Christopher Nolan's Interstellar might have divided viewers as to whether it was an epic, heartfelt and awe-inspiring peek into the potential future of humanity, or just a big budget piece of shallow cack - but hey, it's got a game based on it now!

The Interstellar Text Adventure launched recently, bringing some classic 80s Zork-inspired fun with it. In the game you are a scientist sent on the Lazarus Project to locate a new home for the inhabitants of a dying earth - simple setup.

From there you'll need to place four probes to see if your planet is indeed suitable for human life. Obviously it's not that easy - I swiftly drowned in some mud while my robo-helper stood idly by, watching.

It's actually surprisingly good fun; well written and made with real nods back to both sources of inspiration - the film and the games of yore/latterly TWINE.

Just remember to type 'help here' a lot, otherwise you might get a bit confused. And when you're sliding down the basalt column, typing 'don't fall' doesn't help - I tried.

We ve got five pairs of tickets to give away to this Saturday s Gfinity CS:GO Championship in London. The event will take place at the Gfinity Arena at Vue Fulham Broadway this Saturday, and will see some talented CS:GO teams compete, including Ninjas in Pyjamas, Virtus.Pro and Team Envyus.

We ve got five pairs of tickets to give away for the Main Stage at the event, which starts at midday on Saturday and runs to approximately 11PM. Don t worry, you won t need to print any tickets out or anything like that, your name will be on the guest list, just like in Entourage or an '80s spy movie. Naturally you must be able to get to London on the day.

You must be 18 or older to enter and this is a UK-only competition. This is a raffle, so just enter your email address into the widget below to be in with a chance of winning. The competition will close Thursday 19 March at 5PM UK time, after which the winners will be mailed with instructions on how to get on the guest list. Our terms and conditions apply.

6: Fifty shades of game

Now we move on to colour balance. Well, grey balance, anyway. You have three sliders to play with here—red, green and blue—to ensure you get a neutral shade of grey on your display. Once you re satisfied, the final screen gives you the chance to compare the previous and current settings. Save your settings and you re away. 

7. Bonus time 

For more fine-tuned calibration you can always try the useful LCD calibration pages at www.lagom.nl. If you want to go a step deeper, but still don't want to buy any fancy calibration tech, check out the ICC color profiles on TFTCentral. They offer custom-tuned profiles for hundreds of monitors, which you can download and install through Windows. Look for your monitor on the list and download a profile if there's one available. Then scroll down to the bottom half of the page for an easy walkthrough of how to install them.

Fancy Asteroids-a-like Geometry Wars 3 is being expanded with 40 new levels, a hardcore mode and new drones and super abilities on March 31. The extra levels will include new arenas and a rejigged gating system should make it easier to get to them. Expect new bosses and weapons, in the form of the "Sweeper" drone and a "Detonator" one-shot super ability.

If you'd rather ditch the drones and supers and return to the classic, no-nonsense Geometry Wars format, the update includes 20 hardcore levels with their own leaderboards. Local co-op has also been. The trailer also touts a "revamped" co-op mode and competitive online multiplayer.

If you don't own Geometry Wars 3, but have a latent desire to mow down thousands of pixels with lasers, the new free update will be rolled into the 12 / $15 package at the end of the month. Ian liked it quite a lot when he reviewed it for us. I like it too, in the sense that colours and flashing lights are pleasing when they go fast. A good Geometry Wars session is like a vigorous retinal massage.

Australians can look forward to their own H1Z1 servers, Daybreak Games president John Smedley announced on Twitter this week. While no details were offered regarding when the servers will launch, Smedley Tweeted that they'll be rolling out "soon", which will greatly improve the ping situation for all in the Southern Hemisphere. 

H1Z1 has had a rocky start since it entered Early Access in January, but it seems to be finding its feet. Our Chris Livingston has spent a lot of time in zombie-infested middle America, and you can read about his adventures in these diaries. 

Updated on 2/18/2016. Our recommended components for this build remain the same, but have dropped in price about $40.

