A Viewpoint

Far Cry 3 was an insanely enjoyable game. With a sprawling open world, reactive wildlife & an incredibly satisfying stealth mechanism, FC3 was one of the more ingenious first person shooters in recent years. No doubt Ubisoft would like to raise the bar higher in the upcoming Far Cry 4. But there are a few things FC4 must take care of to improve on the FC3 experience. 1 . Variety in side missions : The side quests in FC3 was pretty awful. Most of them are redundant go-here-do-that activities, failing to utilize the diverse elements of the gameplay. I'm not talking about those knife throwing or jungle racing contests as those were just subtexts for money or xp & gets old pretty soon. It'd be great if FC4 includes side missions that have little stories of their own instead of being simple fetch quests. 2. More discoveries : I believe the missions where you get to find the ancient knife were the best in the game. Underwater caves, secret unde...

This article is based on my interpretation of the story in Far cry 3. If you haven't played the game yet, stop reading. Massive spoilers ahead. A serene blue lake. Quiet & peaceful, water flowing around smoothly. The sunbeams pour through the windy trees. I was on a mission, just passing through. But I stopped the car & stared at the scenery for a while, trying to soak it all in. A pack of deers were roaming around peacefully. Pretty as a picture. Suddenly, the deers started running. Looking at the opposite direction, I knew why. A Tiger has come across this place. Before I could do anything, the Tiger pounced on a fleeing deer & killed it. I returned to my car & kept moving toward my destination. “Nature of the predator”----I thought while driving. Suddenly a thought jumped on me---”what's the difference between those animals & the protagonist of Far cry 3 or in a larger scale, our society? Was there any?” Then I realized, we're very much ali...

Every medium of storytelling has their unique ways for dialing up the immersion. Videogames achieve this through scripted moments/events. While it's true that due to over-reliance & abuse throughout the years, scripted moments have lost their ingenuity. But when implemented with creativity & in moderation, these moments still make a gamer suspend his/her disbelief like nothing else. Scripted moments are not to be confused with in-game cutscenes. Cutscenes (pre-rendered or in-game) simply take control away from the player, keeping the story and the gameplay segregated. Scripted moments, however, leaves the player with some manner of control while still moving the narrative forward. Scripted moments “show” the story instead of “telling” it, blending the interactive nature of Videogames with the programmed sequences.  A great scripted moment makes the player forget that it's actually pre-programmed and adds a sense of aliveness that every medium of art thr...

The characters & the world building of both DC & Marvel comics have fascinated me since childhood. With the burst of great comic book films for the last couple of years, a lot of general moviegoers who's generally not into comics are increasingly drawn into these exciting fictional universes. This is a ranking of the different power levels in both DC & Marvel-verse. So the non-comics reader can have a perspective where most of the characters stand when it comes to power levels. Though this ranking is aimed at the non-comics reader, it covers the entire spectrum of power of both Dc & Marvel omniverses. It will highlight the more popular, instantly recognizable characters with some not-so-popular characters in between. The power levels are based on the characters' area of operation & the ability to cause damage on a scale. For example 'City Level' means the included characters in this tier operate on a City wide scale & also has th...

Let me ask you ----” what is the one element that hasn't changed much or at all in videogames for 20 years or since it's inception?” The answer is : An overly simplistic approach towards conflict & resolution in both gameplay & narrative. Take a series such as Call of Duty. The main villain or bad guy is one man/terrorist that needs to be stopped/killed/eliminated. To do that, the games sets the player on a path to killing millions of soldiers/terrorists across different parts of the globe (read: levels). On the very last level, the player gets to put an end to the bad guy in a scripted moment or an in your face, slow-mo cutscene. Now compare this structure with older 8bit games. There's a big bad boss & he sends all his minions to fight you. You fight wave after wave of enemies across different levels. At the end you face the boss in a pattern based fight and beat him. End credits. The main difference in both these variants of games is little ...

                                   “I'm loyal to nothing, general----except the dream”                                                                              ----- Captain America (Daredevil: Born Again) I admit that I've never been a huge fan of Captain America or an avid reader of his comics. But of all the Marvel movies, the Cap movies are the ones I liked the most, especially the winter soldier. Since then, I've had a dee...