I've spent a lot of time recently playing around with some old hardware to see if any old parts still have use. Thanks to a mixture of Nvidia s latest Maxwell GPU, in GTX 750 Ti reference form, and an expired Sapphire HD 6670 Ultimate I found something very good indeed: an efficient, relatively powerful, silent gaming graphics card.

One of the best things about the new 28nm Maxwell GPU, GM107, is that as well as being incredibly low-power for the sort of gaming performance it can generate, it runs cool. The reference board I received at launch will happily push 100% GPU load and not saunter past 54 C. Compared with the competing AMD R7 260X running up to 83 C, that s very cool indeed.

That s all well and good with a whirring active air-cooler strapped to the top of the GPU, but if it's so chilled what about passive-cooling? At the moment there aren t any passively-cooled GTX 750 Ti cards on the market, which is a serious shame as, a quick switch of chip-chiller with the aforementioned Sapphire HD 6670 Ultimate later, I was able to fashion my very own.

Thankfully the Sapphire cooler fits snugly on the Nvidia reference board, which meant I had no extra drilling to do on my precious GTX 750 Ti circuit board. All it needed was a little thermal paste and some work with a screwdriver. With the passive Sapphire cooler in-place the GTX 750 Ti was running considerably hotter than with the more-traditional active air-cooler atop it. But still, it was just bouncing around the 80 C point and didn t even threaten to throttle back the GPU in-game.

I was able to get the exact same benchmark figures as I previously squeezed out of the card with the reference cooler whirring on top of it, but this time it was absolutely silent. Combine that silent running with the fact that the reference card needs no external PCIe power connectors and I ve found myself with quite an exceptional gaming card for my little lounge PC. A traditional word of warning before the screwdrivers come out, messing with your setup can void a card's warranty, and hotter-than-intended (albeit silent) running might shorten the lifespan of a card.

I've had to stop myself from counting the horror clich s in The Evil Within trailers, as it was putting me off a survival horror game that ought to have much to recommend it. It's from Shinji Mikami, who made Resident Evil and, in a quite unrelated genre occupied only by itself, God Hand. But then he also worked on Dino Crisis. But then he also worked on the excellent Vanquish and Killer 7. I am so confused. Will these new Evil Within screenshots clarify matters? The main with a box for a head suggests "no".

In-game footage suggests a cross between Silent Hill and Resident Evil 4, but with a bit more sneaking. That is a fine combination, all told. It's due out in August.

Pity the user interface elements of Alien: Isolation, for they have been through a terrible ordeal. Pristine, unblemished versions of the game's icons were printed onto VHS tapes, scratched, shoved into an old player, and played on an old CRT telly while the cable input was twisted. The tortured images were then ported back into the game, producing imagery suitably distorted enough to fit with the low technology of the Alien films. You can watch the results of the process in the latest developer diary, which explains some of the other techniques the Creative Assembly have used to try to capture Ridley Scott's vision of a future made out of big '70s pocket calculators.

We're looking forward to Alien: Isolation. Sam and I took on the monster at GDC this year and Chris played it back in January this year. It's a survival horror game in which you play as Ripley's daughter, fleeing one (or perhaps more, later in the game, who knows?) powerful beast with some complex hunter AI.

Patches of altered reality drift in bubbles and waves across Concursion's environments, and each reality offers you a window into a different game. One moment you're a space-suited adventurer in a sidescrolling blaster, the next you can fall down a pit into a top-down Zelda-esque adventure. Moments later you might find yourself playing a space shooter, or as a ninja in a forest full of enemies.

Is it confusing? A little. Is it fun? You can find out for yourself now, if you like, with Concursion's new playable demo, which offers a handful of levels to try. Plug in a controller before starting the demo, if you have one, and watch out for sudden gravity shifts as you sail across realities.

If you enjoy it, Concursion is looking for thumbs-up on Greenlight. Here's the latest trailer, so you can see what you're getting into.

