We’ve had one bitch of a time ever since we announced the Game of the Year awards and the massive gaming giveaway the likes of which India’s never seen. We missed Christmas, the New Year, our pets’ birthdays and other assorted events just to bring all this goodness to the Indian gaming community and we’ve been blown away by the tremendous response we’ve gotten from the community and the sponsors.

In the end, it is all done and all but the three major prizes have been announced. So point your browser here and check if you are one of the lucky bastards that’s managed to win something while we curse ourselves for making your day. We and the fantastic folks over at GamingIndians have gone to a lot of trouble to set this up, but it’s all been worth the terrible, unyielding pain we’ve had to endure over the last couple of weeks.

At this point, we want to say a big “Thank you” to our generous sponsors who made all of this possible in the first place. We wouldn’t have pulled it off without you, so how about giving it up for these awesome folks who made this thing a resounding success: (and maybe a couple of pints of beer the next time you meet them)

• Ajay Khanna, EA India
• Anand Khemani, e-Xpress Interactive
• Avinash Bali, Tech2 Gaming
• Faiyaz Shaikh, Milestone Interactive
• Manoj Menon, World Wide CDROMs
• Mohit Anand, Microsoft India
• Rahul Varma, The IT Wares
• Sameer Desai, GamingIndians
• Sanjoy John, Microsoft India
• Vinit Agarwal, GamingIndians
• Yashdeep Bali, EA India
• Zarik Nabi, Milestone Interactive

And yes, more applause for all the other people who helped us on this, including the mods, admins and members at GamingIndians and The ANGRY Pixel, all the people behind the scenes at these companies, the great folks over at Genesis BM (especially Charanya Chidambaram and Priyanki Ahluwalia) and all the dedicated (no, really) folks over here at The ANGRY Pixel, especially Abhinav Pattanayak (my right hand man / scapegoat in this whole affair), Anandraj Singh, Bobby Sandhu, Dev Kanchen, Reginald Miranda, Jay Patel, Ravi Sinha and his anime-loving cuckoo brother, Vijay Sinha. It’s an honor working with such talented and crazy individuals such as yourselves.

Remember to stay tuned for more contests and other fun stuff heading your way in the near future and yes, do come back on the 15th to see if you’ve won yourself one of the three big prizes and to read up on the rest of our Game of the Year articles. And yes, soon you will also be able to read up on how we structured the big prize contests (along with their solutions) and maybe introduce your forehead to the nearest solid object when you find out how close you came to solving the “seemingly impossible” puzzles. In the meantime, I’m gonna go curl up under the covers for a couple of hours and catch up on some much-needed beauty sleep.

For all those of you that have been waiting for the announcement, it is finally time. We are now in the final 24 hours of the Sweepstakes contest we’ve been running for a long time, so if you’ve voted in our Game of the Year polls, but haven’t yet confirmed your participation in the sweepstakes, you’ve got very little time left to do it.

And we’ve got all three of our mega contests up and running, where you stand to win a copy of Halo 3 Legendary Edition Master Chief Helmet, an XFX 8600 GT and a copy of Crysis or a special copy of the BioShock Collector’s Edition with the Big Daddy figurine. All you’ve got to do is crack the codes that we’ve put up in these three posts and solve them. But be warned, they are nowhere near easy!

The Halo 3 “My head won’t fit inside” Contest:
Details / Discussions
Prize Sponsor: Microsoft India

The PC “Ima graphix whore” Aficionado Contest:
Details / Discussions
Prize Sponsors: The IT Wares / Electronic Arts India

The Big BioShock “Who’s yo Daddy?” Contest:
Details / Discussions
Prize Sponsors: e-Xpress Interactive

On the bright side though, we’ve finally decided we’re going to give in to all you guys’ screams and extend the time for the mega prizes from today to the 15th. So you have until 11:59 PM, January 14, 2008 to crack the codes before we close shop and announce the winners for the mega prizes on the 15th. The winners list for the other prizes will go up sometime tomorrow, so be sure to check the Rules and Regulations and make sure you understand them full well. There will be a test later…

Finally, thanks a lot for giving us sadists some of the best fun we’ve ever had in our lives torturing you with fiendish puzzles designed to shave a couple of years off your lives. We will be wrapping up the whole show by posting the remainder of our Game of the Year articles up and announcing the winners, before we waltz off to a marathon TF2-slash-CoD4 session and drop off the face of the earth until the end of the month. Oh, yes, remember to stay tuned, ‘cos we’ve got some major announcements coming up before long and we may even announce another devilishly fun (for us) contest soon enough. And just when you thought it was safe to let your guard down…

PRIZE SPONSORS

Nailed that bastard! After two weeks of not being able to post anything, and getting our site hijacked and junk posted by some unknown hacker, we’ve managed to isolate him, detect his intrusion and kick him the hell out. Needless to say, this is the last you’ll see of him.

Turns out he’s some asshole called Atlas and he’s the one responsible for all the weird stuff you’ve been seeing on our site for all these days. We couldn’t get a fix on his location, since the weird trace that we ran pointed out that he was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. Yeah, right! In any case, we’re not sure what damage he’s caused to our systems, but we managed to retreive one log that he forgot to delete after his hack. Looks like he managed to find some sort of file… but we can’t find it anywhere on our servers. We’ve put up the log of his hack in this post. Goddamn if I know what needs to be done… but at least its over.

(more…)

We seem to be getting the strangest emails these days. Look at this doozy junk that popped up in my email today morning. We seem to be intercepting some sort of weird military transmissions from an unmapped island somewhere in North Korea. I don’t know what the hell this thing says, but if you guys figure it out, I suppose it will be useful to you somehow. Bloody roten code (SET3-SUBSET6), driving our servers down. First the mail infection and now this, what the hell am I even gonna do? Maybe I should take a closer look at this crysis. ARG! I’m gonna go stark, raving mad any day now…

CODE CLASSIFICATION TOP SECRET UMBRA
HAIL CEASAR..HAIL CEASAR..
ENCRYPTED MESSAGE FOLLOWS FROM GRID 249-B, PRIORITY SENDER DESIGNATE NOMAD

OLNVE:UNYB/ZSSQRCYBLRQSEBZP-18NFXLYBEQ.
SVYRYBPNGRQNGGURNATELCVKRYQBGPBZFYNFUVASVAVGRPELFVFQBGRKR.
CEVBEVGLQRPBQR.
YBPNGRFRDHRAGVNYFLZZRGEVPGEVNATHYNGVBAFBARKBOVBGVPGENAFCBEGPNEEVRE.

MESSAGE TERMINATES. EYES ONLY.

Damn, it had to happen now, of all the bloody times. Oh well, I suppose with electronic systems, these kinds of things happen. Anyways, it looks like some rogue AI called Cortana has somehow managed to worm itself into our mail delivery systems. We strongly recommend that you do not try to interact with the entity. More specifically, please do not send her any emails. We’re working as hard as we can to remove every trace of it from our systems. I repeat, do not send any communication to this digital infestation on our servers. We have enough trouble as it is.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and hope that you will be suitably recompensated in some way at a future date. And remember, if you need any more information on the Sweepstakes, make sure you read this post real carefully. Thanks again.