ALL GLUED: Participants at the World Cyber Games in Hyderabad on Tuesday. - PHOTO: P.V. SIVAKUMAR

HYDERABAD: Crouching beneath trains, groping their way through tunnels, chasing each other up the ladder, emptying bullets madly into each other, wielding knives where they have run out of bullets... . no, this is not the military engaging in war games. It is a bunch of cyber game aficionados taking time off from their otherwise hectic working and studying schedules to play.

As many as 700 students and working professionals participated in the World Cyber Games (WCG) 2005, organised by India Games and sponsored by Samsung.

This is the fifth consecutive year that WCG is being held. One team for each of the five games played here will play the National Finals, to be held in Mumbai on October 31. Winners of the national finals will participate in the world final in Singapore.

Games

The five games were FIFA Soccer 2005, Need for Speed Underground 2, Counter Strike, Warcraft III-The Frozen throne and Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War. FIFA soccer 2005 and Need for Speed Underground are digital versions of football and motor racing. Warcraft III and Warhammer are army-building exercises.

"You are given a map where you create a world from scratch. In this world, what you need most is an army, army bases and defence systems for fortification. Once you are confident of your defences, you go on the offensive," says game co-ordinator, Yogesh A. Nagdev. The player, who succeeds in razing the other's fortifications completely, wins the game.

But the game that was the most heavily contested was Counterstrike. This was a game of cat and mouse, or terrorist and counter-terrorist as the case turned out to be. Only the mouse can be either the terrorist or the counter-terrorist.

Game winners

The winners in the individual games during the two-day WCG India Preliminary round were Hari Deepak (Warhammer), J. Immanuel Sandip (Need for Speed), P. Uma Dixit (FIFA Football) and Sreekanth Polisetty (War Craft).

The Tango Mango team comprising Gopikrishna Reddy, Alok Gupta, S. Ritesh, Bharat Kiran Reddy and Sai Ram, won the Counterstrike five-member team game.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail