Humour

Top 5 CIO games of 2004

T A Balasubramanian unveils a few corporate games that CIOs love to play

Here is the final round-up of the best corporate games played by CIOs in 2004. In contrast to the action-and-adventure packed competition from the real games business, these are games of great strategy, stealth and subterfuge, not to mention speed and style. You can hone your skills by playing them at any time, even during office hours.

In fact, you may already be playing these games of action and strategy in various degrees during office hours, so don’t be surprised if you find some of your carefully hatched plots unveiled here in more detail than you could have imagined. Even Robert Ludlum or Fredrick Forsyth would have been dazed to find the sheer ingenuity and eye-popping variety of plot that these CIO games demonstrate.

Burnout 5: Fully Exhausted

Genre: Driving drives

If you think of driving as only driving vehicles down a road, then this immaculately produced CIO game should make you sit up and dance with your keyboard. In the usual sense of the word, drives in CIO Wonderland are devices that whirl plates and discs at enormous speeds on spindles that seem to respect no speed barriers on the information highway.

But then, “Exhausted” is no ordinary drive. It challenges you, the crafty, wily, CIO, to create a Backup Boondocks that nobody in your entire organisation (aptly called Baffle Corporation), can ever reach. All the data in Baffle is initially guarded by the treacherous Prince Finance the Finicky (scathingly nicknamed Fina-Fini) whose mission in life is to become the information Black Hole of Baffle. Your mission, as CIO, is to take over from Fina-Fini and finish his domination over Baffle. In the process, you will leave all the users in Baffle totally burnt out with anxiety and fully exhausted, which explains the title.

“Burnout 5: Fully Exhausted” is a nerve- wrenching game that any CIO will instantly take to.

The Data Bomb of Ridiculous

Genre: Action

The Data Bomb of Ridiculous (DBR) almost challenges Bollywood in terms of levels of nonsensical intensity, weird pacing, and sheer crazy action like few games ever have.

This is a truly eye-popping game, so the jazzy production values are worth every explosion of data that occurs as you play the game. A giant data bomb has been hidden in the basement of Baffle Corporation (where else?) by an evil spirit called Ridiculous Pop-up, and you Herr CIO are challenged to find and defuse it before it blows up and spreads gooey data bytes all over CIO Wonderland.

As you might have guessed, DBR was diabolically created by a German CIO, in collaboration with Don Lever, the Bollyhood king of wacky comedy. Lever is credited with the game’s absurd dialogue and goofy design, but clearly, this game is the outcome of a lot of dedicated, zany work on the part of many extremely nutty people.

Grand Theft Data

Genre: Action

Generally, when a CIO corporate game tries to be all things to all users, it becomes an overbearing pot-pourri that cannot but leave a bad taste in a refined mouth.

Grand Theft Data stimulates you, the crafty CIO of Baffle Corporation, into trying many, many more things than any previous Grand Theft Data game. For example, you steal data not only from the Internet and intranets, but even from hidden files of other corporations and even individual unsuspecting CIOs who may be online, around the world.

While some of the nefarious ploys seem right, the impact of all these stolen data elements becomes too vile at times—which is what makes this a powerful game package.

It does not disappoint because it does not settle for anything as simple as stealing a password.

Built with a perfectly evil story, devious plots and devilish dialogue, a disgusting Mafia voice-over, chilling graphics, bone-crunching sound effects, and extremely baffling and varied gameplay, Grand Theft Data is a thrilling dive into the murky side of CIO shenanigans.

After-Life 2

Genre: Action

After-Life is the strange account of how your life shifts into high gear on an astral plane following an accidental encounter with the Phantom of Baffle Corporation. In the shadowy world of After-Life, you single handedly take on the role of recovering all the lost files that have disappeared in crashed drives and corrupt disks over all the lifetimes of all the CIOs who have passed through Baffle before you. In this terrifying task, you are given first aid by association with the Phantom.

When After-Life 1 was out the year before last year, it paved the way for many of the outstanding CIO shooter sequences you see here. This great baffling sequel, which makes the CIO and the Phantom equally strong, gives you no special preferences, except the usual weapons of data recovery: snoop software, undelete guns and digital gum.

As you will discover, this stunning sequel is a technology topper that pulls out every atom of data you ever lost from holes you never knew existed, and helps you send the Phantom into cyber limbo.

Hello Lolly 3

Genre: Strategy

This is a spectacular new version of the original Hello Lolly, and the other avatar, 2, both of which were about how you always managed to overshoot the IT budget year after year. The game, of course, is to outwit the treacherous Prince Finance the Finicky (Fina-Fini) into providing enough lolly so that your IT projects get bigger and more bizarre.

The earlier versions were somewhat dull because they put too many limits on your IT budget, allowing Fina-Fini to put you into a cell too easily with no resources in the end. Fortunately, the current edition gives you new powers to make Fina go green, even when it appears that you have a negative budget. Your new strengths are not revealed to you until the JFM quarter each year, when budgets suddenly shrink or disappear. While Fina is gloating over imminent victory, you are suddenly given access to “new technologies” and “insatiable users” and you can play a greatly blown-up game, checkmating Fina with jargon that he cannot understand, and diagrams of architecture that he finds impossible to interpret.