Elyot Grant, Founder of Lunarch Studios, has multiple keyboards, but not all of them are the kind you'd expect. His rig has to multitask between gaming, streaming, working, recording, and still leave room on his desk for more puzzles than I can count. Elyot left a PHD program to found Lunarch and their first game, Prismata, was just recently funded on Kickstarter. He was kind enough to take some time and tell us about his setup. 

What's in your PC?

• Clevo W350ST barebone with i7-4800MQ processor
• 16 GB ram 
• 240 GB SSD + 1TB HDD
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M
• logitech g100S mouse
• corsair K70 keyboard with cherry brown switches
• Windows 7 + cygwin
• Laptop screen + 2 x 24" monitors
• Sennheiser HD280 Pro headphones
• Logitech C920 camera and Samson G Track Microphone plus a Bell Fiber 50MBps up/down internet connection for streaming

What's the most interesting/unique part of your setup?

This is my home office. It serves 5 purposes: work, gaming, video/audio recording, streaming, and music production. A lot of the hardware gets moved around between my home and the actual Lunarch studios office, which is about 200 meters down the street, where I have a (pretty much identical) setup.

What's always within arm's reach on your desk?

A lot of puzzles, and not only the physical ones you see in the pictures. I've got some materials from last year's World Puzzle Championship sitting right next to me right now, and I'm often caught working on math olympiad or programming contest problems.

What are you playing right now?

I've barely had a chance to play anything other than Prismata (our company's game) over the last couple of months, which I play pretty much every day. During the holidays, I did manage to find some time to play a bit of Smash Bros and some other Wii U games (Captain Toad, Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze, Super Luigi U).

What's your favorite game and why?

Probably StarCraft: Brood War, which I played pretty competitively back in the day. StarCraft was just incredibly difficult to play optimally and that's what made it so appealing to me. I feel like a lot of other games, especially nowadays, don't do nearly enough to make the game as challenging as possible for the player. StarCraft was hard, but for the *right* reasons. It offered a huge number of strategic options and ways to gain value against your opponents, and rewarded you when you played well. Few other games do that for me.

It's not quite as catchy as promising to make you his bitch, but Oculus VR CTO John Carmack says big things are in store for people who try the Oculus Rift VR headset for the first time. In an interview with Fortune, the former id Software mastermind said that using Oculus technology is akin to a religious experience.

"Oculus really started popularizing a new approach using cellphone screen technology, a wide field of view, and super-low-latency sensor tracking. It s not crappy stuff that doesn t work and makes everybody sick," Carmack said, comparing previous virtual reality efforts to the Oculus Rift. "When you experience Oculus technology, it s like getting religion on contact. People that try it walk out a believer."

Somewhat less hyperbolically, he also reiterated comments made by EVE: Valkyrie Producer Owen O'Brien earlier this year that, despite early expectations, the best Oculus Rift experiences aren't actually first-person shooters. "Comfortable VR experiences had to be these seated cockpit games and you re diverging from that at your own risk," he said. "The great games are the space sims and driving sims and these experiences where you re basically sitting at a table with nothing happening in front of you."

"Simulator sickness" notwithstanding, Oculus VR clearly isn't giving up on first-person experiences. Earlier this month, it acquired Nimble VR, a startup company developing low-latency hand-tracking technology using 3D cameras.

"Winter Showdown," the upcoming new game mode for World of Tanks, sounds like fairly conventional stuff: You put the tanks in the snow and boom, it's a showdown in winter. But this is actually quite a bit different than you might expect, because it's not an ice-encrusted, Eastern Front-style armored brawl. It's an 8-bit mode.

The trailer does look wintery, but even more than that, it looks like somebody recreated the game in Minecraft. There's more to the new mode than just the blocky graphics, though, as Winter Showdown adds "mega platoons" supporting five players instead of three, and new gameplay modes including two-on-two mega platoon battles, and 10-vs-10 random battles.

The add-on will also bring a trio of new tanks to the party: The close-quarters Mammoth heavy tank, the long range Polar Bear tank destroyer, and the quick Arctic Fox light tank. There will be a new battle arena, an Operation Winter medal, and as is appropriate for this more old-school style of multiplayer tank battle, players will be able to heal their teammates by shooting them with special gold ammunition.

