Well folks-- I am not a publicity hungry guy and I am actually and really preoccupied by a lot of work that I really enjoy doing. I opened this blog for my cartoons several months ago; but I did not do much till a few days back. you can visit this place and leave some comments on my cartoons:

http://sharierkhan.blogspot.com/

Just to give you some idea-- I now have four cartoon book, including one graphic novel, to my credit and more are underway. Yes I draw a lot of cartoons and I am running a daily strip in Bangla for the last two years.... that makes me work even harder.

the number of good games may not be very few, but the number of addictive games are indeed few. Multiplayer games are one kind of addiction, but singleplayer modes of the same titles may not be that addictive. But an intense game like Call of Duty 4 has more replay value than any of the games that I played in recent times. In fact, its so good that I did not switch to a new game for quite a while now. It's a real pity that the game was not too long.

I have been a loyal fan of Need for Speed since its first release in 1996 in Dos mode. I have played all of the games and I never hated the change of direction in the series. In fact the change of directions added extra flavour to the series. But the latest installment is so shockingly unattractive that after playing it for less than an hour at a friend's PC I decided this is not my cup of tea. I am quite surprised that why they turned NFS into an easy version of GTR. Its so stupid. When a player has already gone through Most Wanted, she/he will never want a game that feels like a material from the early racing days. Its not even worth my review.

I believe except for a few handful people like me, the rest of the world uses pseudonymes in the cyber-world. People pick names which might give an instant message to another person (for instance, a chat-loving young friend of mine named himself "soft heart, hard...; just to get some girls' attention), or to give one the idea about what she/he might be. This impression is however grossly misleading. Pseudonymes are often symbolises what one wants other people to think of her/him-- not what she/he is. The best example is the names taken by players of Unreal Tournament (sorry for referring UT once again; but this game alone can be a subject of sociological study).

These are the names taken by a bunch of losers; losers because their scores are invariably minus for they kill themselves instead of killing others in the game:

1. Chhota Shakil (one of the top most wanted killer in India/ the person who took the name is a junior political reporter, who resorts to bluffing a lot to get out of a tight situation)

2. Killer (the person who took the name is very timid)

3. The Hulk (the skinniest guy in our newsroom)

4. Daud Ibrahim (top regional criminal; name taken by a little guy having a lot of political opinion, but little real action)

5. Gilgamesh (the Babilonian hero-- the guy who took the name is a good cub reporter who spends very few words each day)

Mid rank player

Gengis Khan: is a very nice guy who literally does a lot of charity for poor people

Then there are others; who are not losers

Irresistible (his body odor reminds me of a skunk)

Gunda (meaning rougue-- the guy is actually very nice)

Then there are some x-rated names which I can't put up here.

I have been playing Unreal Tournament 2000 in LAN at the office with veteran players-- my opponents are excellent and their skill is better than the bots of "God-like" difficulty. I am now a mid-rank player in a pool of 7 to 10 players. However after playing the game for a while, I noticed some common behaviors among the losers:

1. After getting badly defeated, a loser instantly takes a busy look-- as if he has never played any game (not just a moment ago-- but ever). The loser instantly takes papers and copies and starts talking to the colleagues in a way as if he was talking about work for quite a while.

2. Some losers use this excuse: I was away for the last four days.

3."My mouse was not working properly" (I used this excuse)

4. "I was sick yesterday-- I am still not up to the mark"

5. "Phone calls took away my frags"

6. "I changed my glasses.. this is giving me such a headache" (another of my own excuse)

7. "My PC sucks... bet you could never even score 1 frag with my PC!"

8. "You thought I lost? Well, X is 10 frags below me!"

9. The excuse I liked most: Well I entered 10 minutes after the game started! I could barely play for 5 minutes!

10. There is a competition among the last few players to not to be the last one. Among them, there is a suicidal tendency; after one colleague (Perv_Heart) lost a game badly to me (from bottom end, that is), he was telling another colleague-- how can I swallow this!! My prestige is gone!

Names taken by the players are also very interesting; they include Perv_heart, deadman, bra-snatcher, etc. etc!

I don't know if this has happened to others or not; its not a big deal-- but I had my profile erased twice; then I was given a new rank for one day, and it was gone on the next day. I also had hard time uploading my logo image. I wonder what's wrong with this site-- which I consider as a quality website. I have been visiting Gamespot from 1998.

