Interview with Blitzkrieg Cpma winner AshR

Famously known as “The Pro” for his prowess in Q3a CPMA, 20 years Ashwath ‘AshR’ Ravee is also famously known as “small bitch”. Most abuses levied on him are because he is probably the fastest man in the arena. Over the last few years he has polished his CPMA movement and skillz that make him ubiquitous throughout the arena. Taking two circles round the entire map, plodding two rockets in your chest and taking a break to breathe, all constitute a single second.

We catch up with the winner of this year’s Q3a CPMA competition to find out the dynamics of him getting high in a single beer and those mouth ulcers that he keeps complaining about.

GamersIndia: GI
Ashwath: AshR

GI: After three years using the wistfully pronounced “cowee” which sounded like kaveri, why the change of nick to ” AshR “?
AshR: I started off using cowboy from hell after the pantera song. Later, I formed a CS clan using the same name in the plural form then I changed my nick to N1ghtwing after the dc comics character but got bored of that too…now I’m just using parts of my name

GI: How long you been playing q3a?
AshR: I started just before my 12th standard board exams. I played dm17 all night against Xaero after telling my mom that I was going to study. That would make it around 3 years

GI: Vanilla q3a is dead, how far do you think CPMA will go? Blitzkrieg has been one of the only tourneys in the recent past to even have anything q3a related for an event.
AshR: To be honest, CPMA never did have a very active ‘big LAN tournament’ scene anywhere in the world. The OSP players were always more in number. CPMA however still has many leagues going on online where the best players in the world play. Q3 however seems to be popular in India even now and many players did turn up for the Blitzkrieg event

GI: CPMA is pretty much a new game altogether, with regards to physics, how far flung is it from vanilla in terms of gameplay
AshR: As a mod, CPMA has one of the most advanced feature sets one would expect in terms of netcode and other quake 3 related things. The programmers have done an excellent job in removing old ID bugs in q3a. CPMA is no longer fps dependent which means 125fps no longer gives you the best speed and distance

GI: Any plans to switch to go pro in another fps?
AshR: Maybe, Adrenaline Gamer 2 mod for half-life 2 looks very interesting www.adrenaline-gamer.com. No release dates mentioned yet but until then I’ll probably be looking at half-life 2 dm or painkiller depending on what’s put up for Indian tournaments in the near future

GI: What rig did you win?

AshR: AMD 64 2800+ CPU
AMD ATHLON 64 K8T800-BOARD
MSI 6702 BOARD
512 MB DDR 400 MEMORY
WD 40 GB 7200 RPM 8MB HDD
52 X CD RW ROM DRIVE
ATI 9600 pro based AGP CARD with 128 MB RAM
and TV out.

GI: What was the final spread?
AshR: In the grand finals, the final spread was cpm1a 26-0 / cpm3a 18-4

GI: You have made a few movies which have garnered acclaim, tell us about them?

AshR: My first real gaming video was a counter strike one for Carnage ‘04. It featured the best frags by players from all over the country who participated in indianproleague.com’s lan tournament. It was well received all over with over 5000 downloads or so. After that I made my second video Aerodynamic : The Promode Dance, featuring cpma moves and tricks by mew from Finland and Poub from Germany. I didn’t’ do too much work on it and didn’t expect it to do that well but the tricks in the movie were really outstanding and therefore many people posted very good comments and reviews about it on own-age.com. If you head over to the site you can find it on the front page as one of the featured downloads for the year 2004.

I’m working on my third video currently. It will be a promode frag video featuring frags by sh4un, a CPMA player from Poland who’s quite well known on the cpma scene. You can check out the trailer over here http://www.own-age.com/vids/video.aspx?id=3206

I have another promode frag video planned and it will be called Mercurial but that is just in the demo collecting stages now. I’m currently a member of Twilight Pictures which is a movie making group that has put out many well known videos including the famous ‘Get Quaked’ series

GI: Thank you for your time and best of luck to you in your future endeavors.
AshR: Thank you.