HTC in Hyderabad

My HTC HD Mini phone experienced a near-death experience few months back. Luckily, it survived with some damages to the LCD touchscreen. The subsequent efforts to get it fixed altered part of my impression about HTC phones - while their phones are snazzy and uber functional, the customer service is a big let down.

The issue was not as much with the responsiveness or quality, but rather the inability to track down an authorized service center in the first place! After several trips and frantic searches, I finally managed to get the contact details. Considering how much of a hassle this turned out to be, I decided to post it here, for posterity! However, its another thing that the center quoted an unimaginably exorbitant price that I eventually got this done from an 'unofficial' reliable dealer, and my phone is back to its 'touch-y' best!

HTC Authorized Service Center,
Mobitech Service Center,
G-11, Diamond Towers, Opp. Manju Theatre,
Beside Taj Tristar Hotel, S.D. Road, Secunderabad - 3 (Hyderabad)
Ph: 27845365, Fax: 40020952, 9849151591
www.mobitechservices.com

FieldRunners Game

I recently came across this ‘Tower Defense Game’ called FieldRunners from Subatomic Studios, in the Chrome Web store. Very immersive graphics in a multi-scenario action coupled with a simple tower-defense objective sure makes for an addictive fun gaming experience!

This was my brief brush with gaming after many, many years and was enjoyable on that count as well. I had last dabbled with Travian, the Massively multiplayer online (MMO) browser-based Strategy game, couple of years back. That was a different time, genre and experience. More about that later.

I played the trial-version of FieldRunners which offers all 7-game modes (upto 100 levels) in the Grasslands map. However, when checked last, this appears to have been scaled down to just 1-mode (50 levels) in the Grasslands map. The good thing about the game is the variety of Tower-types and attack firepower, while the graphics is amazing for a browser-based game. The only grouse is that the enemies have been designed to be rather extraordinarily dumb – taking shortest route irrespective of the strength of attack in the vicinity, while they offer no resistance or counter-attack to the slaughter.

A good strategy for completing Grasslands map is something in the lines of the screenshot below – make the runners cover the length and breadth of every square, while getting the maximum time to mow them down. A dirty trick in dire situations is to keep changing the shortest path by removing and re-placing the basic machine-gun-towers, which would make the runners zip back and forth on the same path, while you get extra time to take them down!