaceship, with cabins for a crew I'd later recruit by rescuing them from the Matrix.
Press E on a crewmate and you can talk to them. Press R and you'll 'romance' them. There's no convoluted conversational minefield to unlock fade-to-black shagging here, though: almost all of your friends – male, female,å or robot – will immediately agree to a quick fumble. It's a pastiche of BioWare's RPG sex vending machines – feed enough in and collect your hump from the slot below – but also indicative of SRIV's desire to simplify.
That desire is the best thing about the game. Options unfurl as you play. Steelport is a city full of cars, and, as in GTA, any of them can be hijacked and driven. They felt good. Half an hour into the game, I unlocked nitrous boosts – for all vehicles. My already-quick cars went faster. They felt great. An hour into the game, I unlocked super jumps. Holding the spacebar would power-up a leap to get me halfway up a tower-block. It felt fantastic.
Ten hours in and I barely needed to touch the ground.
Two hours in, I could run faster than cars. It felt brilliant. Three hours in, I'd unlocked a glide move that meant I could float between objectives like a disgusting flying squirrel. It felt amazing.
Ten hours in and I barely needed to touch the ground. My favourite way to get to a story mission-marker was to sprint to Steelport's central island, bound up the tallest skyscraper while charging an upgraded tier three superjump, then leap off and glide toward my objective. Fifty storeys above it, I'd turn myself into a human missile through an upgradeable ability and slam to the ground with a powerful shockwave. Pedestrians and cars would careen away from my impact point, and I'd saunter the few feet to my destination in luminous pink high heels. It felt fucking glorious.
There's a full customisation system for all the cars, in addition to pilotable alien hoverbikes, UFOs and attack helicopters. Any minor inconvenience I had, I found stripped away by an upgrade. Glowing blue collectibles hidden on buildings and bridges around the city let me upgrade my movement capabilities, as well as a suite of four powers that include ice blasts and telekinesis. I found myself entering mini-trances and collecting these blue orbs for ten, fifteen minutes at a time, revelling in the joy of superpowered movement and the camp little yelp my character produced whenever he collected one.
The simulated setting lets SRIV play wherever it wants to.
Simulated Steelport's shops can be hacked to provide new clothes and weapon options, as well as turning the local populace to the Saints' side. Towers can be climbed and turned from angry alien red to calm blue. These missions are structured further by your crew, who'll ask you to perform certain tasks to 'destabilise' the simulation.
Some of these missions are weak: clearing waves of foes gets tiresome when they take too long to turn up, and the Audiosurf minigame goes on too long. Others are inspired, particularly the destruction jobs where you're given the keys to a tank, and the insurance fraud schemes, where you purposefully ragdoll yourself into traffic to earn points.
But it's the story missions that are the strongest, using characters from the three previous games to make them bombastic, funny and imaginative. The simulated setting lets SRIV play wherever it wants to, the standout for me being a base infiltration in the Metal Gear Solid vein that forced me to shoot out every light source in the facility – and the line “that light had a family.” The setting also enables the game to cast its staggering level of violence in an acceptable light. Enemies, aliens, pedestrians: all of them simulations to be suplexed onto the concrete by one of your ludicrous melee moves and left to fade back into imaginary numbers.
It's not the most technically proficient game. Five or six times cutscenes failed to trigger because I was mid-animation when they were due to start, clipping was a constant problem, and enemies occasionally got stuck in the scenery. Fortunately, it's not broken: Steelport with all its moving parts was designed to push consoles at the end of their lifespan, but my i5 CPU and two-year-old graphics card ran it on high without trouble. Graphics options that included v-sync and anti-aliasing – but no field of view – were more than enough to keep me happy in a city that never chugged as I glided through its skies.
Saints Row IV is a game that's comfortable with itself. It's solved how to tie callous violence to a character you actually want to inhabit by means of a narrative device, it's solved fiddly movement by an intoxicating set of movement mechanics, and it's solved the leery, exploitative tone of previous sequels through genuine affection for its cast and equality of player characters – man, woman or toilet, all can wield a giant purple dildo bat. It's a vast, mechanically joyful game, the result of chucking all the fun and freedom of gaming into the same city.
Saints Row was born of Grand Theft Auto, but although both feature open cities and freeform violence, they've diverged. Grand Theft Auto is desperate to be a film, to be satire, to be an experience. Saints Row IV wants to be a game, and by showing its heartfelt love for the medium, it's become something wonderful.
The Verdict
Saints Row 4
It might not have the sheen of Grand Theft Auto, but Saints Row IV is both gloriously stupid and stupidly good.
We recommend By Zergnet
Do you like statistics and exclamation marks?
Do you like statistics and exclamation marks? Yacht Club Games has posted a breakdown of sales for its recently released platformer Shovel Knight, and it's a surprisingly interesting read. The Kickstarter funded title released for PC, Wii U and 3DS on June 26, with 64 per cent of pledges coming from the PC community. The game went on to sell a whooping 75,000 copies during its first week on PC and Nintendo's eShop, far exceeding the studio's expectations of between 30,000 and 60,000 copies. 38 per cent of sales in that first week were on PC: a close majority.
