Category: Gaming

is a place where you could find the famous Crimson Room and Viridian Room RPGs. I got these games accidently when I was looking for a few flash games online.

The creator of these famous “rooms” – Takagism (I hope I got his name correct) is truely a master of the trade.

He has combined two things that have truely facinated me. Computer Gaming and Creativity. Let me start with the gaming part first. I statred with games very early and statred with Mario, Contra etc. and I still remember playing Tiny Toons at a shop near my place. Then MAC happened and kAgE introduced me to the wonderful world of REAL computer gaming. I had played DOS games like Writer Rabbit and Bricks before but the real gaming started at the cafe near our college and on the LAN between me and kAgE. It was mostly Quake 3 Arena but the important thing was that I got attracted towards it like anything. Then it was Babel where I had a chance to feel the action on the consoles. Amongst them, it was the GBA SP that I thought was the coolest.

Flash – The Macromedia product. I have been using since version 4 and now they are upto version MX. Things have changed. Macromedia as a copmany has given a lot to the internet. There was a time when it was mandatory to have a flash intro for every website. Although things have changed but still the amount of funtionality that can be given to a static page is awesome. Hats off to the creators of this wonderful software.

Coming back to the original rooms… I must admit that I was not able to solve the puzzles but as they say you can find stuff on the internet and I googled my way to glory. Talking of google brings me to another question. Which amongst the Google and Yahoo is better … (Reason is that when I search for my name on both these search engines, on one, I am on the top of the world and on another I am just another jack in the town).

Today, along with a Maggi Super Saver pack, there was this Popeye Jigsaw Puzzle. It was pretty cool. It reminded me of the times when I was in Primary School and how I wanted to have a huge Jigsaw Puzzle and how I wanted to be the fastest puzzle solver.

Ths jigsaw puzzles are believed to have been invented in Eurpoe in early part of the 16th century. People say that the map makers in Europe would paste the maps on card baord and cut them into pieces to help children learn about maps. What started as an educational tool soon developed into a famous past time.

A detailed discussion on the history can be found at http://www.jigsaw-puzzle.org/jigsaw-puzzle-history.html

and http://www.oldpuzzles.com/history.htm.

Few websites that allow you to register for free and play with Jigsaw Puzzles

online are http://www.jigzone.com, http://www.jigsawland.com,

http://www.dltk-kids.com/puzzle.htm, http://www.freejigsawpuzzles.com

and http://www.alljigsawpuzzles.co.uk. These were the top 5 results returned when searched for "Jigsaw Puzzles" on www.Google.com.

So what is it about Jigsaw Puzzles that keeps people fixed to them? I know of a lot of pass time activities, they sound very sound to start with and as time progresses, people seem to loose interest in them. But Jigsaw Puzzles? NO,people don’t just leave the puzzles without completing them.

How would Jigsaw Puzzles help someone?

Eye for Detail: I would say that if someone were solving the puzzles for a long time, he would have excellent eye for detail. All the time spent in selecting a piece from a heap of other mixed pieces and trying to put it in a right place, A person would indeed develop the eye for detail. People would, by habit, be very attentive and would look for everything before they make a move.

Team Play: Jigsaw Puzzles can be lot of fun to solve when done in groups. Although I haven’t had an opportunity to do it but I would definitely love to do it sometime. I just need to find a few like-minded people. When you are solving a puzzle, you are in a team trying to reach a common goal. A well-defined common goal wherein you try to help your team mates to find a particular piece, a particular part of the picture and gradually the complete picture.

Ok, so for the last few days, I was outta Delhi. I went to Kanpur, IIT Kanpur to be precise. They were having their annual tech fest and I went there to participate in Computer gaming event called Stratagem ’04. Until today, I wasn’t sure wat was the meaning of the name Startagem and as I was updating BLOG, I looked on dictionary.com and found the real meaning located at http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=stratagem. Nice name I must say.

25th Feb. 04

Today was the day when we were supposed to leave for Kanpur. I got the reservations a day earlier. Me, Ashish Anand and Aditya Takiar were supposed to go to Kanpur. Kunal was already in Luck now and he said he would reach there by himself.

Anyways the day started at around 4 A.M. with me getting ready for leaving to the Railway Station. The train was scheduled to leave at 6:30 A.M. Took an auto from here and shared it with some ass who said that you don’t have to reserve the seats for going to Kanpur. I didn’t notice it them when he said it but I realized it later. Ok reached the station at around 6 and called Adi and asked him when he’s reaching there. I confirmed the platform the train was arriving on. Adi came at around 6:05 and we went into the station and as usual started hunting for people. Ashish also came soon and we realized the train was about 2 hours late. So we spent those 2 hours playing Chess, Eating and talking about strategies about Q3 and CS.