Looking to build a cheap gaming PC that lets you play today s games on a tight budget? Want a PC that rivals the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One consoles without spending a ton of money? Today, you can build a great gaming PC without cutting corners for $700.

This is PC Gamer s guide to building the best budget PC money can buy. That doesn t mean it s the cheapest PC you can build. You could build a gaming PC for under $500, and there are some good guides out there if that's your budget. But I think it's worth spending a bit more to build a much better PC. The parts in this build were chosen for being affordable without sacrificing quality or reliability. You could forego an SSD for a cheaper hard drive, for example, but SSDs make a dramatic impact on the speed of your PC. They re worth the extra money. You could choose a cheaper graphics card, but this one has enough memory to play modern games at high settings without chugging.

This rig will offer you great gaming performance, despite being  $500 cheaper than our recommended PC. It ll offer you an upgrade path to a more powerful CPU and GPU down the road, without being trapped by the limitations of cheap hardware. No, you re not going to be playing the most demanding AAA games at 1440p or 4K, but you ll be able to handle the likes of The Witcher 3 and GTA5 at 1080p no problem.

Here are the parts I recommend for a budget PC build. Scroll down below the chart for the reasoning behind each choice and a few case recommendations for different sizes, styles and prices.

Processor: Intel Core i3-6100

Price: $125 on Amazon

My previous recommendation was the Pentium G3258, which was an incredible bargain at $70 and could overclock close to 5GHz. It s still a great CPU for many games, but its dual core design will start being more of a hindrance with games on 2016 and beyond. For a budget CPU now, I m recommending something cutting edge: the new Skylake i3-6100.

Though the $120 i3-6100 is still a dual-core chip, it uses virtual cores and hyperthreading to deliver good performance in games that can take advantage of quad core CPUs. And it s been well-reviewed. Digital Foundry wrote the Skylake Core i3 6100 is an accomplished product bearing in mind its price-tag...in our testing, the Core i3 6100 is best in class. They found that the i3-6100 was able to deliver over 70 fps in The Witcher 3 on Ultra and over 100 fps in Battlefield 4. That performance compares strongly 57 fps in The Witcher 3 for the last-gen Core i3-4130 and 64 fps for AMD s FX-6300. Those CPUs scored 84 and 87 fps in Battlefield 4, respectively.

There are two primary alternatives to the i3-6100: the Devil s Canyon i3-4170 (which is a faster-clocked version of the i3-4130 referenced above), and AMD s budget processors, like the FX-6300 and X4 860K. AMD s chips offer strong performance for their price, but it s hard to recommend them for a couple reasons. A big one is upgrade viability. With the Skylake i3 CPU, you re getting in on the ground floor of a new platform and Intel socket. You can easily buy a new i5 or i7 CPU in 2-3 years, retain the same motherboard, and supercharge your current rig. The AMD chips are on a much older platform, limiting their upgrade viability and access to newer technology like M.2 SSDs.

Because any PC we recommend will come paired with a dedicated graphics card, we don t care much about the integrated graphics on-board some Intel CPUs and AMD s APUs. It is possible for an AMD APU and GPU to be used together to improve framerates with what AMD calls Dual Graphics, but the results of that pairing often aren t beneficial, as Tom s Hardware and others have shown.

The i3-6100 processor costs basically the same price as the i3-4170, but with one significant caveat: the newer Skylake motherboards are more expensive. This whole build is a bit costlier than the last version because we re upgrading to newer technology, but the serious performance bump and long-term upgrade viability will be worth it.

Motherboard: AsRock Z170M Pro4S

Price: $100 on Newegg

Most budget build you see will opt for cheapo H- and B-series motherboards. You could definitely pair your new Skylake CPU with an H170 board and save $50 or so. Here s why I m recommending the AsRock Z170M Pro4S instead: it s only $100, and it supports DDR4 RAM speeds beyond 2133 MHz, which H170 boards can t do. And in their i3-6100 review, Digital Foundry saw that DDR4 2666 RAM speeds made a significant performance difference in some games, which were bottlenecking at 2133 MHz.