Vlambeer are known for making fast, satisfying action games. In Super Crate Box, Ridiculous Fishing and the upcoming Nuclear Throne, you will know Vlambeer by the uncompromising crunch of every bullet fired and fish hooked. They're a prolific team, as well, and Kotaku UK have taken a look at their numerous incomplete and occasionally playable prototypes, which see them playing with gentler concepts in Western Hour, and some more familiar ones in "Space Murder" and a game they simply call "GTA II in space".

Also included: Space Beaver, a puzzle-platform game in which gravity acts in your favour, keeping your feet on the floor as you jump up to ceilings and walk over edges. Ffflood is an attempt to make a tower defence game that unfolds at ridiculous speed. "Untitled Space Marines Sims-alike" is an attempt to simulate what a space marine gets up to in their downtime, showering, doing push-ups, eating, doing more push-ups, etc.

There's also a prototype from their Adventure Time game jam, a stealth game called "Nambo", in which you can never be quite sure if your stealthy leaps and rolls are visible to guards or not, and Western Hour an interesting narrative experiment that has you wandering a tiny town in the Wild West searching for the man you're supposed to kill. You'll find more, along with links to the downloadable prototypes over on Kotaku.

Are you a sailor? This is your regular reminder to keep your giant octopus insurance policy up-to-date. In free adventure game, The Earl Octopusor, one of the squiggly fiends mugs an innocent sailor, who dispatches a last-second call for help to adventurer, Miss Libellule. As said adventurer, you dive underwater to hunt for the Octopus' treasure by completing puzzles in a beautifully illustrated aquatic realm.

The Earl Octopusor is the latest adventure game from Jo99, and the second to star Miss Libellule, after her debut in The Queen of Snakes. If you've played a point-'n-click before, you'll glide right in easily. A lot of the puzzles require careful examination of the dense artwork and there's a bit of slightly obtuse pixel-hunting to find hotspots in the busier environments, but the overall effect is endearing.

You can play it now in your browser over on Jayisgames.

The iPad version of Blizzard's all-conquering card-'em-up has just arrived on Apple's US and UK App Stores, having already been soft launched in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. You can get it by clicking here. But is the mobile version any good? And why, as PC gamers, should you care?

In short: yes, and for two reasons. Firstly, the fact you can port across all your progress custom decks, card collection using your existing PC Battle.net account, is definitely good news. Maybe you want to continue tearing up Ranked Mode while on holiday. (Or sat on the toilet at work.) If so, then the mobile version is, well, more mobile.

Perhaps more interestingly, PC gamers and iPad owners will be able to play each other. In fact, you won't even know which type of player you're playing. So, what's likely to be a sudden and substantial influx of new players may have interesting implications for Hearthstone's 'meta' game.

Will currently unpopular heroes and deck builds suddenly become trendy? Will these new finger-swiping players get mown down by seasoned mouse wielders? Probably not if Blizzard's matchmaking algorithms have anything to say about it, but we're certainly expecting the community to grow fast.



One point of order worth noting about the iPad version is that, like the PC game, it requires a constant internet connection. So you can't browse your cards, create decks, or practice against the AI offline. Presumably because Blizzard wants to be tracking your stats (and selling you new packs) at all times, but that feels like a misstep for the iPad version. You can see managing editor Cory Banks and I discussing the differences, and the implications for PC players, in the video above.

Essentially, this is very much the Hearthstone you know and, in my case, have developed a worrying addiction to. It soon becomes apparent that the game was built from the ground-up with touchscreen interfaces in mind. The UI is full of fat buttons, and dragging cards around the board is easy enough. Only once has my greasy fingered slipped and played the wrong move.

We've got more Hearthstone guide coverage on the way, but in the meantime I previously wrote about how Blizzard needed to do more to keep players interested in the game. And, as if by magic, they are, with the forthcoming release of a single player mode, which was just announced at PAX East.

Trials Fusion has one of the most brutally honest trailers of all time. Ignore the early dubstep-fuelled montages of rad dudes doing cool stuff, because that s only part of the game. Mostly, you ll be biting it hard.