A month later the game has sold 180,000, with PC still the most popular platform. This means stretch goals will easily be met without need for further funding, and bodes well for the future of the Los Angeles based studio.
Sales figures aren't very interesting though. The studio also provides a breakdown of its development budget, and it's pretty sobering. Even ostensibly low budget retro games like Shovel Knight cost millions to make, with long hours and low wages apparently the norm. "We ended up operating for five months without money or payments to the team here," the.
"It was a difficult period, where some of us were awkwardly standing in front of cashiers having our credit cards declined, drawing from any possible savings, and borrowing money from our friends and family. But we made it to the other side!"
Read the full post here. It's worth the time, as is the game, with our reviewsaying it "lovingly recreates the simple pleasures of 8-bit platformers and improves on them with modern ideas that make every level different and worth playing."
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Our Verdict
Gat Out of Hell offers all the open-world distractions of a Saints Row game, but precious little of what made the last two so remarkable.
Need To Know
Price: £15/$20
Release: 22 January
Publisher: Deep Silver
Developer: Volition
Link: Official site
Multiplayer: Co-op
I love Saints Row IV. It's funny, silly and, for a game that features a cast of sociopaths, surprisingly warm hearted. It's also polarising – with some former fans unhappy with the series' transformation into an absurd comedy ensemble. I'm not one of them, and it's important you know how much I enjoy the Saints' last outing, because I don't love Gat Out of Hell. I don't hate it, by any means; but it seldom displays the spark of creativity that made the last two games so good.
Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell is a standalone expansion for Saints Row IV. Rather than "The Boss" – the moldable agent of chaos at the centre of all previous games – you play as returning characters Johnny Gat and Kinzie Kensington. Through a ridiculous set-up involving Kinzie's birthday party and Aleister Crowley's ouija board, The Boss is kidnapped by Satan and forced to marry his daughter, Jezebel. Through an even more ridiculous series of events, the playable duo open their own portal to New Hades with a half-formed plan to rescue him.
Needless to say, this is all great. Unfortunately, it all takes place in a cutscene. Gat Out of Hell's best moments are all in cutscenes, where the characters are free to break out of the rigidity of the game itself. Even worse, the game's best joke – which I won't spoil on the off-chance you haven't seen it – was released in its entirety as a trailer. Were I feeling generous, I'd argue that borrowing the movie industry's trick of spoiling a film's funniest bits shows how far comedy games have come. Really, though, it ruins what could have been a wonderful surprise.
The major problem with Gat Out of Hell is that the series' other traditional methods of delivering jokes – its mission design and scripting – are almost entirely absent. Instead, its mission givers offer playlists of open world mini-game activities. Saints Row IV did this too, but only as a diversion between the main missions. Here, there are no missions. Your job is to complete activities until you've caused enough carnage to attract Satan's wrath. Do so, and you'll unlock the final boss fight. The entire process took me around five hours – albeit with plenty of other activities left on the map.
With no missions, the entire game is reliant on its open world design. Some of this is exceptional. Where in Saints Row IV you could super-jump and glide, in Gat Out of Hell you can fly. It's a brilliant system. You've a limited number of times you can flap your wings while in the air, each one giving a small boost of speed. Your job is to maintain momentum, and with practice you can reach some exhilarating speeds. It gives an entirely new sense of freedom, and makes collecting "Clusters" – collectible souls that upgrade your powers – a joy.
Also of note is New Hades. Its biggest plus is that it's not Steelport, virtual or otherwise. There are similarities, most likely due to sharing an engine with Saints Row IV, but even though it resembles a heavy-metal cover version of the city, it's nonetheless a new place to explore. Great! Only, there isn't much new to do in it. Aside from a few notable exceptions, much of the activities, weapons and super powers are lifted across from the previous game. Your enemies even drop health pick-ups, which makes less sense in hell than it does in Saints Row IV's computer simulation.
Some of the new weapons are fun. The exploding frog launcher was my constant companion throughout the game, and the armchair Gatling gun was funny enough in concept and execution to make it into rotation every now and then. Saints Row's combat has never been its strong suit, though. It's functional, but the system feels more suited to large-scale carnage and mayhem than it does to the moment-to-moment headshotting of demons. Here, the smaller scale stuff seems more prevalent, and the grand set-pieces sorely lacking.
There are only a handful of different activities, each repeated multiple times. Torment Fraud is essentially a reskin of Saints Row IV's Insurance Fraud, in which you throw yourself in front of cars and fight against an irritatingly imprecise ragdoll system. Survival and Mayhem also make the transition, and are similarly identical to previous versions. Of the new events, Hellblazer and Salvation make use of Gat's flight ability, and as such are the best of the bunch.
There are caveats to my disappointment. First, this is an expansion, and so of course it's going to be smaller in scope than a full Saints Row game. Second, it's priced like an expansion. That absolves Gat Out of Hell of a lot of its sins, but nevertheless leaves it feeling restrained and underwhelming.