Even though you can t overclock the i3-6100, there are advantages of the move up to Z170. You can use faster RAM. It has an M.2 SSD slot. It uses a fast Intel LAN adapter. And again, it offers a viable upgrade path. If you buy a faster K-series unlocked processor for this socket in the future, you ll be able to overclock past 4GHz on the board. The AsRock Z710M Pro4S is still a budget board, but it s worth spending a bit more for the features you don t get on the rock-bottom cheapos.

Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4 2666 (8GB)

Price: $50 on Newegg

As mentioned in the last section, there are some real performance gains to be found by stepping up from 2133 MHz DDR4 to 2666. RAM speed isn t nearly as important as CPU or GPU power, and in the past I ve said it doesn t matter too much for gaming. In a lot of games that still holds true, but as the link above demonstrates, it can make a big impact in (often poorly optimized) games.

Do you actually need 8GB? We say yes: while most games today don t need that amount of RAM, add in your OS overhead and running a few other programs, and 4GB feels pretty thin for a new gaming rig. 8GB is the new minimum, and Kingston is reliable. This is just about as cheap as you can currently find DDR4 at this speed, and we consider it a happy medium between price and performance (don t skimp out and get 2133 MHz).

Graphics card: AMD Radeon R9 380 4GB

Price: $200 on Newegg

AMD s 300 series graphics cards are running on some older technology, but that technology has been polished up and squeezed for all its worth to wring out some extra performance. Clock speeds are higher and firmware is better.  The R9 380 is a perfect budget (butting up against mid-range) graphics card, and equals or outperforms the GTX 960 in just about any game you throw at it. It s definitely a more power-hungry card, but the PSU in this build can handle it just fine.

Thanks to AMD s price drops, you can nab a 4GB model of the R9 380 for a hair under $200. That s absolutely worth the dough, because 2GB graphics cards are starting to exhibit real problems with today s demanding games. Digital Foundry compared the 2GB and 4GB versions of the R9 380 and found much more stutter in demanding games on only 2GB of VRAM. The 4GB cards offer a smoother experience.

For a budget build, you could go cheaper and buy a graphics card at $150 or lower, but you re going to run into that 2GB problem sooner or later. You won t have that problem with a 4GB R9 380, so it s worth the small upgrade now—in two years, you may have to dial down some settings, but you ll still be able to game at 1080p without running critically low on VRAM.

Power supply: EVGA 500W 80PLUS Certified ATX12V/EPS12V

Price: $35 on Amazon

Power supplies are a tricky business, because most of the companies that sell power supplies don t make power supplies: they re just rebranded from other manufacturers. For a budget rig, you just need something reliable and cheap, with enough power to support a dedicated video card (and leave a bit of overhead for overclocking or future upgrades). This EVGA 500W 80PLUS Certified ticks all those boxes, with near-unanimously positive reviews from hundreds of buyers. It s extremely cheap at under $40.

Primary storage: Crucial BX100 250GB

Price: $70 on Amazon

If you're building a PC today, it should run on an SSD. Full stop. There's no bigger upgrade you can make to your everyday experience of using your PC, and it's worth every dollar you spend.

Crucial managed to beat out its class-leading performance-per-dollar MX100 with the slightly cheaper Crucial BX100 250GB despite being a budget SSD. To save a few bucks, I d recommend it over slightly faster drives.

Now, do you really need 250GB of SSD storage? That s your call-you can opt for a smaller, cheaper SSD if you want. But I think 250GB is the right size. It gives you ample room for a Windows install and a whole bunch of smaller PC games, alongside a couple chunky 30-50GB games. On a 120GB SSD, you ll find that you run out of space very quickly.

