While physically your surroundings may be drab and dreary, your mind is off racing across the galaxy: exploring fantastical environments and impossible realities. In one moment, you're a swashbuckling pirate and in the next, an interstellar traveler, seeking to rid the galaxy of evil wherever it can be found. Games are able to fabricate realities which are seemingly impossible and game design is absolutely key to this. After all, who wants to explore a universe where the predominant colour is brown? Through various mods, people can create screenshots from games that make them look like highly sought after paintings, yet a lot of games don't even need that treatment; gaming is sprinkled with moments that take your breath away and a lot of those are derived from the design of the environments you're exploring. To put it bluntly, games are freaking beautiful things and it's time we started celebrating that more. Look at the fervour that surrounded the movie Gravity when it was released last year. Visually, it was stunning and it won multiple awards for that very reason. Why aren't games celebrated in the same manner? This article aims to do just that by highlighting ten vistas that blew our socks off when we first saw them. All of these areas are bright, colourful and unique; they're a real triumph for the game designers who spent months delicately planning and creating them. Just imagine how much more exciting postcards would be if these were the images plastered on them! Of course, we cannot include every single spectacular vista that gaming has to offer, so feel free to add your own ideas and memories in the comments below.
I have an addiction to achievements, a craving for new bands and a dream to become Captain America. I once finished second in a Mario Kart 7 tournament so I'm kind of a big deal.