The trailer, called Competition , presents an ignoble reel of crashes, spills and tumbles. After each wipe out, the player s name plummets down a leaderboard. It captures the spirit of a game devious enough to continuously knock you on your backside, but compelling enough to make you rise to your feet.

A physics lesson on two wheels. That s Trials Fusion. It s about friction, momentum, gravity. There s no bunny hop button in real life and there s none here. To jump, you ll need to distribute weight accordingly, rocking back on your bike then snapping forwards with purpose. You can lean back to wheelie, break hard to endo, rotate in the air and land hard on squishy suspension. Despite a basic control scheme where the only options are go faster, go slower, and nudge your body around a bit, you re surprisingly versatile. Unconstrained by specific commands, you find your own methods of movement in between the buttons.

That s the reason those dubstep-fuelled montages of rad dudes doing cool stuff are better to watch than play because essentially all they re doing is holding down accelerate and letting the course do the work. It s fun but hardly challenging. Trials Fusion is best when you re making slow progress.



When restarts number in the hundreds and each checkpoint attained feels like a victory. When you re nervously ascending an almost vertical incline or bunny-hopping between platforms narrower than a handlebar. Losing by a millisecond to your ghost (who actually races alongside you), then restarting the course to shave off two. That s Trials Fusion. The other stuff the sleek cityscapes, the gorgeous new lighting and weather effects, the sheer amount of background noise though impressive, feels almost distracting.

Fusion, like its predecessors, almost qualifies as two different games. While the punishing second half deals in piecemeal progress, the first is all about big air, monster tricks and constant forward motion. The philosophy is the same as before but the scale is unprecedented. There are grand urban sprawls where shiny spaceships docking in the background and cars whizz down roads. There are dense stormy jungles and African savannas bathed in dreamy orange sunlight.

You almost want to ask developers RedLynx: "Why?" On the Marina Mania level, for instance, there s a suspension bridge miles into the distance, and on it cars pass back and forth. Someone not only had to model those cars, but give them AI routines and tiny headlights, all for a piece of scenery you might not even notice in a game set entirely on a 2D plane. Across eight worlds featuring eight courses apiece, you get the sense RedLynx loved every second of creation. They did these things because they could.



To their credit, these are tracks designed to be replayed dozens of times. There are warp points to find wormholes you can travel through to visit an extra hard portion of the course and secret squirrels to acquire. Because squirrels. Deepest are challenges, and there are three on each course. Completing 2 flips , performing an endo for 30m , or finishing a faultless run add an extra dynamic to merely completing levels without bailing.

They re specific to each course, too. So on Stormtrooper you must dunk all the penguins underwater. On Deep Freeze you ll get points for climbing a flag pole. Complete them for points to buy bike parts (shuriken wheels and bladed bodykits, for example) and rider attire drawing inspiration from Mad Max, Evel Knievel, and demon clowns.

Challenges give tracks a new layer, and stunts have the same effect on driving. At any point in the air you can manipulate the right stick and contort your ragdoll rider into all manner of ungainly positions, almost like lockpicking in Thief or Skyrim. That is to say, you re just wiggling the stick at a bunch of acute angles until something cool happens.

Tricks don t net you points, unless we're talking about the FMX mode where only cool tricks assure a top finish. If anything they re more like some great temptation, making the fight not only between you and the course, but your own ego. Sure, you could do the job quickly, or you could do it right.



When you ve finally finished the courses, the challenges, the secrets, and the skill games, there s a whole other side to Fusion creating stuff for others to do the same. While the game isn t yet in the magic fingers of the community, you can cast an eye to the predecessors for over 700,000 ideas of what to expect: first-person shooters, Angry Bird clones, bank heists, Endor chases, sub-ocean explorations, Mirror s Edge tributes, and even fully working versions of Asteroids.