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The Verdict
Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell
Gat Out of Hell offers all the open-world distractions of a Saints Row game, but precious little of what made the last two so remarkable.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Phil has been PC gaming since the '90s, when RPGs had dice rolls and open world adventures were weird and French. Now he's the deputy editor of PC Gamer; commissioning features, filling magazine pages, and knowing where the apostrophe goes in '90s. He plays Scout in TF2, and isn't even ashamed.
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I really wanted to fight wizards as an eight-year-old.
I really wanted to fight wizards as an eight-year-old. I watched my older brother play Dungeons & Dragons with his friends, but I was far too young to join them as they adventured through castles and battled dragons. So when my brother sat me down in front of the NES version of Shadowgate, it felt like I was finally getting an adventure of my own. A terrifying, difficult adventure, where one wrong click meant instant death.
Twenty-five years later, the original developers are bringing Shadowgateback, this time to Steam. Developer Zojoi has reimagined what standing in front of the living castle should feel like, adding a (slightly) modern interface to the same punishing adventure gameplay of the original. Ahead of its summer release, I spoke to design director Karl Roelofs about what makes a modern Shadowgate, and why the team used illustrations instead of 3D models.
PC Gamer : Shadowgate is a defining game from my childhood. What made you guys want to bring it back into the modern age?
Karl Roelofs : Dave Marsh [and I] co-created Shadowgate way back in the day and I've known him since high school. We've been best friends ever since and we always talked about visiting Shadowgate again. We think the story really didn't get its due. We've always had more stuff that we wanted to share with people.
Then along comes Kickstarter and the major success of the Double Fine game and Dave and I just said, "Well, why not? Why not us? Why not Shadowgate? It's a popular game. Fans throughout the years have told us how much they really love the game, how much it scared them on the NES when they were playing it there."
PCG : The original game used an interface that replicated another desktop on your screen, which is something that modern game design wouldn't really do. Can you talk a little bit about some of the steps that you guys took to modernize the Shadowgate experience?
Roelofs : Well, we decided early on to embrace the command system of the original Shadowgate game, meaning you have button commands that you can click so you can interact with objects on the screen. We went around and around trying to figure out a different way to really make that work within the game, and at the end of the day, we just felt that it works with buttons. Yes, it's kind of retro, but it works and the play speaks for itself because you get interaction, you get a notebook thing of all the objects. We left that command system on its own with a few updates and modern game tab, like key binds and shortcuts and lots of things to make it easier for people who are more experienced with button pushing and things of that nature.
The game is full screen, it's not in a window [like the original game]. We got to do cool, big graphics. We added a bunch of ambient animation. We also decided that we wanted to add a map to the game, because the original game had various mechanisms to move from room to room, so we felt why not do a map? People play these adventure games and they map it out themselves, so let's make our own map.
There's a couple other cool things that we've embraced as well, which I'll keep a little bit of a secret. One cool think we got to do is add achievements. That's just loads of fun, throwing a bunch of achievements in there, getting all the torches and lighting all the torches, just stuff like that. That's just a cool thing to add.
PCG : Do you look at the achievements as you're designing the game and think, "Well, here's an interesting thing that we can throw in?" Or is it all done after the fact where you have to retrofit the way those achievements are going to work with a game you've already designed?
Roelofs : A little bit of both, to be totally honest. Early on, we knew we wanted achievements. Each room is scripted with all of its interactions. I had the rooms fully scripted about three quarters of the way through when we really knuckled down on the achievements and said, "We've got to add achievements, that'll be cool." So, I kind of retro fitted a few. At last check, we're at 45 achievements and who knows? Maybe we'll have a few more.
PCG : How big is the team working on the game?
Roelofs : We have three programmers, an artist from Russia who's contracted out, and Rich Douglas in Texas who does the sound design. We have three interns that are here in Charlottesville, so there's 8 to 10 of us.
PCG : A pretty small team. I'm going to guess that the original Shadowgate team was pretty small too.
Roelofs : It was, yeah, probably about 10 or 12 all told. It's almost a throw back in a lot of ways to doing it back in those late '80's where you had a handful of people and everybody's wearing so many different hats and just knuckling down and doing it.
PCG : You can probably target this game at the retro mindset people who remember the old Shadowgate game back in the day much so more so than you can trying to win people over and show them what an adventure game is like. Does that sound right?
Roelofs : I hear what you're saying and that's a reasonable line of thinking, but we really do feel that we can hit younger gamers again. When Shadowgate came out on the NES, there were no games like it. That was a new game and a lot people who were real young and had the NES all of a sudden discovered the game and said, "Hey this is pretty cool." So, we feel that we can reach out to the new gamer, the younger gamer now, that market and try to give them an alternative.
PCG : How are you specifically going to target the game to that new audience?
Roelofs : Well, the art style. We tried to go dark and visceral with the art style, trying to make it something that I think will appeal to both a young and older crowd. It's a very unique look and that's what I felt Shadowgate had on the Mac and the NES. I feel that we can reintroduce just the aspect of interacting with the world of Shadowgate because that's really what we're trying to build is more of a world and we're limited but we're just trying to have as much interaction as we can.
PCG : How are you limited?
