A Viewpoint

An abandoned district flooded with water. The deserted buildings, the growl of some faraway machinery & the sound of flowing water create an unnerving creepiness. It's a pale yet haunting reflection of a city that's filled with despair. This eerie ambience can either last forever or soon explode with sounds of gunfire & blades penetrating human flesh. My HUD (Heads Up Display) showed where I need to go----an entrance to a base at a side of a nearby building. I am on a narrow walkaway above the water. I moved towards the destination. Suddenly, I saw movement. A patrolling assassin. I zoomed in towards his location & found him facing at my direction atop a high point further in the walkway. His location as a vantage point means I can't infiltrate further without being seen. That makes him my first target. Looking around for a moment, I jumped into the water & swum to the stairway of a nearby building where I could see him without being in h

The name Max Payne brings back fond memories. Max Payne (MP) was one of the first third person shooters I played on PC & MP2 was the reason I bought my first graphics card. The MP series was one of the very few ones that struck a great balance between intricate narrative with fully fleshed characters & satisfying gameplay with it's bullet time mechanics. And who can forget those amazing graphic novel style presentation? But as far as I can remember, after finishing MP2 I thought there wasn't much room for a follow up game, with all story threads neatly tied up & many important characters being dead. So when I first heard of MP3 after all these years & that it takes place in Brazil, I was less than enthusiastic. Though a part of me really wanted to find out what Max was up to in all these years, another part thought it wouldn't be the same Max payne I played many years ago----with a contrast in tone as stark as the streets of New York at ni

Over the years, we PC gamers had to give up freedom over our games because of the various digital rights management (D.R.M) schemes. In most cases, these end up punishing the legitimate customers than discouraging piracy----like Uplay didn't let me play Assassins creed 2 after a clean format. But in the current scenario of rampant piracy in PC games, simply cursing over D.R.M's can't lead to any solution. Think about it for a while----totally removing these draconian schemes from our games forever may not help PC gaming in any sustainable way. It certainly won't do anything towards reducing piracy and at worst, many AAA developers may stop developing for the PC platform altogether. What we really need is an alternate content securing system that will never get in the way of legitimate owners & reward them for their love of gaming instead of making them fearful for losing access to their games. It's not hard to notice the pattern in the majority of

"It's a ghost, it's a one hit killer, oh no it's the Shadowy Assassin"----Lieutenant That's actually the most apt description I've found for this unbelievably powerful build, believe it or not. The Shadowy Assassin (SA) is simply an unstoppable force of nature. He moves so fast that enemies have a hard time trying to get a bead on him, annihilates weaker foes with one shot (not talking about spike damage)----even after some archers actually manage to focus on him, all they can manage to hit is a rigged decoy ready to blow into smithereens. Meanwhile the SA makes short work of them from behind, and when that Lieutenant is the only one left standing, something beautiful happens----the mage puts a winter's grasp/cone of cold on him, the SA throws something at the Lieutenant & when he thinks he's got it figured, only the cracking sound of bones getting crunched is heard----poetry in motion. The fight is over before it ever had a ch

Although Dragon age 2 (DA 2) had some glaring flaws but it was also a step forward in some ways----like the exciting combat & the story which was more intricate than origins' typical 'build an army, defeat the big bad evil & save the world' type. The biggest strength of the Dragon age series is it's world & the people who populate it. After the events of DA2, some of the questions like what is going to be the solution to the mages & templars situation, weather the Qunari will plan another invasion & above all, what is Morrigan up to clouds my mind (probably yours, too). There's so many ways Bioware can expand the story and refine the gameplay further. We already know that the next game in the series will not contain the flaws that DA2 did like the copy-paste environments, choices that only give an illusion of choice & limited customizations to the party members. Now as an ardent fan of this epic dark fantasy series, here's s

Games are all about ideas & their execution. Different ideas from different aspects of games like gameplay ideas, narrative ideas, presentation ideas all come together to create a single game and behind every successful game there is one or several ideas that have worked it's magic. Some ideas work, some do not, some are promising but because of poor execution are forgotten quickly and while some ideas are intriguing in the time of their debut, loses their value in the long haul. But there are very few ideas that not only worked when they debuted, they created a vision for other developers to expand further and helped push the boundaries of videogames. In some cases, these timeless ideas even helped create new genres of videogames. Below are the ideas that in my opinion, created the foundation, the lifeblood of the present gaming industry with their innovation & ingenuity. These ideas have been used & abused from the time of their inception & the deb