The track editor builds on what came before. While little of note has been introduced, little needed to be. The setting is more varied, for instance, and now contains snow and desert areas, but when people can literally make Limbo inside of it, these additions seem a bit pointless. Browsing them is simple though, with players able to search for hard tracks, RedLynx picks, top-rated weekly, and more.

It s one thing making something for your friend to play on, but it s another thing actually playing them. Multplayer here harkens back to the days of Excitebike, with up to four players simultaneously racing across a selection of specially-made supercross courses (courses featuring four lanes rather than one). Though, the fact it s local-only multiplayer is limiting.

If it wasn't clear from the booming electronic menu music with its Welcome to the future! chorus, the collection of astoundingly detailed tracks, and a primed and ready-to-go method of letting players create and share tracks, Trials Fusion is a big game. It s a bona fide platform. While this is all good, it s not the best part of Trials Fusion. The best part, like in a touching sports movie, was in it all along. It s in the tumbles and spills. The acute motion rather than the massive gesture. That s Trials Fusion.

The developers of Curious Expedition have had a heady winter. After their devlog landed on TigSource, the two-person team won a 50,000 grant from the German government to finish developing the game, an exploration roguelike inspired by pioneers and the fiction of Jules Verne. Riad Djemili and Johannes Kistmann then left their day jobs at Yager Development where they worked on Spec Ops: The Line to work full-time on Curious Expedition and bring it to retail.

The game's hook is undeniable: explorers will set out across a randomly generated continent in search of treasure and knowledge, and the slightest misstep will result in a dead or insane expedition party and a failed excursion. This is a game where Nikola Tesla might shoot an energy gun at a giant crab or a hired hand will go insane and steal precious supplies on his way out of camp.



What we didn t know before now is that Curious Expedition is being developed to be playable in-browsers through HTML5. It s an enormously risky move by Djemili and Kristmann, as it will force them to educate players that browser games don t have to be low quality, casual Flash games. According to Kristmann, We just need to get players to take a look at the game; that will be our chance to convince them that it's an actual game and not one of those other abominations... Can we convince the hardcore players that browser games can be more than what they currently are?

We caught up with the team on the afternoon after they began the process of incorporating their company, something that makes the whole thing "feel very real" to them. They discussed the dangers of setting a game in a time when colonialism and racism were common, and their decision to include equal numbers of male and female explorers.



What has changed for Curious Expedition since we last talked?

Riad Djemili: We want to release our first buyable alpha already in three or four months. Not just for financial reasons, but mainly to get feedback from the players as soon as possible. Its a pretty unusual game, so we're curious to find out what the players think.

Are you going through Steam Early Access or something similar?

RD: We're leaving that decision open. So far we're developing it as a browser game and will try to monetize it directly. A packaged steam build could be very possible though. It's still unusual to have core-games that are playable in a browser.

So the game will be using HTML5?

RD: Yes, so it runs without any plugins.



Johannes Kristmann: We kinda started with the tech just to do quick prototyping, but never really hit a border with it. So we just stuck with it. The advantages are very nice.

What are some of the advantages?

RD: We're curious to see how that facilitates new gameplay/sharing options, like putting Wikipedia links into the descriptions of characters or items. You could also directly post to Facebook from your highscore table. Or share your unique diary with your friends, just with a click, without them having to download anything.

JK: It's also so nice to just have access to it everywhere I mean during production, we can have it on a webserver hidden somewhere and just access the latest version. Later, when playing the game, you'll be able to play at home, drive to work, and pick up your session at work over lunchbreak.

Sure. "Over lunch."

JK: It'll definitely support those kind of quick sessions. I'm not saying it'll be easy to stop, but

RD: Maybe we could even do crazy stuff like allowing you to embed a high score widget for your player account on your website.

The perception is that browser-based games are free, not very good, and not very serious. But that's not really fair because of the power that HTML5 has over old browser games built in Flash or Java. Have you guys heard any feedback like that? Or are you worried about that?

