Month: September 2016

(credit: Tony Webster)

The stream of racist, sexist, and economically illiterate memes appearing in support of Donald Trump during this years' interminable American presidential election are being bankrolled in part by the 24-year-old inventor of Oculus Rift.

Palmer Luckey, who came into a personal fortune worth $700 million (£535 million) when his VR headset firm was bought out by Facebook, has admitted to resourcing an unofficial pro-Trump political non-profit called Nimble America that's powering the tsunami of unsavoury Pepes and white supremacist image macros that have plagued Reddit.

Enlarge / Maserati + 4K + Windows 10 + Forza Horizon 3 = ...uh, this doesn't seem like a good math problem. (credit: Playground Games / Turn 10 Studios)

Our Forza Horizon 3 game review from earlier this week took a long, hard look at Microsoft Studios' latest open-world racer. Short version: it's a damned good continuation of Forza's wilder half, and while its physics system felt looser and lighter under the wheel-controller hands of cars editor Jonathan Gitlin than he expected (even based on FH2, mind you), he still believed it deserved a spot at the top of the current open-world racer ecosystem.

We don't normally return to games after their releases to analyze performance, and certainly not only three days after a review publishes, but FH3 just so happens to be the first PC racing game sold by Microsoft in... gosh, 16 years! The company's last retail PC racer was 2000's Motocross Madness 2, while this year's sim-minded Forza Motorsport 6 Apex doesn't count because it was an experimental freebie—albeit an amazing and surprising one, at least in terms of performance.

That Apex release was probably easier to optimize for high-end PC performance, since it forced players to stick to specific racetracks (and could therefore limit on-screen elements like draw distance and geometry at any given moment). FH3, on the other hand, isn't just an open-world game; it's an outright romp that begs its players to kick up trails of dust, water droplets, and tree branches while competing against tons of AI-controlled opponents in no-rails races.

Enlarge (credit: 2016 Wizards of the Coast / Tyler Jacobson)

Magic: The Gathering finally jumps away from grim alien-infested worlds in the last set of 2016: Kaladesh, a new world full of inspired, steampunky inventors with a vivid colour scheme. We got our hands on the new set a couple of weeks ahead of the official release; here’s our take on what it adds to the ever-growing Magic universe.

The setting

The last year has been a dark one for Magic’s story. Even without looking at any of the cards from this new set, the packaging and promotional material makes a tone shift very clear; colour, celebration, and creation jump out at you immediately. This is a drastic change to the mise en scène of the past year, but Magic happily accommodates this without it ever being jarring; embracing different worlds is part of the appeal of the evolving game.

There’s plenty of depth to the world of Kaladesh, rather than just being a simple inventor’s world. The designers have blended classic steampunk elements (protruding, brutal machinery) with fantasy tropes (elves, gremlins, and the first Magic dwarves in just under a decade). The result is something much brighter than many steampunk settings, but there are elements hinting at struggle below the bright surface, stopping things from lapsing into the saccharine or cliché.

Enlarge

Prepare to feel old: this October marks 20 years since Lara Croft made her debut on the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn in Tomb Raider. To celebrate, publisher Square Enix has put together a goody bag of treats in the form of Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration on PlayStation 4. There are zombies (because zombies=£££), a new PlayStation VR mode, co-op, and even a new point-and-click adventure game mode. Xbox One players get everything, minus the VR support of course, as DLC.

It would have been easy for Square Enix to just cobble together a few odds and ends that were chopped out of Rise of the Tomb Raider for Lara's twentieth, but there's a level of depth that gives the anniversary a ballroom rather than pub feel.

After a few hours of hands-on time, it was the new co-op Endurance mode that stood out. Endurance is largely the same single-player variation that appeared in the original version of Rise of the Tomb Raider, which tasked you with hunting down valuable artefacts across a procedurally generated, snow-bound wilderness. The constant struggle to stay warm and well-fed adds the challenge.