Monday, September 15, 2003

Cricket: The death knell for other games

 

 

Claiming English to be the death knell for other languages is almost as atrocious. While agreeing that other games are tending to be sidelined, cricket definitely isn’t the cause. Cricket has many merits, and the chief ones being its ability to be played anywhere and its relatively low cost. Because of this and a plethora of other virtues, cricket is the most popular game in the country. And therefore, it is not cricket, the game itself, but the public at large that is to be blamed for the ruination of other games. As a personal experience, in my school, whenever I have played any game in PT class, it has been either cricket or football. Never have I been exposed to atiya patiya, gilli danda or kabaddi. And frankly speaking, even if they did, I wouldn’t have been interested. Yet, I do not hold cricket to blame, for the simple reason that if cricket would not have existed, then everybody would have liked some other game, say kabaddi in its place and people would be writing on kabaddi being the death knell for other sports. Some or the other game would hold the position that cricket is now holding. Moreover, we have to face the truth, bitter or otherwise that cricket is the only sport where India currently has the capability to turn out international standard players in large numbers.

Agreed that cricketers in India are a bit glamorised, but Bhupati, Kartikeyan, Pillai and Anand have a celebrity quotient too, and it isn’t that the cricketers have any less talent, and hence are as deserving of the status as their fellow sportsmen. An odd cricketer may belittle the game occasionally, but the damage has been sufficiently remedied by showing the door to every one of them.

Cricket is the game most commonly shown on TV, because it is an interesting game to watch. The television itself prevents people from going out and playing, and not cricket. There are many who like to watch cricket, and keep tabs on the records of the cricketers, and follow the various tournaments keenly, but would hate to go out in the sun and actually play it. Again, cricket takes the blame, this time for the television.

If anyone desires to keep any game alive, then the only possible solution is for the people at large to take interest and work towards it. The government is playing a key role in keeping these games alive, no matter what anyone might say. It treats all games equally, and the incentives and facilities provided to the cricketers are no more than any other player of any other game receives. For those who care, the national events of the games that are supposedly dying out are broadcast regularly on doordarshan, and the public isn’t interested. We cannot hold cricket to blame for having way more viewer potential. The sponsors of the cricket team are partly to blame for going with the flow and encouraging cricket teams only. The advertisements intending to promote the products are promoting the game. Lately, the trend has been changing and companies are looking at various different sportsmen for wearing them on their shirts.

This, and the very fact that such a topic is being called into discussion signifies the change in trend of the people’s thinking. It begins to show that the people actually care about the various sports that are a part of our culture, and those that some of us have mastered better than people from the regions where they developed in the first place. Who knows what this fresh train of thought will lead us, if it loses steam before other sports get a prominent place, then the blame should not come on cricket; if, however, almost extinct sports are rejuvenated, then they will owe one to cricket for bringing their plight into the light.

A lot yet needs to be done, and other sports will most definitely die out if we do not take more sensible steps towards resurrecting them than pointlessly blaming cricket. The devil down below may be ringing the triangular piece of metal for most other games, but the sound coming out most definitely isn’t cricket.

-Aditya MJ

D, FYJC Science

Thursday, September 04, 2003

Dos games

 

Computer gaming goes where no other form of entertainment has ever gone before, mostly because it is interactive and you get to be the hero. You get to do things you can never do in real life and that's  the fun part. However, games today are pretty costly and take up a lot of system resources. For someone who uses his computer mostly for work, it is impractical to have around six MB of space for a game that will get pretty boring after some time. And then the high requirements of the games force you to constantly upgrade your system if you want to play them. Classic, old fashioned, dos games come to the rescue. They provide the same intriguing gameplay, and essentially pick the same chords as any other game available in the market. Around fifteen games will fit within a megabyte, and best of all its available on the net for free! Even the serious gamer would enjoy the old fashioned charm. However, if you do not know exactly where to find free dos games, you'll end up wasting a lot of net time going around in meaningless circles and reaching dead ends.

dosgames.com

This site has almost all the games that were created from the dawn of computer games (around 1984!) till the Prince of Persia 2 demo. It has a convenient navigation, with the games divided into 3d shooting, action, adventure, ball and paddle, sidescrolling, miscellaneous, puzzle, educational/kids, RPG, sim, strategy, space shooting and Tetris. The picks of the lot are doom (everyone will remember this), keen (addictive), hocus pocus (really funny) and skyroads (the best). If you are looking for anything specific, you can search or look in the all games index. There is also a page of newest additions which is a very convenient feature if you have downloaded half the site already. Then there are a lost of small games <50 k, and the game makers have excelled themselves here. The Mario brothers is one of the games here, taking only 47 k of your system, but providing hours of overwhelming gameplay. Classics here make you go totally nostalgic, pong, digger, pcman, and the best, volfied. Check out alleycat (1984) also, a little known but a total timepass game. Some of these games will run very very fast on your PC, so you'll need to download a free software called mo'slo from the utilities section, to enable some games to run. Be sure to stop it after playing or your system will continue to go slow and eventually crash.

dosgamesarchive.com

Second choice to dosgames.com, because the games are sorted in alphabetical order, and each page takes a long time to load… Yet a practical site, it has many dos games that dosgames.com does not have. These games include the lion king (I still remember using the dwarf cheat code) Aladdin (as stunning as ever), Abuse, Biomenace and Prince! If you go to this site, it is a must to download the duke nukem series, hexen, dave (yessss!) and the commander keen series. However, you must know the name of the game here unless you want to waste a lot of time wading through pages of needless games. If you are in a mood to experiment, this is where to do it. I tried our catacomb abyss, and was not disappointed. There exists an equally remarkable doom modification here called rouge spear.

Other resources

I wanted a game called comix zone, and could not find it in the two sites above. I went to google search and after some time, found it. However, this is one of the few rare games that are neither in dosgames.com nor dosgamesarchive.com. Usually, if you know a game that is not available in either of the two sites, then the games are not shareware, or not yet freeware or abbandonware (public domain). It’s a good idea to ask friend to e-mail you the old games that still hang around in little visited corners of their systems. I did that with a game called earthworm Jim. If all else fails, google is the best place…

 

At the end of the day, dos games are still thriving and still have as much charm as they had when they were first released. The best way to spend some time when it rains relentlessly outside…

-Aditya MJ