RD: Absolutely mostly from ourselves. We're very aware that we're trying to break the mold here. I think this is going to change in the coming future, but it s definitely a risk to be on the forefront of this. We don't have a lot of other games that we can take as a blueprint in this regard.



JK: That's probably one of the biggest challenges standing out from the browser game crowd and making people understand that we are a quite different browser game.

RD: That makes it exciting, but also scary honestly. I hope that our game is that good, that it can become a groundbreaker in that regard.

JK: It's hard because people are so used to not paying for browser games. The question is more if we can convince the hardcore players that browser games can be more than what they currently are.

RD: There is also the option of pre-packaging the game and making it playable as a regular, offline desktop game. I think we'll probably end up doing both. Kinda like Minecraft. You can play that online, but if you want to have that feeling of ownership and security, you can also download it and have it on your desktop. That's also something we'll learn from the alpha. As soon as the players get their hands on it, they can tell us how they prefer to play it.



You recently spent a lot of time adding female characters during your FemCrunch. Why do you think it is important to have equal representation in the game's characters?

JK: We knew we wanted to have female explorers, but never really spent more than a minimum effort on it. If you read the blog article you'll know the background. But once we started researching on female personalities of our time period, it was so easy to see why we needed them. There are so many great stories about female explorers I had never heard about, and now being able to put them into the game and potentially make more people aware of those women is a great opportunity for us. Also, when playing the game now with the diverse cast, it just feels so good to have all those characters.

RD: I think you always have responsibility as a creator, in general, to think about what values and messages you're putting out there. Especially since we're in a semi-realistic setting. So we take that seriously. In the way women are portrayed and also how the native people are portrayed. That doesn't mean that we're force-spooning a certain message though, just that we're conscious about what we put in the game and what we don t.

There are some very ugly currents of colonialism that run through this time period. It's a delicate place to work.

RD: Yes, absolutely. Again, not entirely risk-free from backlash from the community, but we think its a interesting scenario and valid for games to also touch on political-cultural issues.

JK: We also just cannot not have it in the game. If we'd leave that aspect out, we'd whitewash, which is a horrible thing to do.

RD: Yeah, the question would have been to do the setting at all. Not if we also put in the negative aspects.

JK: We re gonna step on toes no matter what, but maybe there is also a dialogue that can happen.



RD: We have a little experience on how that works with Spec Ops: The Line. That was already inspired by Heart of Darkness. Now we're doing it again with a smaller indie title.

JK: It's just surprising how extremely different the reactions to our game can be. Some people do not see at all the racist subcontext, while others are immediately offended. There is a huge gap between how this time period is perceived, and that s where we potentially could initiate a reflective process in some players.

RD: We definitely believe that games can have a cultural context.

One of the best memories from my Star Wars gaming holocron is loading up a LAN multiplayer match in Jedi Knight 2 with a low-gravity mutation switched on and a lightsabers-only weapon restriction. It was silly loads of fun, but the Force wasn't with publisher LucasArts' wishes to continue the series, as Disney closed the studio last April. Our only hope lies with the power of JK2's lingering community, where a brave modder is taking on the huge task of uplifting the entirety of the game's graphics in a HD remake mod.

Developer Raven Software released JK2's source code when it learned of LucasArts' demise, handing over the legacy of the Dark Forces series to the players. The code's availability meant modders could delve into the game's inner workings more deeply with total access to textures, scripting, and AI behavior.

The remake mod, as explained by author JDBArtist on the Gaming Nexus forums, will focus on overhauling JK2's single-player missions and some multiplayer arenas with improved lighting and sparkling new textures for every single surface. It's likely a long wait before a full release the author is part of a mod team building a custom MMORPG, and the remake is a one-man effort but JDBArtist seeks more texture artists and code-crafters to join in the effort via forum PM.

Have a look at some in-progress screenshots below, and keep track of the Gaming Nexus forum thread and Mod DB page for additional images. For more from the Star Wars modding scene, don't miss Evan's excellent adventures as a traveling robot Jedi.