Secondary storage: Western Digital Blue HDD 1TB

Price: $52 on Amazon

This is an optional addition to your primary SSD, but it s one I expect most modern PC owners will want. Unless your PC is for games, and nothing but games, you re probably going to want storage space for music, personal photos, movies, PC Gamer fan letter drafts, and all sorts of other files. You should grab a secondary HDD to put that stuff on, and for a budget build, a $52 1TB Western Digital Blue HDD should suit you just fine. Western Digital is consistently reliable, and the Blue drives are faster than mass storage Green drives, while cheaper than the premiere Black Drives.

You can run games and programs off this drive without issue, though obviously installing to the SSD is ideal.

Disc Drive: N/A

For a budget build, save yourself $20 and skip out on the disc drive. You don t need it anyway, right?

Cases

Since we re using a micro ATX motherboard for this build, you can buy a small, micro-sized case, or a more spacious mid-tower. Here are a few case choices we d recommend in the budget price range:

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

One dark evening in 1938, a nameless man drives through the night. Swerving to avoid a figure in the road, he crashes his car and limps to a spooky mansion, hoping to find help. Stumbling through the darkness, he begins to find locked doors and scribbled journals, mysteries and memories. His troubles are just beginning, and so are White Night's.

The look and feel of White Night, the third-person noir horror adventure by Osome Studios, are wonderfully done. The screen is divided into stark black and white, darkness and light, and the only way to illuminate the gloom is by using matches found around the house. Your trenchcoat has the tiniest pockets in video games history, allowing you to only carry twelve matchsticks at a time, and the moments when the lit match sputters, and you must wait in the darkness while you attempt to light a new one, are terrifically tense.

You're not alone in the house, naturally, for in the darkness lurk grim specters who don't want you there. Believe me, angry ghosts, after about a half-hour I didn't want to be there either. While initially intriguing, not to mention spooky as hell, I found that every time I cozied up to some appealing element of White Night, it quickly drove a sharp elbow into my sternum.

Stagger into the light

The fixed camera, for example. At times it's excellent, such as when it remains in place while you slowly recede into the distance until you're standing in a tiny pool of light on a nearly pitch-black screen. It can also be unsettling, as when it appears to be watching you through a window from outside the house. More often, however, it's teeth-gnashingly irritating, such as when you run through a room and the camera angle swaps three times in five seconds, leaving you confused as to where you were even going. Sometimes the camera shifts a complete 180 degrees, meaning the room you were entering by pressing the W key, you're now leaving by pressing the W key.

This can be a slight nuisance when you're slowly shuffling around, but when you're on the run, pursued by one of the mansion's instakill phantoms, it can be positively aggravating. Fleeing toward a doorway during a camera swap can completely turn you around and you'll wind up rushing headlong into the ghoul, which ghost-slaps you to death. Successful escape eventually boils down to rote memorization, not just of the mansion's layout but of when each camera change will occur so you can adjust your direction. If ghost attacks were less frequent, it might be less of an issue, but they only grow more common as you play.

Even the look of the game, which I love, eventually begins to hurt the experience. Considering the mansion is essentially pitch black, telling one room from another is extremely difficult, and I found myself repeatedly examining the same paintings and journals and items, unsure if I'd visited them before. You have to walk right up to items and point your character into a very narrow angle of approach before you can even tell if you can interact with most objects, adding to the already clumsy exploration.

While I liked the story itself, it isn't a particularly well-told tale, related to you in voice-over, on-screen text, and journal entries, which often all give you the same bit of information repeatedly. Like everything else about White Night, it only half-works. The fright and tension, very effective at the start, quickly evaporate, leaving you not afraid of the dark but simply cursing it.

In the 22nd century, Earth is on the way out. Cosmic forces are slowly but surely pulling the planet into the sun; the polar caps are melting, the oceans are vaporizing, and the people are panicking. As is the way of things, the powerful and the privileged were able to escape to distant colonies among the stars, and now they send teams of scavengers back to the strip the planet of anything of value that was left behind.

