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Consoles

We’ve been hearing this since what, the PlayStation with its cheap-to-manufacture CD-ROM games with high storage capacities? Despite PC-deficient console gamers’ decades-long insistence that consoles do everything a PC can only without the bugs and the tough-to-navigate system requirements, PC gaming has consistently stayed one step ahead of its prophesied doom. The platform has always had something unique at each point in its history: high-def adventure games like Myst, real-time strategy games like StarCraft, massively multiplayer online games like EverQuest, unbelievably creative indie games like The Binding of Isaac, and much more. Creative game developers are continually finding new ways to use the PC’s unique features to experiment and innovate in brand-new directions, and that’s unlikely to change as long as consoles are fixed, closed platforms.

Piracy

Widespread availability of broadband changed the game from the days of swapping floppies at school. Readily available torrent seeds kicked piracy into yet another level from the days of Kazaa and LimeWire. Piracy rates skyrocketed in the early 2000s as college kids downloaded everything they found on shady sites to the massive hard drives that were becoming increasingly affordable. Despite this, companies like Valve discovered that gamers would pay money for added value in the form of free updates and multiplayer services that were easier to cut pirates off from than the game code itself. That didn’t stop other publishers from jumping off of the cliffs of DRM insanity, though.

DRM

Facing increasingly dire levels of illegitimate consumers, companies fought back by escalating their digital-rights management in an ill-fated arms race with hackers. Far from the endearing code wheels and tech tree trivia of the ‘80s, DRM efforts began actively hurting game sales. DVD drives were wrecked by driver-level shenanigans. Hidden, difficult-to-remove software degraded overall PC performance. In at least one memorable case, Titan Quest suffered from awful word-of-mouth reports because of a DRM solution that corrupted the experience with increasingly nasty bug-like phenomena if it thought the copy was pirated. Not all was lost, however, as other companies like CDProjekt bucked the trend and reaped big sales (though putting out excellent games certainly didn’t hurt their cause). The well-documented struggles of Assassin’s Creed II on PC thanks to Ubisoft’s draconian DRM appear to mark the nadir of this chapter of PC gaming history, as Ubisoft recanted its original stance of putting that level of control in every one of its games shortly after announcing it thanks to bad press and consumer backlash.

Microsoft

Perhaps the worst idea to try to stem the tide of piracy was Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live service. In theory, sharing a unified login with your Xbox Live account was a win-win for gamers: You get all the chat, friends list, matchmaking, and achievements on PC as well as Xbox now, hooray!  In practice, the entire service was a disaster from the very beginning. Microsoft canned cross-platform play before it even came out with that awful Shadowrun shooter in 2007 (though it was re-added in 2009), and the GFWL client suffered from hardware incompatibilities and network problems from launch on. Authentication server failures were a regular occurrence, locking players out of the games they bought at random times. Matchmaking worked poorly at best. Worst of all, your kids couldn’t watch Netflix in the other room on your 360 if you were signed into your account on the PC. With all of the disadvantages of a connected online service and none of the positives for consumers or publishers (the DRM layer was easily cracked), the few publishers who initially supported GFWL abandoned the service after only a few games. Microsoft has since all but killed the GFWL initiative, instead hoping that its unified Windows store and Live account paradigm with Windows 8 will achieve its goals. (Spoilers: It won’t.) 

Microtransactions

Other markets, particularly China with its lax intellectual property rights, were ahead of the curve in dealing with widespread piracy. The solution, microtransactions, was heralded as the scourge of gaming that would prevent any interesting development from taking place ever again as studios chased metrics-driven cash cows. The jury is still somewhat out on this one as developers and publishers struggle to find the right balance between real money, in-game rewards, subscription fees, and box cost. However, avoiding too much doom and gloom is easy when looking at the success of titles from Guild Wars 2 to League of Legends and witnessing one disastrous quarterly report after another from Zynga.

Retail

Another knock-on effect of the piracy problem was a sharp decline in retail presence for PC gaming, particularly at specialty retailers like GameStop [full disclosure: Game Informer’s parent company]. Without being in stores, how would anyone buy PC games at all? In stepped digital distribution, most notably Valve’s Steam service. Just as Apple found with iTunes, game publishers discovered that consumers would still pay money for their digital goods if the process of buying a game through the Internet didn’t suck so much. Once digitally distributed games stopped being wrapped in layer after layer of DRM, pushed through horrendously slow download speeds, and had decent online documentation to replace paper manuals, the money started pouring in. Who would have thought that treating customers like clients instead of thieves would be a winning business strategy?

XBLA/PSN

Console digital distribution lagged behind its PC relatives, but the rise of Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade and (later, once it stopped sucking so badly) Sony’s PlayStation Network were heralded as (another) death knell for PC gaming. “Look at all these indie games,” the haters said, “being sold for $10-20 and with all the conveniences of console gaming. Surely developers will abandon the PC entirely now that they can be on Xbox!” Well, it turns out to not be that simple. While XBLA and PSN have been very good to a small number of heavily promoted titles, far more have failed to gain traction thanks to poor discoverability on those services. Some tiny indie studios simply don’t have the cash to buy development kits or pass through certification with Microsoft or Sony, which run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Sony (and later) Microsoft have announced plans to mitigate these issues on their next-gen consoles, but literally anyone can put out a PC game with no approval or submitting to any company at all. That will remain a strength for the platform no matter what.

Smartphones

Reading too many tech pundits over the last few years can give the impression that Apple (and later Google) has burned down traditional genres, platforms, products, and markets like the Golden Horde pillaging its way across Asia. As the iOS and Android markets reach maturity, though, the reality is that their gaming segments don’t seem to have made any real difference in the PC space at all. If anything, you can see more interesting and creative projects coming out for both PC and mobile platforms as getting a game up and running on PC is orders of magnitude easier once you have an iOS or Android build, and hitting more platforms lets studios take riskier gambles in the hopes of striking it big. 

