Cricket Revolution – Made in Pakistan

Posted by BA on Oct 15, 2009 in Uncategorized | 3 comments

Pakistan’s first complete 3D Cricket game

Mindstorm Studios‘s Babar Ahmad caused several hundred audience’s jaws to drop last night at P@SHA’s ICT awards. He showcased a video demo of “Cricket Revolution“, a great looking game that they’ve been working on for quite some time now. But the output was worth the wait.

The game is neat, simple to play, easy controls, lots of options, multi player/network modes, social/viral aspect and last but not least, its comprehensively made in Pakistan. I’m so proud to see such great work being done in Lahore. And for obvious reasons, the game did a clean sweep at the awards too.

Instead of making you read a lot, I’ll show you a few videos here. I simply went to their website and downloaded the demo. The demo does not contain the teams, stadiums, matches or network mode and for obvious reasons, it’s only practice mode. You can do both batting and bowling practice and in both cases, the game feels better than any other Cricket game I’ve played so far. Yes I have played all the Electronic Arts titles over past decade and I started from the good old Allan Border’s DOS based cricket.

The game is scheduled to be released on October 31st and is already available for pre-order at http://store.steampowered.com/app/25500/ and the pre-order price is $18. So hurry up, as the retail price of the game will be somewhere between $20 and $25.

Here are a few practice videos that I recorded right during this demo run of the game.

Demo Startup and Main Menu

Batting Practice

Bowling Practice

And finally in the end, this is the video Babar played at the end of his presentation that is absolutely marvelous. Enjoy!

PTA to launch 3G in Pakistan to boost telecom further

Posted by BA on Aug 29, 2009 in Uncategorized | 10 comments

PTA has recently announced that it plans to launch 3G services in Pakistan very soon. Though no dates or time frame has been given and the word soon remains undefined. According to this news-release, launching 3G services is one of the steps it is taking to keep the upward trends in telecom growth, a sector that is already contributing 2% of the GDP and it is expected that it will grow up to 3% in the coming years.

My question is, that a country with a tele-density of 62%, mobile penetration of 94 million subscribers with a population of around 180 million, can we still expect more subscribers to sign up?

I believe we are already reaching a kind of saturation point. Please consider the following facts before answering my question:

• There is a big number of subscribers who carry more than one active sims
• Pakistani population between ages 15 and 64 is less than 60%