The Best PC Game of All Time

Ah, the 90’s were a hell of a time for the real-time strategy genre. It was the birthplace of one of my favorite games of all time; Total Annihilation. It was also the time of Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, Homeworld and Starcraft. It seems that developer Pathos Interactive view this as a golden age, too, because Bannermen feels and looks like it was ripped out of the 90’s and shoved into 2019. The problem is, even by the standards of the 90’s Bannermen isn’t very interesting. The campaign follows a chap by the name of Lord Berrian who, along with everyone else, gets his arse kicked by an evil lord named Karthor. Due to his bruised backside Berrian sets out to take Karthor down and free the kingdom from evil. From there a few minor characters get introduced, but if you’re looking for a deep, engrossing plot then Bannermen is not it. What you do get is a series of 18 fairly basic missions that have you building bases, crushing armies or occasionally dabbling in some light st...

Review unit on loan from Roccat. Audio is something long looked over by all except the die-hards, but now we’re finally starting to see some appreciation for sound with digital streaming companies slowly but surely abandoning the horribly low quality 256kbps compression methods, while the introduction of Blu-ray and now 4k Blu-ray discs has resulted in a marked improvement for films and games. The reason I mention this is that the Roccat Khan claims to be the world’s first “Hi-Res Audio” headset, something usually defined as being 16 bit / 44.1KHz. It’s a meaningless statement for most consumers while audiophiles are all too used to dealing with how to get the best audio possible. As such the Japanese Audio Society (JAS) and the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) have created a certification for what they deem to be Hi-Res Audio, and the Roccat Khan meets the criteria. That’s all very well, but how does it sound? Well, for testing I hooked it up to my SoundBlasterZ internal sound...

Provided free of charge by SteelSeries for review. Damn, but do I love me a good headset! Don’t get me wrong, I adore my speaker system, but there’s something awesome about slipping on a headset and tuning the outside world out, revelling in the sense of isolation that padded ear cups can provide. Not to mention a good pair of cans can help you appreciate one of the most under-appreciated aspects of videogames – the sound design. So today we’re tackling the SteelSeries Arctis 5, the middle-child that sits between the Arctis 3, which doesn’t come with the small controller for balancing in-game audio and chat, and the wireless Arctis 7. Currently sitting at £85 this headset arguably sits in the sweet spot of performance vs cost, and has a hell of a lot of competition. Indeed, near the start of the year I reviewed the HyperX Cloud Revolver and declared them the best stereo cans I’d tested. Steelseries have gone for an understated design for the Arctis lineup. There are no extraneous a...