The Great Escape

Joshua Lundberg once ran away from his demons

It’s safe to say mental health is rapidly becoming less of a taboo in society. While this may not be the case for discrimination in the workplace and alienation socially, it’s certainly made huge strides in the last five years alone through the bravery of many people and the successes of organisations like Beyond Blue.

As someone who lives with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, general anxiety and depression, I’ve spent much of my life struggling with the balance of anxiety and the goings-on in life, and that’s regularly affected my relationship with games.

RAM Man

We’ve all been told that one of the quickest and easiest ways to increase your computers performance is to add more RAM (Random Access Memory). This can be true – especially these days with resource hungry Operating Systems and ever increasingly complex programs. But what exactly is RAM, and how does it work.

Computer memory has one task – storing information as either a 0 or a 1 – it really is that simple. Think of you computer memory as a table with lots of paper cups on it. These cups represent the computer memory cells and can either be empty (0) or full (1). The computer constantly scans all these cups (cells) and can see if they are full or empty. The computer can then interpret all these 0’s and 1’s into data which tells the computer what and how to do things.

Logitech Harmony Elite Universal Remote

Decrypting the input mess

As the resident geek in your home, you probably face the challenge that many geeks face – you’re the only one in the house who knows how to get the plethora of devices in your AV cabinet all set to the right mode to operate. In my place, watching streaming media over the PS4 requires far too many steps for my better half to remember, which is why I’m guaranteed a phone call every night I’m away on business trips. Universal remotes promise to solve this problem, but until now everyone I’ve tested has one niggling issue that stops something or other from being fully automated. I’m happy to report that the Harmony Elite is the first kit I’ve used where everything just worked… yet the rapid march of technology has made a big part of this kit obsolete already.

Fallout 4

Building a better tomorrow with Bethesda’s latest wasteland epic

Brace yourselves for what’s about to follow: Fallout 4 is an absolute mess. Before reaching for your Fat Man, however, take note: this is as much praise as it is censure. If there’s one thing that sets Bethesda’s role-playing games apart, other than their ridiculous scale, it’s the junk. Every crevice is packed with knick-knacks, all subject to real-time physics and most surplus to requirements, and it’s this confusing sprawl that makes the landscape feel lived in. There’s nothing quite so human, after all, as the ability to generate clutter.

Layers of Fear

A masterpiece of horror… about a masterpiece of horror?

To be trapped forever by your own tortured psyche: surely there’s no worse fate possible? It looks like Layers of Fear is really going to put that to the test. It’s oozed it sway out of the collective psyche of indie developer Bloober Team, and, if the Xbox preview version we’ve played is anything to go by, it’s an ambitious, clever and strangely beautiful horror game.