That's the setup for Verona, a third-person "value extraction adventure game" in development at Prior Games. There's not a whole lot to see at this point beyond some art and the brief teaser above, but I'm really intrigued by the underlying concept, and the website suggests that the studio is trying to give the game some real depth.

"Set on a pre-apocalyptic Earth already left behind by the wealthy and the privileged, Verona follows a team of extractors—22nd century treasure hunters—who secure and transport anything desirable from our dying planet to the colonies, regardless of size," it says. "Inspired by the cult television series Firefly and Shakespeare s Romeo and Juliet, this is a third-person action adventure that keeps on challenging you to ponder the material or emotional value of the riches you find."

Prior Games CEO Theodore Reiker said the story of Verona will be shaped by a player's choices and relationships with fellow crewmembers, but "the extraction of valuable assets is key," and the amount of money earned in each stage will be the primary measure of success. "There is no alien threat in the game and the protagonists role is not to save the universe," he said. "It s a tale about greed, cruelty, love, and staying human in an inhuman world."

The studio was founded in 2011 by the "creative team" responsible for Sine Mora—Reiker was writer, designer, and director on that game—a well-received side-scrolling shoot-em-up that came out in 2012. Verona looks to be a lot more ambitious than Sine Mora, but the success of that game gives me hope for this one. Release date and platforms haven't been announced, but it was on display on PCs at PAX East, so I'm going to assume we're in.

MSI s innovative GS30 2M Shadow is a laptop setup that strives to be both thin n light laptop as well as a fully-fledged gaming desktop machine, all in one smart package. And it so very nearly gets it all right. In some areas it falls short of our expectations, but MSI is still the only company to have actually managed to get a laptop with an external desktop graphics card into the market so far.

Ever since I started professionally testing technology in the mid-naughties, companies have been excitedly showing off their different takes on external graphics card adapters for laptops. The one thing they ve all had in common? They never really made it far from the prototype stages. It s like some sort of PC alchemical holy grail—making graphical gold from the leaden performance of a normal laptop.

But MSI s GS30, with it s Gaming Dock, is the first to actually deliver on the promise of using a normal desktop graphics card bolstering a thin n light, non-gaming notebook. The two-pronged attack of this pricey package has a lovely-looking, seriously light, 13-inch laptop in one corner and a rather ugly black box packing a 450W PSU and mighty MSI GTX 980 graphics card in the other.

To get them to play nice together you simply lay the GS30 atop the Gaming Dock, pull a lever and the whole thing is then powered by the desktop power supply inside. You might as well close the laptop s lid too, as all the video is taken care of by the GTX 980; you ll then need to plug a monitor into the GPU s output.

But you ll also want to plug a keyboard and mouse into the USB 3.0 hub in the Dock, where you ll find a pair of stereo speakers, too. You can even jam some SATA storage inside it to house the part of your Steam library you re not going to be able to play on the go using the Iris Pro graphics in the laptop.

And it works almost seamlessly.

Apart from having to shutdown in order to plug in or undock, you can switch between thin n light laptop to gaming desktop in a trice. You re not sacrificing any GPU performance either, as the dock s connection to the notebook is a full x16 lane PCIe 3.0 socket.

Alienware s similar Gaming Amplifier is only using a GPU-hobbling x4 connection. And, while that is still going to improve upon the gaming performance of the Alienware 13 laptop itself, you ll know deep down inside that you re wasting valuable frames per second of whatever desktop graphics card you ve plugged into it. Sadly, with the GS30 it s not as simple as just plug, play, and be happy. It s never that simple.

Short-lived and loud

Even though the gaming performance is right up there with a powerful desktop machine, the experience isn t. MSI has rightly opted for the top mobile i7 CPU in order for the processor to outlast the graphics card in the dock—there would be no point upgrading the GPU if the notebook s CPU could no longer keep up.

It s a beefy quad-core, octo-thread processor of Intel Haswell ilk running between 2.8GHz and 3.5GHz in this setup. There s also a huge 16GB of DDR3 memory inside that little package too, helping drive the future-proofing angle home.

