A Viewpoint

    The name ‘Crysis’ has become sort of a symbol for intensive graphical benchmarks, a behemoth of visual supremacy that has echoed throughout vastly different timelines (from 2007 to post 2020 with it’s Remastered releases) with an almost nail-biting, ‘Can-it-run-Crysis?’ frenzy. But this excessive focus on it’s graphical fidelity also obscures the fact that the Crysis games are indeed some of the most innovative shooters in the history of Videogames in general, by offering a massive amount of freedom and creative gameplay expressions that you just won’t get in the majority of shooters the genre has seen. When you take into account all of it’s facets and not just the ahead-of-it’s-time visuals, Crysis is truly a franchise that excelled in all the yardsticks of it’s genre, more so than most others could ever come close, even to this day. And to celebrate this truly ahead of it’s time (both in terms of Graphics and Gameplay) series of games, this article will be an in-...

  Calling anyone the Greatest Shredder of all time is certainly obnoxious and downright pretentious, but for someone like Yngwie Malmsteen whose playing embodies the whole essence of ‘shredding’ like no other Guitar player in history, is perhaps an apt metaphor. First off, it’s a pretty well known fact that Yngwie Malmsteen is by no means, the fastest Guitar player on Earth. In fact, there’s LOTS of players who can play waay faster and dare I say, cleaner than Yngwie. If you look at strictly NPS scaling, Yngwie at his absolute best goes about 15 NPS. Now there’s tons of players who can go even farther beyond. But here’s the thing—in case of all the other players, when they’re in the ‘lightning fast’ zone of alternate picking superhighway, it just sounds more and more mechanical and pretty much devoid of any emotional content. But here’s exactly where Yngwie’s playing stands out—it has an innate and very real sense of ‘fury’ in each of his pickstrokes (there may be tons...

      Great games are made of great gameplay, and what we call the overall gameplay experience is essentially a wide range of individual mechanics’ that the player gets to perform over and over throughout the course of a game. But there are some gameplay mechanics’ that stand out as far more enjoyable and satisfying than others, so much so that they become the sole reason for replaying the game over and over again. And at the nucleus of all truly great videogames are these unique and memorable gameplay mechanics’ that feel exciting and rewarding every single time you do them and never really get old. And this article is about celebrating those timeless gameplay mechanics’ that have also made the games they’ve appeared in some of the greatest in videogame history. They’ve been ranked according to their ingenuity and re-playability, so let’s dive in.      7. Maximum Armor (the Crysis series) : This is more of a personal favorite but I've always found t...

                                                                                 Technology, as with most things, is a function of time. Which means as time goes on, things get better and better. And nowhere does it apply more than Visuals in videogames, where the degree of realism in exactly proportionate to the passage of time. But there’s always an (or in this case, several) exception to the rule where a small number of games exist which features visuals so far ahead of their times that they not only look better than most games years after their original release, they just never look dated at all...

  More than being a great songwriter and virtuoso Super Guitarist, it’s Satriani’s ability to tell a story or convey an emotion through notes, chords, legato runs or any other musical passages that makes him such a great artist and composer on the Electric Guitar. And all the 5 songs listed here are testaments to this fact. 5. Lost in a Memory: The most emotionally powerful deep cut in Satriani’s discography, Lost in a Memory is a fever dream inducing track that can pull you in a labyrinth of strong emotions. There’s a great amount of emotional storytelling going on in this track, and the organic sounding notes, the dreamy chords, the cathartic riffs, the wavy synths and the plaintive solo—all of them contribute towards drowning you into the song. Even the brief chord section at the end feels magical. This is one of those rare tracks that you just bask into, as even after the song ends, the feeling stays on in you.     4. Flying in a Blue Dream: Mystica...

  It’s been over 15 years since I first heard a Joe Satriani track, and until that point, I had never imagined that the Electric Guitar would be able to translate complex human emotions so vividly--how lush chords and technically intricate guitar solos could express delicate feelings while at the same time, sound musically immaculate. As one of the pioneers of the modern instrumental Guitar genre, Satriani has crafted some of the most musically rich, imaginative and diverse pieces of music to ever grace the Electric Guitar. What sets him apart from most other great Guitar Heroes out there, is that his playing, even when it gets unbelievably technical, is always in service of the songs. There’s almost always a ‘musical storytelling’ aspect to his compositions and a central theme that every element of the ‘songs’—from the riffs to the solos, serve as essential contributors instead of being self indulgent. It’s this element of ‘restraint’ that makes Satriani a virtuoso musician ...

      Videogame sequels that surpass their predecessors in almost every way aren’t particularly rare, but games that manage to do this twice in a row, are indeed few and far between. That’s why even though there have been countless ‘trilogies’ throughout Videogame history, not all of them are regarded equally. While many start out on a particularly high note with a truly great title that excels in all aspects of gaming, the next few games often turn out to be letdowns in respect to what had made the first one so great and even ends up bringing the whole ‘trilogy’ down (the Dragon Age trilogy, I’m looking at you). Then there are also trilogies that become increasingly better with an all-round-great sequel that not only improves on the first game in massive ways but also carves a whole new identity for itself while elevating the whole franchise to unexpected levels of glory. And this is exactly what Mass Effect 2 did when it came out. But then, it’s sequel and the th...

        If there’s one videogame franchise that’s at the same time the most beloved while also being the most tragically heartwrenching, it’s Half Life—the granddaddy of the modern first person shooter experience whose DNA is ever present in almost all fps’ that came after it. Universally celebrated as one of the greatest games ever made, Half Life 2 was one of those seminal experiences that not only reshaped an entire genre, but also gaming in general. From Level Designs to Gameplay, from Character-focused-storytelling to rich, dynamic worldbuilding, from being one of the rare models of the 3-elements-fusion (merging Gameplay, Level Design and Storytelling) to inventive use of scripted sequences which were previously unseen and perhaps even unthinkable—Half Life 2 remains a masterclass in videogame design lesson relevant to this very day, which is 3 entire generations after it’s release. The Half Life saga continued through 2007’s Half Life 2: Episode 1 and 2...

It’s like a droplet in an Ocean that believes itself to be a separate entity and tries to conquer the Ocean not realizing it’s own insanity it’s dilemma is that it can’t really see that it’s not separate from the sea never was and never will be the droplet can’t ever understand the ocean it can only merge with it and see the Truth for what it is.

    Inside the core of all great videogames ever made, there are multiple inventive gameplay mechanics working their magic. And this article is about celebrating the most groundbreaking and influential gameplay mechanics that have, by virtue of their sheer ingenuity, also made way to an incredibly wide range of videogames. Ever since their debut, these 4 gameplay features have been adapted and implemented in so many different titles throughout the years that they’ve slowly carved their own footprints in videogame history, to the point that right now it's difficult to even imagine videogames without them.     4. Dynamic Cover: Before Gears of War introduced it’s Dynamic Cover system that allowed players to seamlessly move and position themselves in firefights without getting hit , there wasn’t much in terms of cover mechanism in both the first and third person shooter genres. They relied mostly on the good ol’ run-n-gun shooting and any element of cover w...