Zapak.com: 'Gaming' gone wrong

The Bollywood actor, gloved hands, glowering expression, battle stance ready, challenges you to fight him at Zapak.com, from a hoarding many feet above your car. Then, two heroines come to promote the website in your city. More advertisements mushroom all over the roads. More celebrities seem to come out of their heavy televised closets to reveal their ‘gaming’ activities. ‘Gaming’ booms, most of the forums on Zapak.com, praise the site for delivering the users’ doomed souls from the final, brutal end caused by acute boredom.

Ok, wait a minute, something seems very wrong here. It takes one look at Zapak.com, to realise that the site claims a lot more than it can deliver. Yes there are games that you can play, and yes, you can play against other human opponents. But, that’s if you want to play games that basically range from mutated variants of Tetris, to games that your average low end phone would play. If you wanted to enter a ‘gaming portal’ and have a truly exhilarating experience, then you might as well return to the PC/Console games you were playing.

Zapak.com, has no titles that would remotely challenge a casual gamer, leave the avid gamer a side. The site has many genres of gaming, right from ‘sports’ games to ‘strategy’ games, many of which make ‘Mario’ look like a marvel of cutting edge technology. In an age, where consoles like Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 have entered the arena, the trend in the industry responded by bringing in a wider variety of game playing options, along with interactive environments, realistic graphics with story lines that appeal to mature audiences (17-35+ years). Instead, Zapak.com seems to take you to the past, rather than create a portal where Indian MMORGS (massively multiplayer online role playing games) may be launched.

But then again, the site is owned by Adlabs, which primarily deals in the movie industry. That may explain why the .TV part of the site boasts of playing movies. The user uploaded movies and short clips of game reviews do the obvious: review games for advanced consoles or of computer games, games that ‘gamers’ do play. But even these clips suffer from shallow content and below par production.

Till Adlabs realises the meaning of ‘gaming’, and the users decide to actually be treated as adults, expect more hoardings with smiling Bollywood actors and retrograde content.