Meeting the Warrier

Today we catch up with the Unreal genius, the boy from Bangalore known in the gaming world as ‘bzrk3r’. Winning the Unreal Tournament 2004 leg at WCG India ‘04 was almost a walk in the park for him. Unfortunately for India, his studies will soon take him to distant lands and so, we lose out on one superlative gamer. Read on to find out about Ashwin Warrier and how he was crowned the UT2K4 champion last year.

AshR : Intro, intro, intro, intro

bzrk3r : *ahem. I’m Ashwin Warrier and I’m a 20 year old gamer. *nice guy pose

AshR : Lol, that’s not enough. Tell us more about yourself. What you do in real life etc.

bzrk3r : Well in September I start a HND course in Computers at Cavendish College, London and so currently I’m just preparing to leave.

AshR : How do you usually spend your day?

bzrk3r : Presently my days are packed with getting all the paper-work done. I still have to apply for my visa When I’m free I just mess around with Photoshop, play DOTA and some UT with friends… stuff like that. You could also interpret it as saying I have no life

AshR : How did you become so pro at UT2K4?

bzrk3r : Haha, I still don’t consider myself as Pro but it started off around 5 to 6 years when a friend of mine installed UT classic at a local Internet cafe. What I thought of as just another FPS became an addiction and a major time-pass for me. Gradually all of us became better. I just stuck to UT despite the changes.

AshR : How long did you play UT99? Did you have any tournament experience with it? Have you played any other games seriously before that?

bzrk3r : Hmm.. UT99 was roughly around 1 to 1.5 years. I played it almost everyday and sadly I hadn’t heard of WCG and so I was unable to take part in the tournament. Before UT, I used to play a lot of fighting games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and Tekken. I still play them a lot actually.

AshR : Aha, being the Street Fighter fan that I am, tell me which SF game do you like the most?

bzrk3r : To be honest, I haven’t played that much SF compared to the other two but out of the lot, I like Street Fighter II the most.

AshR : So when and how did you get into competitive gaming?

bzrk3r : Gaming was always competitive to me. Even if I didn’t attend any tourneys, the competition between some of my friends and myself was more than enough but the first major tourney I ever played was WCG 2003.

AshR : If WCG ‘03 was your first competitive tournament, when and how did you become aware of the competitive style of playing? How did you find out about proper movement, strategies, item whoring, spawn raping, weapon denial and stuff?

bzrk3r : Constantly playing UT99 everyday for at least 2-3 hours gives you all of that. The bigger the desire to earn frags and deny others the same - the faster you pick up on this stuff. UT2K3 however, was a totally different scenario. Different game, different tactics and I learned some by watching demos and videos.

AshR : So, In a nutshell, you taught yourself the basics of efficient fragging and refined it later on by watching professional players?

bzrk3r : exactly.

AshR : Your WCG 2003 performance wasn’t very good, was it?

bzrk3r : No, it wasn’t. I lost to one of my friends in the main rounds. That was right after Jai Prasad ( BurN ) thrashed me in the practice session but then UT2K3 was honestly a new game for me. I had probably played around 10 to 15 games before attending WCG.

AshR : The year after that saw you as India’s new UT2k4 champion. How did you practice for WCG ‘04 after your loss the previous year?

bzrk3r : Well, my friends and I were very disappointed with our performances in WCG 2003. We tried to get over it by switching to UT2K3 and playing a lot of it. This was also around the time when Reliance had just opened their gaming cafes all over and had come up with their monthly unlimited offers. That helped a lot and we got practice on the way. As soon as WCG announced the official games list for 2004 we switched over to UT2K4 and as you know, it paid off and I managed to win WCG India that year.

AshR : Thank you so much for giving me your time even though you’re probably knee deep in preparations. Have fun and good luck with your future in London.

bzrk3r : No problem. Thank you too.

Ashwath ‘AshR’ Ravee