Roelofs : We chose not to do 3D—for multiple reasons. People would look at that as potentially something that's limiting. I don't think it is, because I think the story driven single pane play style is unique in and of itself, because you can look at the screen and hunt around and do things on screen where the 3D thing, it's all motion and movement and you're just going all over the place. This is a little bit more of a thinking game on top of the adventure. That would be considered limiting, I think.
PCG : Will this Shadowgate be as difficult as the original? Or are you making it easier for the new audience?
Roelofs : It's both. We have three levels of difficulty. The hard level, the highest one, is going to be relentless. You've got to manage your torches, you've got to be careful what you do. We have a medium level which takes the hard level puzzles and it makes a little more forgiving—torches may last a little longer. Some puzzles may not have exactly all the steps that are in the hard one, or they may be slightly different, but still the same in an essence. Then for the easy level, we don't want to hold any body's hand, but it's going to be easier. We want you to enjoy your experience, but we also look forward to killing you in our game. That's another thing that we embrace in this game. If you want to do something stupid, go for it, see what happens.
PCG : I remember all the different stupid things I did in the original game and how I'd be totally punished for it.
Roelofs : Exactly. Like I said, there'll be difficulty levels so you're still going to punished, but maybe not as much.
I spoke to the game's Senior Producer, Matt Webster, who has been with EA for 20 years (five of which have been with Criterion). I asked him if there were anynods like stretches of road from old games and here's what he said: "Oh yes, some of them were. Our first set of road - I can't remember the name of it now -was almost a direct copy of the very first game. In fact, the very first set of road we
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Our Verdict
Everything that you loved and hated about the 1994 originalludicrous gibs, explosives, boss fights, and first-person platforming.
The original Rise of the Triadis a relic of the early ages of PC gaming. It didn't ask you to aim up or down, quick save every few minutes, or worry about fiddling with graphics settings. It did, however, beg you to explode, shoot, and instagib everything.
Interceptor Entertainment's 2013 remake is an earnest love letter to the original—warts and all. There are no quick saves, for example. There's no regenerating health. The game doesn't even have actual cutscenes aside from the intro. What it does have is an undeniable charm. This is Quake on steroids. Things move faster, explosions are bigger, and the giblets are greater.
You play as a member of H.U.N.T., a Special Forces unit sent to a nondescript island to investigate cult activity. The cultists, it seems, are also some sort of military force? And have rocket launchers? Honestly, it doesn't matter. You're not going to play RotT for its story, but for its retro shooter sensibilities.
RotT is a hard game that follows in the footsteps of classics like Doom. The challenge isn't in killing enemies, but in managing your health and ammo. Running out of rockets is akin to bringing a knife to a gunfight—which is funny, since the melee attack is super effective. This isn't your modern, hide-and-shoot, cover-based game. Instead, you run and jump around corners with guns blazing. If you aren't covered in gore, you're not doing it right.
Multiplayer makes great use of the game's super fast pace. Having 16 players jumping around a map at hyperspeed while picking up power ups that let them fly across the map is amazing. Oh, and I'm now 100 percent sure that text-to-speech should be in every game. RotT reads out anything that anyone types into the chat, rendering multiplayer matches a mixture of chaotic fun and laugh-until-you-explode-because-you're-still-in-game action.
The most important thing about a game like this is the gunplay—it's fan-freaking-tastic. Ignore the basics like pistols and the submachine gun, and you've got an awesome selection of weapons at your disposal. A staff that shoots lightning, a flak cannon that chains explosions, a rocket launcher masquerading as a gatling gun and more.
Less positively, ROTT has one of the most needlessly frustrating campaigns that I've played in a while. There are more than a few instances where a checkpoint is placed at the start of a multi-part platforming puzzle or too far back from a particularly difficult sequence.
Rise of the Triad's biggest problem is that it's stuck in 1995. Sure, that's also its biggest selling point, but there's a reason why games like RotT aren't popular anymore. Bosses like N.M.E., Nasty Metallic Enforcer, a spinning, laser-sword wielding robot with homing missiles just aren't fun to fight. What's worse is that all of the enemies are dumb. They mindlessly funnel towards you until they're in firing range. Nazis clothed in tan roll every time they're fired upon. These are walking targets and nothing more.
For better or for worse, RotT isn't afraid of pissing you off. Breakaway floors? Check. Indiana Jones-style giant rolling balls? Check. Bosses that just won't die? Check. This game has all of the things that make old school games nearly unplayable today, but they're the reason that Rise of the Triad is an annoyingly amazing game.
At $15, this is an absolute must buy for deathmatch fans. The multiplayer is stellar although the single-player campaign is a labor of love that'll probably only appeal to nostalgic gamers. Fast-paced deathmatch games are few and far between. Fortunately, Rise of the Triad is a worthy successor to the forefathers of first person shooters.
The Verdict
Rise of the Triad
Everything that you loved and hated about the 1994 originalludicrous gibs, explosives, boss fights, and first-person platforming.
