By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net

GADGETS Magazine Editor John Nieves will head to Hong Kong at the end of the month to represent the Philippines in the first Intel Asia PC Gaming Showdown, which is a competition open to gaming journalists and amateur gamers.

Nieves will be facing off against game journalists from Thailand and Malaysia.

Nieves won the top prize in the Philippine leg of the competition, which pits gaming journalists in three games from Electronic Arts; Crysis, Need for Speed Pro Street and FIFA 2008.

In an interview, Nieves said he has already been practicing on FIFA 2008, the only game that he is not strongly familiar.

“Crysis plays much like most first-person shooters that I’ve played before so it’s easy to pick up and I’ve been playing the Need for Speed series since it came out. Soccer games are more difficult for me because I’m not much into sports games,” he said.

The grand winner of the Hong Kong finals will take home an high-end Alienware gaming PC powered by an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor while the second place winner will be awarded with a Creative Gigaworks S750 gaming speaker system.