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: Ubisoft has a huge amount of games on sale starting at 40% off. You can get Bastion for only $3.75, and if you haven't played it yet then you probably should. Newegg has a 250GB Solid State Drive for only $112.99 and it comes with Borderlands 2 for free. And, in a similar deal to last week, XFX has another video card on sale that comes with your choice of three free games from a list that includes Alien: Isolation, Sniper Elite 3, and Tomb Raider.
Hardware:
— The Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD is over 40% off, only $112.99 on Newegg, and comes with Borderlands 2 for free.
— Similar to a deal last week, the XFX Double D R9-270X-CDFC Radeon R9 270X 2GB Video Card is $154.99 on Newegg after a $30 rebate, and comes with three free games. The choices include Alien: Isolation, Star Citizen, Sniper Elite 3, Thief, Tomb Raider, and many more.
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.
Peter "Durante" Thoman is the creator of PC downsampling tool GeDoSaTo and the modder behind Dark Soul's DSfix and Deadly Premonition's DPfix. He's previously analyzed the PC port of Dark Souls II for PC Gamer. Now he's turning his expert gaze upon Valkyria Chronicles.
Valkyria Chronicles is somewhat of a sleeper hit. Released as a PS3 exclusive in 2008, and in a genre which is niche on consoles in the first place, it never achieved great commercial success despite good reviews and a cult following among those who did play it. Roughly two weeks ago, rumors of a PC port spread following a PEGI listing. Sega quickly confirmed the port and a release date: the 11th of November.
Many PC gamers were understandably skeptical, especially given the quality of another recent late PC port of a Japanese last-gen console game. Which brings us to this article. Over the past week, I ve had the opportunity to test and evaluate the PC port. Note that this is a technical evaluation, which is what I m good at—if you want to know my opinion on the game itself, I really like it.
And even though the PC port has some minor issues, it s a highly competent job which not only brings the game to a new audience, but also finally allows its wonderful art style to fully shine. Meanwhile, returning fans should be happy to hear that they will be able to spend a lot more time playing, and less staring at loading screens.
I felt like Alicia when I first heard about the port.
The bad news
Let s get the bad news out of the way first. There are two problems with the port, though only the first of them really felt significant after half an hour or so of play.
All pre-rendered in-engine cutscenes are limited to the original PS3 quality.
Controls in menus are mapped directly from the console version, without mouse support.
The first point is regrettable, but also probably inevitable: we are talking about a game developed over 6 years ago for a single console platform. The assets and workflow pipelines used to generate the original in-engine cutscene videos are likely lost or defunct, and it would be a huge task to rebuild them all. Nonetheless, it s a blemish on a game which—as we will discuss soon—looks fantastic on PC.
As for the second point, it certainly came as a shock to me initially, recalling the dark times of keyboard-only controls in Japanese PC ports. However, after playing the game with mouse and keyboard for about 6 hours I can say with confidence that it s merely a minor inconvenience. This is due to two reasons: as I ll detail later, mouse support is great in the central meat of the game—its tactical battles; and the keyboard controls work fast and intuitively in the menus, with a great default set of keybindings.
Controller support works as well as expected, and will even switch button prompts from keyboard/mouse to Xbox buttons on-the-fly during gameplay. Neat.
All the rest is good news
That out of the way, I ll now discuss the individual aspects of the port in more detail, starting with its graphics, and progressing over controls to the important final topic of performance.
An artist s canvas
Valkyria Chronicles uses the custom CANVAS engine, still one of the very few attempts to use non-photorealistic rendering in games which goes beyond simple cel shading. The PS3 release already demonstrated its prowess at expressing the artist s vision, but how does it scale up on PC?
Valkyria Chronciles graphics options
When I wrote an open letter to developers, I pointed out two graphical features as essential: support for arbitrary resolutions and arbitrary framerates. An uncomfortably high number of console ports in recent history have shipped with arbitrary limits on internal rendering resolution—sometimes to 720p, and sometimes to 1080p. Even 1440p locks, as silly as that seems, are not unheard of. The situation with framerate is even worse, with both the dreaded 30 FPS lock and the more acceptable 60 FPS limit occurring quite frequently.