Winter Showdown goes live on January 26, except in Korea, where the action will begin on January 15.

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes' release on PC has brought with it the big PC benefit: modding. The added benefit of time means there's a fair bit you can mess about with already.

Over on Steam, you can find out how to tweak and tinker with your copy of Kojima Productions' mini-masterpiece.

You can find guides for model swaps, FOV fixes, time and weather edits and more - the frame rate cap can be lifted too, should you want something more than plain old 30-60fps.

Obviously this means work is now underway on ripping the game apart as much as possible, in order to rebuild it as something newer, faster, better, sexier.

Or just to do this:

(That's main character Big Boss replaced with the face of series creator Hideo Kojima, in case you're confused)

Mokus Games' 'steamlined RTS' BOID will be hitting Steam Early Access on January 8, publisher TinyBuild Games has announced.

There's also a launch trailer - look!

BOID is a class-based multiplayer RTS, featuring eight classes, three abilities, bases and a few other elements - so it really lives up to that 'steamlined' moniker.

I'm getting a definite Spore vibe from the video - like a mix between the first and later stages of the game's evolution. But I'm also getting a vibe unlike Spore, in that BOID looks like fun.

Even years later, the sick burns won't stop.

BOID already has its Early Access page up, though you'll have to wait until January 8 before slapping your money down.

We like cheap PC components and accessories. But you know what we like even more? Expensive PC components and accessories that are on sale! We ve partnered with the bargainmeisters at TechBargains to bring you a weekly list of the best component, accessory, and software sales for PC gamers.

Some highlights this week: The Steam Holiday Sale is a go and has too many deals to round up here! A very cheap 30-inch monitor! So, so many holiday game sales.

— Amazon is having a huge holiday digital games sale, including Skyrim for $10, Alien: Isolation for $37.50, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor for $37.50, and a lot more.

— GreenManGaming has a set of 24 hour deals including the Valve Pack for $25, Fallout 3 and New Vegas at $2.49, Age of Myth for $10.19, and more for 75% off, and you can take another 20% off with the code: WINTER-SALE20-GROGRE

— GreenManGaming also has a bunch 48 hour deals including Lost Planet 3, Remember Me, D&D Chronicles, and more which you can also get an additional 20% off with the code: WINTER-SALE20-GROGRE

— And, lest we forget, the Steam Holiday Sale is in full force with more deals then we can possibly list here.

— EVGA's GeForce GTX 980 graphics card is $550 on Newegg, which is about the going rate for these cards. But this one comes with a free Ubisoft game. We recommend Far Cry 4.

— The 4GB EVGA GeForce GTX 760 is only $220 on TigerDirect after a heap of savings and rebates. That's a budget price for a still-powerful mid-range graphics card.

— Import Yamakasi monitors were all the rage for awhile, and for good reason: they use the same screens as Apple and Dell without the frills or brand recognition, so they're dirt cheap. Case in point: a $360 30-inch 2560x1600 IPS monitor on Ebay.

— The Corsair Force LS Series 120Gb SSD is on sale for $45 on Newegg after rebate. And that includes a free copy of Batman: Arkham Origins.

— Need a lot of cheap storage? The Seagate STDT3000100 Backup Plus 3TB external hard drive is $90 on Newegg with code EMCWHHA26

— Corsair's HX1050 1050W ATX modular power supply is $120 on Newegg after rebate and code EMCWHHA22

For more tech deals, visit techbargains.com.

A note on affiliates: some of our stories, like this one, include affiliate links to online stores. These online stores share a small amount of revenue with us if you buy something through one of these links, which help support our work evaluating components and games.

Deus Ex: Revision, a visual and aural overhaul of the great Ion Storm RPG/shooter, is slowly but surely approaching release. In the December update, the development team said it hopes to have the game ready for launch within the next ten weeks, which, assuming it isn't turned loose unexpectedly early, pegs it somewhere near the end of February.

