Lock, stock, and boom

More than a decade later, Praxis Entertainment has set a new standard at three dimensional gaming by developing the first-ever first-person perspective game in Bangladesh. Their game "Loaded Deck, Episode: Mission Dhaka" has already hit the shops and become quite popular beside the best selling international games like Hitman2, Max Payne and Splinter cell.

The game developers are Towheed and Shourav, two computer science students in their early twenties. The game was developed with the aid of various programmes like Flash, 3-D Studio Max and so on. "We had to buy an A6 game engine to develop this game," said Shourav, one of the game developers.

Four months of sleepless nights and a lot of hard work finally paid off. The name, characters, storyline and so on were created from suggestions from different gamers during the development process.

Once in the game, the gamer becomes an imaginary character Zishan, who is returning from England after completing his studies. He is, as the story goes, the only son of Mahmud Morshed, a multi-millionaire, and about to take over the business from his father. But on arrival finds himself in the captivity of kidnappers. The abductors ask for a huge ransom from his father but Zishan has other plans: he wants to stop them.

The game thus begins with the gamer being Zishan held hostage in a basement and he moves along seven adventurous levels with danger lurking around in every corner.

The game is a lot like early classics such as Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, Doom II and others, in the context that the gamer has to collect ammo packs, hidden keys, health/medicine packs, weapons and so on as he plays the game.

Since this is the first-ever venture of Praxis, it has overlooked some aspects of the game which would have ensured a better finishing. The control keys cannot be customised. One has to play the game with pre-defined control keys. The menu option for instance is very simple. Also, after

shooting a bad guy with a revolver, the corpse tends to explode into pieces, which may appear a bit too childish to gamers. Nevertheless, Praxis has done a great job.

The minimum system requirements for the game are Celeron 300 MHz processor, 16 MB 3D Accelerated AGP card, 128 MB RAM. The system should also have a sound card, a CD ROM drive, and DirectX 8.1 or later for efficient performance.

Praxis has already received a lot of response from gamers all over the country and are just about ready to release the next chapter of "Loaded Deck, Episode: Mission Sylhet" very soon.

"We would like to come up with

more games and are interested in developing games of different genres like simulation, strategy etc.," said Shourav.

"We hope gamers around the country would help us in the ways they can and it would be great if the authorities came forward to help us with our future ventures."