I m happy to report that Valkyria Chronicles is entirely free of both of these maladies. As you can see in the screenshot above, the game is happy to run at any spatial and temporal resolution your system claims to support. All of my in-game screenshots in this article are taken at 4480x2520 and downsampled—that s more than 12 times the resolution the original PS3 version renders at. The game does remain limited to a 16:9 aspect ratio, but while not ideal this is now commonplace even in PC-focused games.
Valkyria scales up beautifully to the higher resolution, with the artistic intent fully intact but freed of the artifacts that detracted from it in the original release. You might have noticed that there are no further graphics settings, which could be indicative of ugly low-res shadows or other effects. However, a more in-depth study of the game s rendering process reveal that everything scales with resolution (which makes sense)—e.g. shadow maps are rendered at 1280x1280 if you play at 1280p, while they use a full 4480x4480 with the resolution I play at. This works out beautifully in practice, with the quality of all effects increasing with increased rendering resolution.
I was personally surprised that even in a slower-paced game such as this, playing at 60 FPS (rather than the PS3 version s 30) not only looks but also feels better. It s not the massive difference expected in an action title, but especially with mouse and keyboard the added temporal resolution makes the controls feel more responsive and immediate. I successfully tested Valkyria at up to 120 frames per second, and was able to run it at over 100 fps at 4K resolution—more on that in the performance section below.
Control where it matters
One additional central requirement on PC, beyond arbitrary resolution and framerate support, is built-in remapping of input devices. The Valkyria Chronicles port delivers here as well, including the ability to map two separate keys per action, which is something I personally always find very helpful.
Valkyria Chronicles input options.
It s clear that most effort went into making the keyboard and mouse controls work well in the battle interface, where it matters most. The keyboard mapping does a great job in the menus, even if mouse support there would likely be much more intuitive for PC gamers. In-battle, unit selection, movement and aiming works exactly as you would expect, surprisingly including even small touches like adjusting the sniper rifle zoom level with the mouse wheel.
While the game can t deny its origin as a console exclusive, after a short period of acclimatization the keyboard and mouse controls work very well and allow you to carry out all tasks rapidly and precisely. At least for me, they are preferable to the gamepad version, especially during the TPS/aiming parts of the game. By the way, you ll probably want to boost the mouse sensitivity way up. The default setting is very low.
Performance: fast like a scout
Generally, performance shouldn t even be a topic worth discussing in-depth with a port from a last-gen console. However, as Square-Enix recently demonstrated, it s certainly possible to make even such a port drop frames on high-end PCs. However, this is not an issue with Valkyria Chronicles, which performs incredibly wellboth CPU- and GPU-wise.
In terms of CPU usage, on my 4 GHz Haswell the game consumed less than 25% of a single core to run at 60 FPS. As expected, at 120 FPS (the highest I could test) it usually remained below 50%, with spikes up to 58%. GPU performance was a similar story. At my monitor s native 2560x1440, GPU usage on a Geforce GTX 770 was around 33%, and it still managed to achieve an average of 108 FPS at 4k (3840x2160) resolution.
Emboldened by these results, I even tested the game on a convertible tablet/laptop combination, powered by a last-generation low-voltage Core i5-3317U with a nominal frequency of 1.7 GHz and Intel s HD4000 integrated graphics. Certainly not a gaming machine by a long shot! At 720p, the game ran at around 44 FPS on this system and was absolutely playable.
Beyond image quality and framerate, one area where the PC version offers a massive improvement over the console original is loading times. Everyone who has played the PS3 version knows that of the 40 or so hours the game takes to fully complete, at least half an hour will be spent staring at loading screens. On the PC version, the average loading time seems to be around 1 second, and that s with the game stored on an old mechanical HDD. Saving the game is so rapid that at first I thought it wasn t working correctly.