Though this is not game related-- I thought I would put a bit of my soft pranks that I played on guys who were once novice with PCs. I am sure you'll find this entertaining. I work in a busy newsroom where we used to write stuffs in typewriters till 94. After PCs arrived, some of the guys could not just figure the various functions of a PC beyond using it like a typewriter. For instance one of my friends did not know that you could auto-replace words in Microsoft word (in Tools>Auto Correct). he was writing some story, when he took a break. I sneaked in to his MS Word settings and put F*** (I mean figure it out) against "the" in the Auto-Correct words settings.
He came back and started writing like "the city was..." and then he saw what he actually typed was F*** city was...". Surprised, he deleted the words and wrote it again. But again he saw "F***"instead of The. Then he was alarmed, he screamed,"somethings wrong with my computer!" We asked him what. He typed and showed us what's wrong.

Then we suggested him to type super-fast, so that F*** can be avoided. He typed like a hurricane and then he saw that again. We suggested him to type slow. He did. Nothing worked. Then he started typing very slowly, looking at the monitor like Mr. bean, and then typed pretty fast. Then as an expert, I intervened. After reviewing his PC, I declared that it was just a matter of virus-- and I could clean it, if he treated me with a cup of tea. the other folks were laughing to death.

Scene 2:

A colleague of mine left my newspaper and joined BBC in London. After six months of training, he came back for two weeks and gave me some prank stuffs. One of them was a plastic Sh*t, very realistic-- and somewhat shiny like its so fresh that you could smell it. One of my colleagues, Ashraf, was new with PCs and quite mystified by its capabilities. he was always asking me what else a PC could do. Anyway, that day we were busy working. When he looked the other way, I placed the Sh*t near the CPU and just below the floppy disk slot. He turned and jumped off his chair. "Oh my god! how... what... where... when...!!! hey look this is literally Sh*t!"

Ashraf walked back a few steps and called the sweeper (we have a sweeper at the office to take care of the bathrooms) to get rid of the Sh*t. We asked him how did he Sh*t on the table, pretending that we thought he did the job on the table. He vehemently protested. "I never did it... one moment ago it was not even there. I don't know from where it came..."

We then asked, "could it be the PC?"

He looked quite unsure, pointing his finger at the floppy disk slot, "do you think it came from there?"

I said, "its a possibility. i believe you were writing too much sh*t and the PC could not take it anymore!!!"

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Folks, I will be happy if you put some of your own PC pranks in the comments.

I just started rediscovering Unreal Tournament 2000 at my office on LAN. I played it a lot on singleplayer mode back in 2001-02. That experience is completely different when you are playing a super-fast game against real people. I still wonder how they made this game to act so fast and easy. No wonder right now I am playing as the bottom feeder-- though I played this game long before my colleagues.

When we were young in the seventies, I don't recall my father playing games with us. Back then, the number of older people playing outdoor or indoor games was visibly few. But as we grew up in a globalised environment flooded with cross-cultural ideas and entertainment, we turned out completely different from our fathers.

I am guy from Bangladesh. I grew up in Dhaka, a crowded and not-so-glamorous city (does not mean I don't love it) in South Asia. Most people from other parts of the world have a negative idea about my country. Well I tell you, you can do anything here and you can find everything here. So its no wonder that when PCs and gaming consoles came out in the mass market in the early eighties-- we actually came to use them within a year or two. My first video gaming experience came from an Atari console. That was, I think 1986/87. The first game that I got hooked to was a racing game called Enduro. Another game I loved was building an igloo house in the north pole avoiding attack by polar bears (can't recall the name). And then there was this submarine shooter game in the arcade which drained out a lot of my money.

I never liked Pacman much. I played it on Atari, then at the arcade and later in the PC. Never loved it for more than 5 minutes, by the way. And never found Donkey Kong to be extra-ordinary.  

My passion for video games waned by late eighties due to lack of availability of good games and as there was no "gamespot", I also did not know which games should I look for.

Then in 1992, I encountered Prince of Persia 2 on the PC. My idea about video games changed radically. So far video games meant playing one challenge with incremental difficulties. In Prince, I found story, drama and a good reason to spend sleepless nights. I realised then that only PC could offer such a game because the PC offers space (well back then, the HDD was my idea of space. other radical game consoles did not invade the market yet). 

But to feed my addiction to video games, I needed to have my own PC. Back then computers were costly-- mainly the computer benchmark was Apple. It was only in 1995-96 that I realised that Apple robs people and I should actually be buying a pro-people PC. So I got me one. From then on, I played innumerable games. I am a 40-year old game addict now-- though I don't quite spend as much time as student gamers can afford. But I am proudly a game addict. I also influence my 10-year old daughter to play PC games--- including Battlefield (which she plays quite well). I believe that a certain level of PC game addiction makes a person constantly PC-smart.