Magicka 2

Spell checking this utterly ele-mental action-RPG

The Wizards of the Order lived in castle Aldrheim in the land of Midgard, studying magic under the tutelage of a one-handed vampire named Vlad. When insidious forces invaded and instigated a civil war, however, they were all but wiped out And without wizards to accidentally incinerate them, humanity has flourished.

Unsung Heroes: Sound Design

We go behind the scenes to speak with those at the forefront of what might just be videogames’ most under appreciated craft

Try to imagine playing through the entirety of your favourite game with the sound turned off. Imagine Dead Space without hearing a menacing clank in a dark corner cutting through the silence. Battlefield multiplayer without the chaos of gunfire and explosions. BioShock without the haunting deep wail of a Big Daddy. As soon as you start thinking like that, the vital importance of sound design comes sharply into focus.

The Apple-IBM Parthnership

David Briddock investigates why Apple is partnering with a company it depicted as the enemy in 1984

Right from the early days of personal computing, Apple CEO Steve Jobs saw IBM as the enemy. A company out to dominate the entire computer industry. The company that would crush technological freedom and innovation.

Jobs decided he needed a campaign to convince people to reject the bland, grey world of IBM and instead purchase Apple hardware and software.

Top 5 Ways Your PC Could End You

Be nice to your computer and maybe you'll be spared..

1 Electrocution

They say it's the amps that kill you, but it's more like the amp - or at least part of one: between 0.1 and 0.2 amps is enough to send you to the next life. Bearing that in mind, you'd think that sticking your hands into your PC case while it's turned on would be a recipe for instant death, but worry not. There's not enough voltage running across your motherboard or the components to overcome the natural resistance of your skin (if it's unbroken, anyway).

Acer XG270HU

Acer's 27in FreeSync display is sure to impress the moment it lands on your desk. Its striking bright black and red frame makes it stand out, and the almost impossibly slim bezel, measuring no more than a few millimetres across, goes some way towards shrinking the space between screens in multiple-display setups.

Make Dropbox even better

Dropbox may be great at keeping all your files up to date, but add-ons make it capable of so much more, as Clive Webster explains

With so many people using Dropbox, it’s no wonder that developers have created their own applications to use the service in different ways and to extend its capabilities. This month we’ve rounded up the best Dropbox apps and services, so that you can get more from your account.

Jenny LeClue

A very young inspector calls for a mysterious adventure

Remember poring over those choose-your-own-adventure books, before videogames turned your brain to pixels? Well this visualy striking episodic adventure is here to remind you exactly how all those nail-biting decisions felt.

Jenny LeClue is a young detective on a quest to prove her mother 's innocence in a murder investigation, in the seemingly idyllic town of Arthurton Dark already, isn't it? Every decision you make counts, and to make things even more meta, Jenny has a narrator called Arthur К Finklestein, who lets you write and alter the story as you go.

OS explained

What does your operating system really do? Mike Bedford explains all in this in-depth guide to the brains behind your PC

The launch of a new version of Windows is always a major event in the world of PCs. The introduction of Windows 10 this year means the operating system is, once again, vying for our attention. Although it’s the most visible element of a computer, in some ways the operating system is the least well understood. It’s easy to view it simply as the means through which we interact with a PC -mainly to start and stop applications - but it’s actually much more than that. To give this unsung hero the respect it deserves, therefore, we’re going to consider what an operating system really is and what it does, much of it behind the scenes.

ADOBE Photoshop Lightroom 6

ADOBE Lightroom has been our favourite photo editor ever since we first clapped eyes on version 1. Adobe already had Raw processing in the bag with its Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) engine for Photoshop, and Lightroom packaged it with elegant library management, printing and sharing facilities.

Version 6 brings relatively modest changes to the image-editing tools. It’s now possible to modify the shape of a linear or radial graduated filter using brush strokes, which is ideal for darkening skies without inadvertently also darkening the tallest trees in a scene.