In conclusion—Valkyria, Valkyria, may the bloodline live forever
The PC port of Valkyria Chronicles is a no-frills affair, but it delivers all the most essential qualities which should be expected on PC, including arbitrary resolution and framerate support. Its lack of graphics options is easily forgiven taking into account that the quality of all effects scales with resolution, and the artistic intent of its renderer which is inherently less customizable than the average photo-realistic affair. Commendably, it also performs amazingly very well even on modest hardware.
Given the quality of the game, the competent port and its very fair pricing, any fan of turn-based strategy games or SRPGs would be remiss not to check out Valkyria Chronicles. Oh, and if you want to improve your image quality further by means of downsampling, or want to be able to toggle the in-game HUD and take HUDless screenshots, note that the latest version of GeDoSaTo includes a profile for the game.
The trickle of Game of Thrones news continues with word from Telltale Games that there will be six episodes its in upcoming series, and that the wait for it to begin will soon be over.
"Soon" is the operative word here, as Telltale said in its latest tweet that the first episode, entitled Iron From Ice, will be "premiering soon." Strictly speaking, that's no more precise than "later this year," but it does have a more optimistic ring to it, even if the year is almost over anyway. The announcement was accompanied by a rather nice hand-painted image of the famed Iron Throne.
Blitzkrieg 3 was announced in September with the intriguing promise of asynchronous multiplayer, an unusual feature for a real-time strategy game. The multiplayer component will actually consist of two parts: "Unhurried" base-building, in which you'll construct your defenses, and attacks against AI-controlled enemy forces.
Asynchronous multiplayer games are those in which players don't have to engage simultaneously, but can instead make their moves whenever it's convenient. It's an easy thing for turn-based games—I go, then you go, repeat until victory or boredom—but RTS games, as the name of the genre suggests, tend to happen in real-time. In Blitzkrieg 3, however, players can construct their defenses at their leisure, erecting buildings and fortifications on varying landscapes, laying mines and barbed wire, and placing their defensive defending units as they see fit. Combat sequences will occur separately, with control of those defenses left to the computer.
"While attacking you ll try to break through other player s AI-controlled defenses to capture their base and resources, applying various units and tactics to solve the brain-teaser they have left for you," Nival Interactive CEO Sergey Orlovskiy said in a recent interview with MMO Reviews. "So in general, it s a blend of single player and multiplayer modes—you are actually playing a mission, created under certain rules for you by another player."
Blitzkrieg 3 will support leaderboards and clans, and it won't be totally free-to-play, although what exactly it will be in terms of payment model is a bit hazy. "Blitzkrieg 3 will have paid single-player campaigns with free multiplayer, where you can purchase individual missions or an optional subscription via a premium account for all single player campaigns," Orlovskiy said. And while there will be no microtransactions, Nival "will be selling additional historical campaigns as optional DLC."
Nival also released a new "Word from the Front" video prior to the weekend that shows off some of the game's models and animations, and in terms of eye candy I'd have to say it's looking pretty good so far. Blitzkrieg 3 is expected to come out sometime in 2015.
Multiplayer Diablo can be a lot of fun with the right people, but if you were hoping to leap into the action with your console-playing friends, Blizzard has some bad news: It ain't gonna happen.
Making the PC and console editions of the game work together might not sound like a big deal, but it's "definitely not possible at this point with this game," Lead Designer Kevin Martens told GameSpot. "We didn't build it that way, so the two ecosystems are closed. I'm trying to give you the most definitive, least PR answer there is, and that is no, we can't do that. What the Xbox and PlayStation networks do is different than what Battle.net does."
That's also why Seasons, the ladder-like leaderboards that debuted in the 2.1 patch released in August, won't be coming to the console versions of the game. "Seasons requires always online, and that's one of the major differences in the ecosystems there," Martens said. "For seasonal conquests and things to be what they are, everyone has to be playing on the same leveled field. That's a great example for something that doesn't work for consoles."
The obvious question—why the console versions of Diablo 3 don't have that onerous always-online requirement, despite Blizzard saying for years that it was designed first and foremost as an online game—remains unanswered. But the bottom line is, you're not going to be playing with your console buddies.
A Grand Theft Auto V launch trailer has been released. Unfortunately, it only heralds the impending arrival of the game's Playstation 4 and Xbox One versions. The PC version isn't out until next year, on 27 January.