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Everybody's saying the same thing: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit is like Burnout. Of course they are - the game is, after all, made by Criterion. It probably uses the same game engine. The slick speed, the way the car sits on the track, the spectacular crashes - it's Burnout Paradise on the interstate freeway. But everyone's wrong. The reason the latest Need for Speed is going to be a return to form
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Our Verdict
Homefront never quite captures the feel of guerilla warfare, but its multiplayer mode is a warzone worth fighting in.
The best parts of the 1984 movie Red Dawn are when a band of small-town Colorado teenagers launch a series of guerilla attacks against occupying Soviet forces. The scrappiness of their insurgency is exhilarating to watch—it's chilling to see high school students hardened in battle against overwhelming odds. Homefront, with a story written by Red Dawn's director John Milius, makes every effort to recreate that feeling by putting us up against another hypothetical conqueror of America: a unified Korea. It nails the atmosphere, but plays it too safe—Homefront is too busy trying to be Call of Duty to make you feel like a wide-eyed Lea Thompson mowing down Soviet soldiers with a heavy machine gun.
Shock and awe
That's not to say Homefront doesn't tell a good story. Leading into the five-hour appetizer campaign, the cutscene explanation of how the US was invaded is surprisingly believable, and its depiction of America after years of war and occupation is incredibly detailed. This is a tour of occupied America—you'll see everything from a hidden refugee community to a locked-down metropolis with $20-per-gallon gas signs, starving suburbs with bodies hanging from water towers and horrific labor camps set in repurposed high schools. Moments into the game, it's clear that Homefront's seven missions are an excuse to show off its well-realized fiction. That's what Homefront does right: it made me feel like what I saw was only a fraction of a fully imagined world.
Combat, though, doesn't match the intensity of the story. The action is a mix of sniping, assault, and defense, but it boils down to ho-hum whack-a-mole gameplay that never made me feel like an outgunned, underdog guerrilla. Ammo is plentiful and AI compatriots are invincible. The remote-controlled Goliath tank is fun to use, but only in that it's overpowered and quick to deliver explosions.
Warbucks
Homefront's enduring appeal is in its class-based multiplayer modes. It follows the trend of class-based team warfare and unlockable weaponry, but its remote-controlled drones and an in-match reward system, called Battle Points (which you spend to buy equipment and drones), give it a unique feel. The blend of fast showdowns and large, multi-tiered objective-based maps are appropriately chaotic, especially on a full 32-person server. The hefty feel and sound of the rifles makes headshots all the more satisfying, and the ability to pilot remote-controlled aerial rocket drones adds suspense, forcing me to look not just left and right before running between cover, but also up. I also like the way that the Battle Points system adds enough persistence to reward players having a good day without making them overpowered in the next match.
Though the multiplayer maps vary in size, I found that the smaller maps provided Homefront's fiercest firefights, especially once drones come into play. My favorite map is set in a suburban cul-de-sac, where I found refuge from the rain of rocket drone fire and assault choppers by sprinting into garages and ducking behind cars. Those nooks are also great places to deploy my own drones while remaining hidden.
I found myself really enjoying Homefront's multiplayer for its polished mechanics and chaos on the battlefield. It's too bad that same ferocity don't manifest in the single-player campaign.
The Verdict
Homefront
Homefront never quite captures the feel of guerilla warfare, but its multiplayer mode is a warzone worth fighting in.
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The very first thing I notice when I start playing Below is how tiny I am.
is how tiny I am. Noticing this makes Kris Piotrowski, Creative Director at Capybara Games, extremely happy. "That's the point," he says. I'm supposed to feel vulnerable, miniscule, and alone. Even in a crowd of gamers who are getting their first taste of Capy's upcoming roguelike, I do feel alone.
Below's protagonist washes up on the shores of a mysterious island, where he or she (the character is too tiny to make out a gender) must wander and explore and figure out what's going on. One would imagine from the title that you'll have to delve into dungeons, and you do. But not at first. There are unanswered questions on the surface of the island before I even get to any of the game's procedurally-generated caverns. "What's that lighthouse?" I wonder out loud, and start making my way across the terrain. Piotrowski doesn't stop me, even when I hit a dead end. "In the full game, you may have a reason to come back here." he tells me. He definitely won't tell me why, and only encourages me to keep exploring. I happily oblige.
Capybara helped create pixel-art classic Sword & Sworcery: EPwith Superbrothers, and while Below isn't a retro-looking game, there are still similarities in the color palette and, occasionally, the game's perspective. At first I feel like I'm looking at my character from an overhead perspective, but certain areas look more like a two-dimensional, horizontal scrolling view. My limited view also distorts depending on far away some things are—less like fog of war and more like an unfocused phone pic at the edges.
Another element Below shares with Sworcery is its sound design, with music again penned by Sworcery composer Jim Guthrie. Even on a crowded convention floor and with Piotrowski talking into my ear, I can hear how Guthrie's understated music will make me feel even more isolated on the island.
Below's combat takes cues from games such as The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and Dark Souls. You start with a simple sword and shield, with access to basic slashes, running overhead strikes, and shield blocks and bashes. You'll also find two-handed weapons later in the game—I used both a bow and a spear—and can switch between both sets. Timing your attacks against the patterns of the island's various creatures is critical, as you're committed to each blow and can't cancel out.