Ok the wait was finally over and the train arrived. It was a sight of horror to see about 300 Bihari lining up in front of the doors of the coach that was supposed to be reserved for us. Anyways I instantly knew that there was going to be some fight with those unbathed-for-dunno-how-many-days biharis. I finally managed to get hold of the door and I was struck between a lady and her kid and a Bihari. Had to kick and hurt a Bihari in order to help the lady get it. Finally I was in after struggling for 15 minutes. Reached the berth that was supposed to be reserved to me and saw HUGE metal trunks lined up there. Anyways Adi also reached the place and finally when the train was about to move, Ashish also made it. We thanked god that we were alive and started settling. We were amazed to saw how biharis would smoke bidis, won’t bath, spit wherever they fancy, sit anywhere they want. We had to verbally abuse biharis and made sure that we didn’t have anyone else seating on our berths. We occupied the top three ones in a compartment. And the best is yet to come; Ashish found out that he has lost his purse when he was trying to board the train. It had around 2000 bucks, his driving license, petro card, college I card etc. We were sad for him and he was looking as if he was given a shock of his life. To my amazement I found out that my wallet was also missing. I mean I am one of those people who would take care of things and be careful but I lost it. I had around 500 odd in there. BAD beginning. We even thought of getting down and returning home. Adi was laughing at all this time. Bloddy Takki. Damn the journey. It was like hell. It was HOT in the train and I had to take my shirt off and all. There were biharis all around me and they were smoking and made journey even more miserable.

Finally we reached Kanpur at around 4 in the evening. As soon as we came outa station, there were about 15 Rickshaw wallas around us asking where we wanted to go and there were few auto wallas that were asking if we wanted to go to IIT etc. They were charging 100 bucks and they said get a “parchi” form Prepaid booth and etc etc. We walked outta station and finally after negotiating a bit we managed to get an auto for just 60 bucks. And I was wondering if auto wallah is ready for 60 bucks, they how come the Sarkaari Prepaid booth is asking for 100 bucks. So we finally boarded the auto and we set off for the IIT.

The roads (if I can have the liberties to call em road) were BAD. As bad as they could get. I don’t remember traveling on as bad roads. I felt like I was dirt biking. The auto driver was I guess on a suicide mission. He would scare the hell outta me every time he overtook any other vehicle. Also I guess it was compulsory for him to abuse every driver he went pass. Was a fun trip. So after around 40 minutes of dirt biking we were there in front of the IIT Gate. Sign of relief.

More to come soon.

Everynight after I have played with and lost badly to kAgE, I think why the hell do I have to play again and again with him to loose yet again… I am not all that bad when it comes to First Person Shooters but kAgE, don’t have words to express. I can make “any” single jump and all kinds of strafe jumps etc. but can’t seem to jump longer than kAgE.

I guess me playing again n again to get better, is about persistance and practising. Failure? as it was one of the topics @ IMS class today, the thoughts are still fresh and I am trying to figure out the positives out of my matches with kAgE. The only one I see could be beating the hell outta others who are not that good players.

Today played Q3DM17 and Pro-Q3DM6 in the two matches combined, I did’nt kill him even once. He had in all two deaths and both of em suicides. He murdered me atleast 70 odd times in two 10 minute tourneys.

Q3Arena – I think all you need to be good in this game is a good rail shot and excellent machine shot. Straetegy and moves can be learnt but aim should be perfect. And it’s NOT easy. I have been playing Q3 for well over two years now and still my machine accuracy is around 10% and my rail accuracy is about 40%.

Will post more stuff later as I should be studying right now cos CAT is just around the corner and I don’t remember a single thing from the course.

Ok, I have been trying to figure out the design for the UBG site that would act as the website for my clan, my gaming company, my SEO company, my web-designing company and my visual components company 😉

I talked to Kunal about the colors on the webpage and he is of an opinion that we have browns and grays as the colors. I agree completely to him. According to me, White as a background color in a website sucks big time and there are too many Black websites floating around. So its time for a change. So we have decided upon the colors and all we neeed is a layout. And that I guess is not very difficult to do. I am just tryint to learn PHP and find out some free webhosts that give you free PHP support for the website. Infact as I am writing this, I realized that few of my websites don’t have to be dynamic in nature and can be hosted on brinkster etc.

Still trying to figure out the theme for the websites and will try to give them a corporate look.