Welcome to this week's Playfire rewards bulletin where we outline all the great offers and rewards appearing on the Playfire service and Green Man Gaming.
Don't forget if you sign up to Playfire, you actually earn rewards and incentives for playing games - how good is that?
This week s special Playfire reward is a 25% discount voucher which you can claim against PC download titles available on Green Man Gaming. What do you need to do to claim such riches? Easy, just link your Playfire account with your Steam account and the goods are yours.
Couldn t be simpler.
Football Manager 2015 has just launched to rave reviews, and the annual instalment of the world s favourite footie manager game is set to make football widows of wives and girlfriends and significant others until the close season.
Still stuck playing Football Manager 2014? Well Playfire has just the incentive you need to upgrade.
Take your old team out for a trot on FM14 and play for just one hour and you ll get a 25% off voucher to claim against Football Manager 2015. That s practically giving it away and it would be rude not too (at least that s what you ll be able to tell your other half).
There s a raft of great new PC titles releases this week including the brick block adventures of the Dark Knight in Lego Batman 3, plus awesome RPG goodness from the Valkyria Chronicles, compelling sci-fi warfare from Space Hulk Ascension Edition and the oddly shaped ball delights of Rugby 15 (which might provide some small consolation/magnificent triumph after the Eng v All Blacks game over this weekend).
Keep an eye out for great rewards on these brand new PC titles, plus a raft of special offers, discounts and vouchers throughout the week.
So if you re a PC gaming fan, Playfire and GMG has got you covered, check em peeled for the full set of rewards which appear every day at
https://www.playfire.com/a/rewards/
International Jetpack Conference is a good name for a game. And that's not even the limit of what this surreal free adventure has to offer. It's the bizarre story of a freelance journalist at a jetpack conference made in ZZT, the DOS-based ANSI game-making system.
To an extent, the conversation-driven nature of the game fits awkwardly in its engine. Talking to characters is a process that involves repeatedly walking into them. There are other actions, too, and each is equally ill-fitting. Really, though, that's part of the charm. The aesthetic taps into something nostalgic that's enjoyably subverted by the weirdness of the story.
Most importantly, it's a funny little parable about self-discovery and militarisation. And, despite its DOS roots, has been auto-packaged with DOSBox to make it easy to run and play.
The Black Glove, a surrealist, first-person, er, time-'em-up, has failed to reach its Kickstarter target. The game, made by former Irrational devs, needed $550,000 to secure its existence. Despite its unique premise, stylistic setting and Ken Levine seal-of-approval, it failed to raise even half of that total.
The developers, however, remain undeterred. "The short answer is that we mean to fight like hell to keep it from being cancelled, writes creative director Joe Fielder. "We believe in the game and you all have shown you do, too."
What the studio won't attempt is to crowdfund at a lower amount—saying they need to secure the original amount to ensure the game's successful completion.
"It may be weeks or months before we have news to report," Fielder writes, "but we intend to be back with more as soon as possible."
Few game announcements are met with unanimous enthusiasm. There's always one or two voices waiting in the wing, ready to impart their sceptical wisdom with phrases like 'this looks dumb' or 'Ubisoft gtfo'. That didn't seem to be the case with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, which managed to weave an otherwise sober first-person shooter world with the chrome hued weirdness of 1980s sci-fi action films. It was genuinely exciting. Many have hoped that the 2012 digital spin-off would spawn a sequel or even a fully-fledged installment, but according to Far Cry 4 creative director that isn't going to happen.
Speaking on the IGN Pubcast Happy Hour podcast, Alex Hutchinson responded to queries regarding a follow up. His answer was unusually blunt. "The cool thing about Blood Dragon was that it was a surprise," he said. "It was a great use of the Far Cry 3 base, and had an awesome soundtrack."
"So the answer is no, you won't be getting another one of those. Hopefully we can come up with something that surprises you as much as the original Blood Dragon. And if we did make one, I'd probably get told on Twitter 'are we going to get a Blood Dragon every year? You're just in a factory churning things out'."