Unlike the above games, however, you can't auto-target an enemy. Piotrowski tells me that he left the feature out because he wanted to keep combat dangerous. That's also why you start with a single hit point, and why even the smallest of scratches will make your character start to bleed out, requiring bandaging before your heart completely shrinks. I find this out quickly when I encounter a trap in the game's dungeon, which fires a dart at me unexpectedly. I have too little time to quaff a healing potion before I bleed to death, leaving my tiny corpse and the few items I have on the ground. By the time my next incarnation arrives at the corpse, it's nothing but a pile of bones and twinkling items to pick up. How much time has passed?
I get the feeling that will be one more mystery to solve. Even from my 30-minute session, I can see a lot of potential for both streaming playthroughs and, once the community solves its puzzles, Spelunky-like speedruns. Piotrowski says Capy hasn't set a release date for Below, and that the team is picking up a lot of feedback from reactions at PAX East, where the game was making its playable debut.
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Our Verdict
The R9 Nano is the fastest GPU ever crammed into Mini-ITX motherboard dimensions, but youll pay extra for the small size.
At a Glance
(+) Condensed Milk: Compact; quiet; tiny; efficient; did we say small?
(-) Sour Milk: Expensive; not as fast as larger GPUs; 4GB VRAM; niche.
If the name didn’t give it away, and you haven’t been paying much attention to AMD’s marketing for the past month, let’s just get this out of the way: the AMD Radeon R9 Nano is positively tiny! Caveat: for a really powerful GPU, and we’re mostly talking about the length. The R9 Nano is still a two-slot GPU, and it’s not a half-height card by any stretch of the imagination, but it is about as short as you can make a graphics card while still providing for the full x16 PCIe connection.
When you first see the Nano, you’ll be duly impressed: It’s only six inches long, making it 0.6 inches shorter than the closest contender (Asus’ DirectCU Mini GTX 970). When you pick it up, it’s still somewhat heavy, checking in at 0.61kg—the Asus GTX 970 Mini weighs a similar 0.64kg, but a stock Zotac GTX 970 (the lightest high-end GPU in our labs) only weighs 0.51kg. By comparison, a full-size GTX 980 Ti tips the scales at 0.91kg, and Fury X (including the CLC) weighs 1.51 kg, though half of that is in the CLC. Regardless of how you slice it, we’re still looking at a healthy reduction in overall size and weight.
We’ve covered the specs for Nano already, but here’s a recap:
AMD High-End GPU Specs Card R9 Fury X R9 Nano R9 Fury R9 390X GPU Fiji Fiji Fiji Hawaii
(Grenada) GCN / DX Version 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.1 Lithography 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm Transistor Count (Billions) 8.9 8.9 8.9 6.2 Compute Units 64 64 56 44 Shaders 4,096 4,096 3,584 2,816 Texture Units 256 256 224 176 ROPs 64 64 64 64 Core Clock (MHz) 1,050 Up to 1,000 1,000 1,050 Memory Capacity 4GB 4GB 4GB 8GB Memory Clock (MHz) 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,500 Bus Width (bits) 4,096 4,096 4,096 512 Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) 512 512 512 384 TDP (Watts) 275 175 275 275 Price $649
The long and short of it is that Nano is the same core hardware as the Fury X, but binned for power and not necessarily pure speed. That means limitation of Fury X like the 4GB HBM are still present. The graphics card is also designed with lower power draw as a major objective, and it sports a single 8-pin PEG connector providing it with a maximum in-spec power draw of 225W. The 175W TDP is much lower than that, which means there should be a decent amount of overclocking potential. But most people are going to want to know how the Nano performs at stock, and how far it may end up dropping below its maximum 1,000MHz core clock; in our testing, it generally stays above 900MHz in most games, with occasional drops into the 850MHz range.
One of the big differences between AMD and Nvidia is how they report GPU clock speeds. AMD reports a maximum turbo clock, and outside of exceptional workloads (e.g., Furmark), their GPUs should generally run at the stated turbo clock. Nvidia in contrast has an advertised base clock, which is the minimum clock speed the GPU should run at, again outside of exceptional workloads. However, Nvidia also has a Boost Clock that’s a better representation of the expected minimum clock speed, and in systems with decent airflow their GPUs will almost always run at higher clocks than the advertised Boost Clock. Basically, Nvidia likes their GPU owners to feel like they’re getting more than they paid for rather than coming up short.
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Pictures are worth a thousand words, so the above gallery just saved us a lot of typing. You can see the various promotional images AMD provided for the R9 Nano above, along with some of our own shots comparing the Nano to the standard GeForce reference blower and some other GPUs. You’ll notice AMD puts a strong emphasis on the Mini-ITX aspects. Yes, the R9 Nano lives up to its name and is smaller than all of our other high-end GPUs. It’s also faster than many of the larger GPUs despite its diminutive size, but we’re jumping ahead. If you’re interested in building a gaming PC with the highest performance per volume, a Mini-ITX system with R9 Nano makes for a perfect match.
