Yakuza 5

The Yakuza series is known in the west as a sort of hybrid of GTA and Streets Of Rage – an openworld gangster caper in which you knock the stuffing out of ne’er-do-wells on the mean streets of various cities in contemporary Japan. So why are we in a TV dressing room, fretting about our hair and makeup, stressed out because we just spilled coffee all over a talent show’s producer after a rival tripped us up?

Nostalgia Factory

Inside Square Enix’s new micro studio, which aims to recapture the Japanese RPG’s glory days

When Atsushi Hashimoto joined the videogame industry as a young designer, he made the decision he wouldn’t work for Square Enix. It wasn’t that he disliked the company or didn’t get along with its bulging back catalogue of games, many of which Hashimoto had played as a boy. “These were the kinds of games I wanted to make,” he says. “No, I didn’t apply for Square Enix because I didn’t feel it was right to try to recreate something you love so much.”

Shooting Stars

UK studio Foundry 42 wants to bring Star Citizen’s sandbox spirit to its ambitious FPS campaign, Squadron 42. Can they pull it off?

When I first heard about Squadron 42, Star Citizen’s FPS campaign, I was expecting Call of Duty in space. A parade of cinematic set-pieces with an all-star cast and a handful of linear missions. The appetiser to Star Citizen’s main course. But as I spoke to the talented team developing it – Wilmslow-based Foundry 42 – it became clear that they’re attempting something far more ambitious.

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.