Unfortunately neither the cooling nor the battery in this svelte laptop can cope with such a powerful chip running in this thin form factor. The fans are regularly spinning loudly, whether docked or no, and the 4-cell battery life away from the plug is a ridiculously short 82mins of HD video viewing. That's not even long enough for a full movie. Which is a massive shame, because I would otherwise be chasing down a GS30 myself, desktop graphics or no. With the CPU and Iris Pro graphics it s a powerful little thing in its own right.

So, if the ultrabookish laptop is a mite disappointing, what of the Gaming Dock?

Well, that side of things is definitely impressive, though still feels a little first-gen. The design is functional and not much more. It s simply a box with a GPU and PSU inside it and a PCIe connection on top. MSI tried to boost the geek appeal by adding some LEDs, but it s certainly not particularly aesthetically-pleasing.

With the GS30 perched on top it feels a little jury-rigged, but I m really excited to see what MSI can do with a second-gen version. I m hoping for a sleeker design where the closed laptop slips inside rather than rests atop. I just hope we do get a second-gen version.

Big bundle

At the outset in the UK you re forced to buy the GS30 with a GTX 980 bundled, which is why it s such a huge price at 2,200. You will, however, eventually be able to an empty gaming dock and fill it with whatever MSI GPU you wish. I have learned Scan.co.uk has ordered a bunch of barebones units for this express purpose.

In the US there are no such problems, where Newegg is already selling the barebones bundle for a more reasonable $1,900. But should you buy one?

Unfortunately I d have to say no, and that s because there are better options out there already if you re chasing a desktop replacement laptop. It s all about the fantastic Asus G751JY for me, which we recently picked as the best gaming laptop.

The 17.3-inch gaming behemoth comes with the mobile version of Nvidia s top GPU. It's actually cheaper than the GS30 and the add-on cost of a GTX 980, and you re then getting around 75% the performance of the desktop card, but a better overall experience.

Of course it is much bigger than the GS30 when it s in laptop mode, but because you re taking the GPU with you proper gaming on the go is a possibility. And with its 8 cell battery you do actually get better battery life than the Iris Pro-powered MSI notebook.

You can even dock the G751JY on your desk, too. It s not quite the same deal as the bespoke gaming dock, but plug a keyboard, mouse and 1440p screen into the Asus and you ll have a great gaming experience. It will be quieter, too, thanks to the chunky chassis impressive cooling. The only issue there is that you re not going to be able to upgrade the Asus GPU, but the performance on offer is going to last you a good few years anyway. So, it s a no-cigar moment for MSI s GS30 by comparison.

Technologically the idea of the wee machine and its docked graphics card is sound and rather appealing, but the laptop component needs a lifespan capable of seeing you through a day at college/work then let you game without an aural assault when you get home to Dock.

It s not a complete bust by any means, but it s not something I could recommend right now - I just hope MSI don t give up because a second gen version could be something really special.

Benchmarks

All our tests were carried out at the highest settings with 4x anti-aliasing applied.

DirectX 11 synthetic 1080p performanceHeaven 3.0 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is betterMSI GS30 w/Dock - (27) 75Asus G751JY - (27) 56

DirectX 11 1080p gaming performanceBioshock Infinite - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is betterMSI GS30 w/Dock - (17) 120Asus G751JY - (15) 95

Company of Heroes 2 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is betterMSI GS30 w/Dock - (37) 56Asus G751JY - (26) 41

DirectX 11 synthetic 1600p performanceHeaven 3.0 - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is betterMSI GS30 w/Dock - (19) 39Asus G751JY - (7) 32

DirectX 11 1600p gaming performanceMetro: Last Light - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is betterMSI GS30 w/Dock - (21) 30Asus G751JY - (16) 24

Shadow of Mordor - (Min) Avg FPS: higher is betterMSI GS30 w/Dock - (36) 58Asus G751JY - (33) 45