This raises a simple question: if you’re not interested in building a small rig, is there any reason to consider the R9 Nano over the identically priced Fury X? The answer isn’t quite so simple. The short answer is no, there’s not. The longer answer is that R9 Nano should be offered in non-reference cards in the coming months. It’s possible that some of those will actually be larger cards with air cooling rather than a CLC, but overclocked to perform the same as Fury X. Even if they’re still small cards with R9 Nano clocks, there might be a few use cases where having multiple Nano cards is better than trying to fit multiple Fury X CLCs into a case. Regardless, use cases outside of small systems are going to be pretty niche.
It's not all sunshine and roses in Mini-ITX land for the R9 Nano either. For HTPC use, R9 Nano lacks HDMI 2.0 support, something that will become increasingly important over the coming years. Many Mini-ITX cases also exist that have no trouble accommodating a larger 10-inch graphics card, and in fact the number of cases that are large enough for the Nano but not large enough for a GTX 980 Ti is quite limited. Now add in the need for a Mini-ITX PSU with an 8-pin PEG connector and at least a 400W output. Nano effectively targets a niche within a niche, but we still think it's awesome, and we're hopeful that others will run with the idea and create some new designs that were previously deemed impractical.
And now we come to the real question. AMD says Nano is up to 30 percent faster than R9 290X and GTX 970, but at roughly twice the cost that’s some seriously diminishing returns. Our own testing uses our standard test bed, which most definitely isn’t a Mini-ITX build, but it helps minimize the number of variables. We’ve trimmed down our tests to just seven games now, along with 3DMark, but we’ll be upgrading to Windows 10 and looking to add some DX12 tests in the near future. Here’s what we’re currently running, along with our results:
Maximum PC 2015 GPU Test Bed CPU Mobo GPUs Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan X 12GB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB
AMD R9 Fury X 4GB
Asus Strix R9 Fury 4GB
AMD R9 Nano
GeForce GTX 980 4GB
Sapphire R9 390X 8GB
Sapphire R9 390 8GB
Zotac GeForce GTX 970 3.5/0.5GB
AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB
Sapphire R9 380 4GB SSD HDD PSU Memory Cooler Case
The game, settings, and resolution can all have an impact on performance, and juggling those variables can certainly influence the results. We’re not interested in trying to make one particular brand of GPU look better or worse, so we have our standardized results using a variety of games. What we find is that R9 Nano falls just a few percent shy of the R9 Fury, and about 11 percent behind the R9 Fury X, just as you’d expect from the clock speeds and TDP. The gap also tends to be larger at higher resolutions, which means R9 Nano has to reduce clock speeds more under heavier loads—nothing too surprising there. AMD’s preview of the Nano claimed performance up to 30 percent higher than the R9 290X and GTX 970; our own testing has the 290X outperforming the GTX 970 by 12 percent on average, with the R9 Nano in turn beating 290X by 20 percent on average, and GTX 970 by 34 percent on average.
Other comparisons are also worth pointing out. The Nano is only about four percent faster than the GTX 980, with almost universally worse 97 percentile frame rates (10 percent lower on average). It’s also 16 percent slower than the 980 Ti on average (and manages just a single tie at 4K in Hitman), with 25 percent lower 97 percentile scores. Or if you’re not as concerned with efficiency, Nano is seven percent faster than the R9 390X, 15 percent faster than the R9 390, and 75 percent faster than the R9 380 4GB (at over 3X the cost).
Something else to discuss is the temperature and noise levels. The Nano also targets 75C for temperature, and the fan basically does the work to keep it there. In our testing, the card would reach 75C shortly after loading any reasonably taxing game, but it would never go beyond that level. It's possible in some extreme cases users could push the temperatures that high, but it would more likely than not require overclocking. If the GPU does heat up beyond 75C, there's a second thermal throttle in effect that kicks in at 85C. The net result is that the Nano uses substantially less power and doesn't get nearly as hot as an R9 290X. For our GPU test rig, the Nano fan is also quieter than the CPU waterblock fans, which means not very loud. We'll be shifting to a low-noise testbed for noise/power/temperature testing in the future to better isolate GPU noise.
Without talking pricing and other factors, R9 Nano looks good, and it looks great when you factor in the size of the card. But pricing has to be given some serious consideration. Like the Titan X where you’re paying a huge premium for a 12GB halo product, the R9 Nano commands a large premium for its compact size. It’s not too far off the pace when looking at other $500–$650 graphics cards, but the R9 Fury is slightly faster for less money if you don’t care about size, and GTX 980 is very close in performance with a lower TDP and price. GTX 980 Ti meanwhile delivers substantially more performance and overclocking potential, provided you have the space for the card.
No matter how you want to slice it, the R9 Nano is going after a niche. If you fall in its target demographic, Nano excels at packing a lot of performance into a small space, but for general desktop use it loses some appeal.
