Computer-game players confident of second title

Led by top cyber-game player Tseng Jeng-cheng (曾政承), a 13-member team has traveled to South Korea expecting to win at least one title at the second World Cyber Games 2002 starting today in Daejeon.

The seven-day competition, seen as the Olympics of computer games, has attracted around 450 players from 45 nations.

Participants will compete against each other in six games, including Age of Empires II: the Conquerors (AOC), in which Tseng carried off the first prize last year.

Taiwan has also entered players in Counter-Strike, Star Craft: Brood War and 2002 FIFA World Cup.

"Taiwanese representatives all have solid capabilities," a spokesperson of the Taiwan Cyber Game League (台灣電玩競技大聯盟) was quoted as saying in a Chinese-language newspaper yesterday. "It appears that winning in AOC is a sure thing."

The league sponsored and held national preliminaries to choose Taiwan's players.

"We are focussing on AOC," the league's public relations manager, Vivian Chao (趙慧君), told the Taipei Times in an interview earlier this month.

"We expect Tseng to win the first prize again and we even have hopes of winning the top three prizes in AOC," she said.

All 13 players were born after 1980 and the youngest one, Kang Hung-wen (康弘文), is only 16.

Among them, 17-year-old Tseng, who is a seeded player this time, has attracted the most media attention.

He irked Chinese reporters at the event in Seoul last year by waving the Republic of China flag after his victory.

Having dropped out of school last year, Tseng this year enrolled at Shin Min High School.

To hone his skills, Tseng practices an average of five hours a day, double that amount on holidays.