Feature

WCG Prelimineries Chittagong

Saeed Hasnat

World Cyber Games, or WCG for short, is the world cup for all the gamers around the world, a chance to see how good you are with a keyboard and a mouse against other human players. For the last couple of years, F1 Management Limited, an event management company has been organizing the national round in Bangladesh, selecting the winners who will face the players from all over the globe. This year, for the first time, F1 decided to hold two preliminary tournaments, one in Dhaka and the other in Chittagong, and gave the winners a chance to participate directly in the quarterfinals of the national WCG championships, which started from 22nd August this year. The winners from the nationals will take part in the main event, which is to be held in Germany later this year.

The organizing team from Dhaka comprising of Md. Irfan Hossain, Bangladesh Country Manager WCG, Fuad Awal Choudhury, Managing Director F1 Management Limited and me, a hard core gamer(?!) set out for Chittagong on 17th July. We arrived in Chittagong at around 7'o clock in the morning, and the souped up PCs from Dhaka arrived by courier soon after. The entire event was held in Hotel Peninsula Chittagong.After setting up the room, stage, and of course, the PCs, along with the help of the volunteers, mainly from IUB, Chittagong, we gave the referees guidelines for the matches and called it a day.

On 10AM Friday, 18th July, the games began. The games selected for this year were Need For Speed: Pro Street, FIFA 08, Counter Strike 1.6 and Warcraft3: Frozen Throne. In a setup of 50 PCs, 10 were reserved for Counter Strike, while the rest were used to play FIFA, NFS and Warcraft. The response from the gaming crowd of Chittagong was huge, with requests for registration coming in even at the last minute. Thanks to the organizers and the volunteers, this huge crowd was handled efficiently and calmly, and the day continued smoothly, with nothing but pure gaming spirit in the air.

On the second and last day, the atmosphere was intense, with the knockout rounds in sight. Gamers gave their best to outsmart and outmaneuver opponents in head to head fights, mano a mano. With the spectators and friends cheering them on, it was simply an electric atmosphere. Finally, after much keyboard bashing, mouse clicking and cursing (ranging from “there was dust in my eyes” to “this game isn't worth playing”), the final winners were: Counter Strike 1.6 “The GamerZ”: Sohrab Alam, Samir Ahmed Chowdhury, Ahmed Rafi, Abdullah Wazir & Wasim Akram, in Need For Speed Pro Street: Raisul Kibria, in FIFA 2008: Sourov Mahmood Sagar and in WarCraft 3 Frozen Throne: Ahmed Samiul Ehsan.

Finally, after the presentation ceremony, where the proud winners walked away with medals and graphics cards to enhance their gaming experience, we packed it all up once again, had a quick dinner and headed back home…to Dhaka. We would like to thank all the members of F1,the volunteers, referees, especially from IUB, for organizing such a successful and fabulous program.

(Student of North South University)