A Viewpoint

    Spoiler Warning: This article contains huge spoilers for the Mass Effect trilogy, so if you haven't experienced these games yet, I strongly recommend you to skip this. All true forms of Art are essentially imitations of Life, in their own uniquely creative ways. And this applies to Videogames too, or at least to those rare, few ones that truly transcend the limitations of it’s medium to deliver an experience that’s as deeply memorable and evokes enough emotionally affecting responses to be called as indeed something of an Art form. But like all forms of Art that’s ever been crafted, they all have the same thing in common—they all imitate one or multiple facets of Life itself, in ways that are unique, memorable and worth revisiting multiple times. And for videogames that focus on specific aspects of Life such as character developments or character driven storytelling, in all of my years of Gaming, I have never found an experience that’s nearly as memorable and engagi...

      This article starts out by stating the obvious, and what you already know by now. It’s a universally known fact that Devil May Cry 5 is an all-round amazing action game and one of the greatest showcases of the hack-n-slash genre. It’s right up there with the very best in the series and is a colossal improvement over it’s predecessor DMC 4 is every single way. It’s also far more modular and layered in ways that make it both accessible for newcomers and challenging for players who are well familiar with the signature playstyle of the series, which is a great feat by itself. Overall, DMC 5 is as great as a sequel can possibly be, and simply a must-play for anyone who loves the genre. But that’s not what this article is about, rather it will focus on a far more subjective aspect of the game, and something that I had felt way back when the early gameplay demos and trailers had hit the Internet. Although it wasn’t until several years that I actually got around playi...

    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...