The funny thing about Deus Ex is that in spite of the extraordinarily (and well-deserved) high regard in which it's held, it was actually pretty ugly, even when it was new. The Revision project is intended to rectify that weakness with "new level design, aesthetic direction and world-building detail." The update will feature new textures and models, as well as optional support for the Shifter and BioMod mods, and Chris Donhal's Direct3D 9 renderer.

"We re aiming to wrap up production, and ideally, launch sometime within the next ten weeks," the team wrote in the update, posted on December 9. "As before, this is a loose estimate based on current progress and team member availability, and until environment design is finished, it will remain difficult for us to commit to a fixed launch date. In other words, we won t know when we will release until we re nearly ready to do so."

The mod will also come with its own soundtrack, and a link to one of the new songs was posted with the update. It's pretty good, but in a nod to the quality of the original—which was really good—the new music will be optional: Players can choose to listen to either the new or the old soundtrack as they untangle the vast web of conspiracies that has enmeshed the dangerous world of the near future.

Enemy Within Conversation - Mod DB

Most of us are still out of the office this week for the holiday break, so we're doing something a little different this week in Triggernometry. I'm streaming CS:GO for an hour or two on our Twitch channel, and after that I'll continue to stream Team Fortress 2 on our community server. Come play! 

How to join us for TF2 at 1 PM PST:

1. Join the PC Gamer Steam group
2. Look for a server announcement at 1 PM PST
3. Join!

Our server's on the West Coast of the USA, in San Jose, CA, so keep that in mind if you're joining from a faraway land. Hope you're having a nice end of the year.

Killing zombies isn t the thrill of Dead State. It s finding a toothbrush. Or peanut butter. Or seeing your survivor group finish building a well. To Dead State, winning the post-apocalypse doesn t mean being the best killer, it means being the best manager. Among the hojillion of zombie games, it represents one of the few unsensationalized views of the end of the world. There s plenty of turn-based zombie fighting, sure, but you measure your success as a player by how well you re meeting your group s daily food and fuel consumption, addressing morale, resolving disagreements, or how sturdy your exterior fence is.

Yes, Dead State isn t without issues. My review outlined the crashes and bugs I experienced, at least some of which were addressed by a December 19 patch. I expect DoubleBear, the developer, to chip away at the game s problems into 2015. All that considered, I d throw my grandmother off a roof before I let some technical hiccups deter me from playing something so original in its spirit. I d take something flawed but fresh any day over a polished version of something I ve played a dozen times, like Far Cry 4 or Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

Some of my praise comes from the fact that Dead State is so uniquely pen-and-paper in its design and storytelling, some of which comes as result of its low budget. It takes some amount of imagination and restraint by the player to invest themselves in the world, considering Dead State doesn t supply fancy cutscenes, voices, or even much character animation to express its characters. If you play RPGs hastily, zipping through dialogue to scrape the bare-minimum information that allows you to advance the plot, Dead State probably won t work for you. Some great dialogue (monologue?) comes out of the radio inside your shelter, as Richard wrote about.

Like a lot of our revered roguelikes and survival games, DoubleBear also does a great job of not holding your hand. The decision to recruit or turn away, to engage or not, to help or backstab is purely yours, and Dead State rarely tips its hand mechanically with any kind of morality points system. As you enter new locations, you can practically hear a dungeon master say something like, You approach the truck stop, tasting the scent of dogs and diesel. Underneath a gas pump, you see five men gathered around a fire pit. What do you do?

It s a wonderfully, restrainedly unsensationalized apocalypse. There are no zombies with extraordinary abilities or unbelievable super-survivors. Your concerns are fairly grounded in the concerns of reality; the odds are just higher. I had to resolve a conflict between a black ex-con and a white cop who knew his history. I had to decide whether someone in my party getting drunk was just them blowing off steam, or a warning sign. I had to decide whether I wanted to help a party member carry out an abortion, and then find a nearby hospital clinic with the necessary medical gear if I elected to.

Maybe moreso than a lot of my moments in BioWare games, I felt like these decisions said something about me and my character. The way Dead State presents and then lets you navigate these grounded, relatable dilemmas makes it memorable. Rough edges or not, this is the open-world survival sandbox that old-school RPG players deserve.

It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam key right now. Follow the link for full details.