Two years ago, Frictional Games delivered a first-person horror game called Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The moody corridor crawler tasked players with lighting the way via a lantern and scattered lamps while evading terrible creatures lurking in the shadows. The Dark Descent ignored combat altogether, instead asking players to run and hide when discovered by a monster. The tense and unforgettable game has given rise to a new wave of combat free, first-person horror games. The Chinese Room (Dear Esther) is up to bat for this sequel to the trend-setting original. The Dark Descent’s flight over fight formula was effective, but A Machine for Pigs doesn’t throw in enough threats to keep players on the edge of their seat throughout.

A Machine for Pigs’ story is told as much through the environment as the scattered files and voiceover work. Set during the industrial revolution, players plod through the depths of a terrible factory that exploits humanity in disturbing ways. I enjoyed exploring the dim hallways of a mansion all the way down to the rattling, steaming bowels of the underground factory. Bold players are destined to discover the horrendous business practices afoot in this processing plant. I saw the main twist coming a mile away, but The Chinese Room unravels the story with its unique flair. Opaque, stylishly written journal entries add deeper meaning to the blood-splattered hallways and creaking processing lines. A disembodied voice frequently speaks to the amnesiac protagonist, peppering clues to his sordid past. I like the story A Machine for Pigs tells, but it feels like The Chinese Room is more concerned with controlling the narrative than letting players get lost in the dark. 

Horror is at its best when the audience’s minds fill in the gaps between scares. The original game was conservative with dispersing its monsters, but A Machine for Pigs feels too much so. The Chinese Room shows you plenty of monsters from behind the safety of artificial barriers, but legitimately dangerous encounters are scant. Amnesia: The Dark Descent shined brightest when throwing in an enemy that prompted players to flee into the shadows and hide behind a pile of boxes. Those moments are woefully rare in A Machine for Pigs. A few open sections require players to evade stalking ghouls, but most of the encounters feel too straightforward. For example, one enemy gives chase when walking down a linear path through city streets, which obviously provokes players to keep running forward. I felt like the scares were prodding me down the scripted path of the story rather than leaving the survival strategy up to me. The predictable monster design is also a step back from the gruesome abominations of The Dark Descent. It’s hard to remain frightened while exploring the factory when you feel like the game is pulling punches.

Using your lantern to navigate the darkness is necessary, and it escalates the tension. The original game required players to collect oil for the lantern and tinder boxes to light lamps along the way. These resources have been axed for a lantern with an infinite supply of oil. This more-reliable lantern enables players to explore the environments freely, but reduces motivation for exploring every nook and cranny. Lighting a breadcrumb trail of lamps was a key layer of tension in the original that is sorely missed in this sequel. A Machine For Pigs attempts to compensate by causing the lantern to flicker unreliably when enemies are near, but this only further dampens the scares. I began using the light source like the radio from Silent Hill, removing some surprise from enemy ambushes. 

It feels like a trek through an understaffed haunted house crafted by artists with something to say about the ugly past of industrial progress. The winding, linear path is interrupted with simple crank-turning puzzles with the goal of repairing or sabotaging intimidating machinery. But these tasks just feel like distractions without the omnipresent threat of running out of light. One memorable moment interrupts a backtracking fetch quest with a sudden enemy appearance, but like many of the other frights this is just a false start.

The Chinese Room proves once again that it has wonderful, affecting stories to tell and can create environments that ooze atmosphere. The same could be said of some of the horror film genre’s best directors. However, A Machine for Pigs guides players along the bloody processing line too strictly, removing the impact of interactivity. I had trouble giving into the scares when I knew each one was carefully prepared and mostly benign dressing or loud noises. It will still rattle of the faint of heart, but survivors of the original will feel like they’ve endured worse.

Increasing numbers of mini computing solutions - whether all-in-one handheld gaming units such as the Nvidia Shield or mini-PCs such as the Intel NUC - are appearing across the market. And Gigabyte - the Taiwanese company probably better known for the occasional laptop in the UK - has unveiled its Brix pocket gaming PC.

On the show floor at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco we were privy to see the forthcoming system in both bright red and yellow finishes, as well as test the hooked-up system out with a play session of Grid 2, complete with full-on Logitech steering wheel, gear stick and pedals peripherals.

But let's backtrack: what is Brix? This boxy, cube-like structure (a cuboid if we're being fussy) contains the latest Intel Haswell architecture complete with Iris Pro graphics.

But despite it's angular design we think it's looks seriously cool; all industrial with jaunty angled vent, yet eye-catching thanks to the finish. It's crafted from aluminium so is lightweight yet tough and doesn't suffer from heating up to saucepan levels either - we know, we held one that had been running Grid 2 for a number of hours and it was luke warm at most.

There are a multitude of ins and outs to cater for USB components - two super-fast 3.0 connections on the front, two on the back - in addition to a mini DisplayPort and mini HDMI outports and Ethernet.

We saw Grid 2 running in two different set-ups and thought that one has some display lag, whereas the second set-up operated super-smoothly.

Exact configurations aren't 100 per cent concerte at this stage when it comes to things such as hard drive size, RAM and so forth.

The Gigabyte Brix is due for launch this November, and even though pricing isn't official the Gigabyte reps on stand believe the lowest spec Intel i5 3.2Ghz model will retail for $499 (£316 as a straight conversion, but we'd anticipate more). None too bad at all. There will also be 3.7Ghz i5 and 3.9Ghz i7 versions available at greater cost.