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
Brajeshwar posted this article
on Sat, Mar 10th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Categorized under Reviews
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Now this is true for most Indian portals … take makemytrip.com for example … in todays world of Web 2.0 it is a whole bunch of clutter … and they’ve got their share of tables in there as well.
Haha!
Making me fall off laughing! HAHA!
Have u seen ZapakGirls.com ? If u observe it properly, u will find most of there characters match that of Sunsilk Gang Of girls … maybe here are in partnership!
After Don (2006), Priyanka Chopra is my superheroine.
man u sure seem to have a lot of time… y not get oinam.com organized instead… its been quite some time!
by the way i m not working with zapak nor reliance, thanks to u i still dont have the kind of job that i can boast about.
@ Walmik — We have some internal reason why we don’t want Oinam to be active nor so open/public at this stage.
Dude im pretty sure ur either a jobless person or a really good coder ……and even i think its dumb enough to use BGcolor and tables in 2007 ……..zapak should get programmers……..its 2007 …i think the coders misundertood the 7 for 0 .
What does this have to do with me? Btw, I am neither jobless nor a bad programmer.
lol… anyway, Its good to see oinam.com coming back to life again… the earlier design was also nice…. was it asparagus in the glass? whatever it was.. looked good.
well i said there is an alternativ……..jobless or a really gode coder dintt i ??? i dont insist that the first option is correct …..unless u say so …:P
@Mrinal Wadhwa - are Sunsilk GOG and zapakgals really in partnership??????
Wonderful post
Zapak has been expanding a lot, lately.
I was a total addict at Indiagames until Zapak came.
The range and quality of games available at Zapak is just mindblowing.And to top it all, they now support it with offline events like Gameplexes.
What I discoverd was that you can even embed their games as widgets in your blog. I tested one.
Here is the link
Although I have not yet started utilizing the full potential, I can see this adding a lot of value to gaming bloggers.
Would like to see your comments about the same on my blog. : D
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