With a TDP of 175W, the Nano is going after a far lower power target than any other Fiji-based GPU. Things become interesting when we move on to overclocking, as AMD’s Overdrive utility provides the usual ability to increase the power target as well as clock speed. Where things get a bit iffy is when we look at the maximum 50 percent increase in power target; there’s only a single 8-pin power connection, rated for 150W, plus another 75W from the x16 motherboard connection. That gives us 225W total power delivery, but 175W * 1.5 = 262.5W.
Throwing caution to the wind, we set our sights on warp factor 9.99 with a 50 percent increase to the power limit and a 10 percent increase on the GPU overclock. Unfortunately, after a few trial runs we determined it was too much for the Nano to handle—the tiny volcano kept erupting in our faces. Further experiments ultimately led us to conclude that the real issue was the 50 percent power draw increase, and even a 40 percent increase was still unstable. Most likely the card’s power delivery simply isn’t designed to cope with much more than 225W, though other system components may play a role as well.
Eventually we decided staying closer to the 225W power delivery of the x16 slot and 8-pin connector was necessary and ended up with a 35 percent increase in power target and a six percent increase in core clock. The power limit may have some flexibility, but the maximum core clock hits a pretty hard limit—we saw artifacts even with a seven percent overclock, with everything from a 20–50 percent power limit. Considering the Nano is binned to run at lower voltages than Fury X, that’s probably part of the reduced clock speed range.
What exactly did the increase in power limit and GPU clocks do for performance? We got a pretty consistent 10-15 percent improvement in overall frame rates, which puts overclocked R9 Nano somewhere between the R9 Fury and the R9 Fury X. Additional time spent tuning the GPU core and RAM clocks could help, but without the ability to tweak voltages that’s all we were able to get. And really, overclocking the R9 Nano goes against the design ethos of the card in the first place. The vast majority of users will be better served by a different card if they’re thinking about overclocking—R9 Fury or R9 Fury X for AMD users, or the 980 Ti is easily the most compelling high-end overclocking GPU for everyone else.
The Nano is really an astounding GPU in many respects. It shows how with a bit of tuning, Fiji can go from being a 275W monster to a 175W tiny terror. Put the Nano next to most other GPUs and you’d expect it to deliver inferior performance, but in many cases it doesn’t. The density and space requirements of HBM are a huge win in this regard; look at the area used for GDDR5 on a 6GB 980 Ti graphics card or even a 4GB GTX 980 and compare that with the Fiji package that contains memory and GPU in less than half the space and you can see why most other GPUs can’t hope to go as small as the Nano. But while there’s no question it’s the fastest GPU in its size class, that doesn’t mean it’s the right GPU for you.
Some people love the brute force approach of muscle cars, and R9 Fury Xor GTX 980 Tiwill be a much better fit if that’s your thing. The majority of gamers use desktop systems with sufficient room for at least a 10-inch graphics card, and paying extra just to get a smaller, more efficient GPU isn’t likely to grab their attention. Instead, it’s those running truly compact Mini-ITX rigs, and system builders looking to sell such systems, that will find plenty to like in the R9 Nano.
We’re also curious to see where else AMD might try to take Fiji. Giving up 10-15 percent performance to drop from 275W to 175W is really impressive, but what if you want to go even lower…like the 100W limit you’ll find in most high-end gaming notebooks? Another 10-15 percent drop in performance should fit the bill. We haven’t seen a truly new high-end AMD mobile GPU since the HD 7970M, aka HD 8970M, aka R9 M290X. Those are all derived from the Pitcairn architecture that launched over three years ago, and Fiji would be a huge boost in performance and features, even at lowered clocks.
Supply and demand for the various Fiji-based products is also still problematic. The Fury X continues to be out of stockand/or insanely priced, but whether that's due to high demand or limited supply (or both) is not entirely clear. R9 Fury cards on the other hand tend to be readily available at MSRP. If Fury X and Nano are both taking the best-binned chips, it could be that many chips are failing to meet those requirements and ending up as stock R9 Fury. Hopefully the launch of R9 Nanosignals an end to the limited availability of the Fiji cards, as there are Fury X buyers still waiting for prices to come down.
Ultimately, the R9 Nano is a classic case of diminishing returns where spending substantially more money doesn’t net you a commensurate increase in performance, but diminishing returns coupled with diminishing size is something new and different. If you're big on Mini-ITX systems, then this is undoubtedly 95 Kick-Ass hardware; if you're not so enthralled with small PCs, it ends up being a lot of money for less performance and you can knock 5–10 points off the score. We've gone with the intended audience (Mini-ITX fans), but personal preference will play a big role for end users. It will be interesting to see what others do with the concept, and we’re sure to see some outrageous mini-PC builds rivaling even AMD’s Project Quantum.
AMD's Project Quantum prototype
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The Verdict
Reviews
The R9 Nano is the fastest GPU ever crammed into Mini-ITX motherboard dimensions, but youll pay extra for the small size.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jarred got his start with computers on a Commodore 64, where he has fond memories of playing the early AD&D Gold Box games from SSI. After spending time studying computer science and working in the IT industry, he discovered a knack for journalism, which he’s been doing for more than a decade. This enables him to play with (aka “test”) all of the latest and greatest hardware; it’s a tough life, but someone has to do it. For science.
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