On Friday, 9th March, 2007, I saw Malaika Arora Khan posing like Angelina Jolie in the front page of Bombay Times for ZapakGirls. The photo reminded me of Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft. Malaika wield a Samurai Sword, sling coupla guns, complete with a utility belt and a buckle with the Zapak logo which would definitely not be helpful if she is doing any stunt or even walking for that matter. Her waist even shines with a 3.5″ inverted CD with 4 squares etched out which supposedly might be to store/steal/write data from enemy computers. Personally, I feel this is funny and stupid. Malaika do have the oomph factor but not for this Lara Croft type image.
Few months back, a pissing competition have urged me to visit Zapak – a gaming portal for India. Upon opening the website, being a designer-developer myself, my first reaction was, “wow! it is screwed up in firefox“. Then I went straight to the source code to see the error and I was shocked to see full of TABLES, BGCOLOR in today’s world of CSS, XHTML and Web Standards where TABLES are pooh-pooh as design elements. And I am not sure if this is just mere co-incidence but the way that footer is written – rendered using javascript – so you can have a common js file and render amongst all HTMLs reminded me of my old days (2000s) when I wrote that way while doing HTML websites. That’s definitely not a properly coded site!
It may be my own fault that I am not a gamer at all. However, the let-down was that I could not find any good quality games despite with the fact that they spend huge on their PR – TV ads, Prints, even to the extend of going to Public Toilets to stick up their level game stickers. It will be many years for Zapak to realize a profit to their bold step of trying to milk the non-spending section of the Indian Internet & Game crowd. On a different note, some companies have been allegedly distributing Pirated Game DVDs to help those non-paying-gamers.
Reliance ADA Group, which is behind Zapak, have plans to invest over $100 million over the next 3 years to the gamers, technology, content and PR. Personally, I feel that they have taken a forward looking plan knowing the fact that they will not be making profit at all for at least the next half a decade. The site as of today looks more like a Networking site for Indian gamers.
If you seriously want to play some high quality yet simple & highly addictive games, then Orisinal is the best place to be.
REFERENCES
- Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft
- Lara Croft – Karima Adebibe
- Zylom (Something like Zapak or is it the other way round?)
- Zapak
