A Viewpoint

    Recently I got around to playing Batman: Arkham Origins which, according to the general consensus, is sort of an underrated gem in the Arkham series of games, which is rightfully acclaimed as one of the greatest modern videogame series of all time. And after having my fair share of time with the game, I certainly see why it received the responses it did and more importantly, why it's perhaps not as fondly remembered as the rest of the games in the series.   First off, there are lots of things that WB Montreal absolutely nailed in Origins and the freeflow combat is one of them. I get why many players detest the inclusion of the Shock Gloves but I for one, consider it one of the most exciting and satisfying additions in the game, honestly beating up the Armored thugs and other Boss-level foes to a pulp with this overpowered gauntlet never gets old. No matter what the game throws at you, the Shock Gloves serve as the ultimate equalizer. Also it kind of makes sense for a ...

      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...

    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...

  A game engine is responsible for the look and feel of any videogame—and that’s about the most oversimplified way they can be defined. It works, for the sake of enjoyment value of reading this article, to focus not on the technical backdrops of how game engines (essentially a network of many different softwares, each working together to translate the videogame experience from the developers end to the players’) work in all their magnificent detail but to simply describe what they mean for the games they power and what makes them as great as they are.    So to narrow down the vast technical aspects of game engines into something that makes the overall reading experience more fun than overly indulgent, we’ll just reduce all the different parameters of both the inside and the outside of game engines into just two simple categories— realism and scalability . The former is about the overall presentation (from graphical richness to animation details) and the latter is ho...