Thursday, April 15, 2010

Words With Friends: sorry, William

I just laid down ZEBRA, with Z on triple-letter and A on double-word. 74 points. Oops.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Words With Friends: qis?

Stupid non-word. Niaz came back with "qis", on a double-word tile. I've put down my "aloft" for 22 points, and I'm 19 points in the lead. Can I hold on?

Words With Friends: come on, Niaz

Words With Friends is a Scrabble-like game, which you play against other people over the Internet. Niaz and I have been playing a game for a couple of weeks now, and it's been quite tense. He built a 50-point lead near the start by making "rezones" on a triple-word score. I've been chipping away at his lead for a while, and finally overtook him a couple of days ago with "thugs" on two triple-letter tiles. Since then he's not played, which is annoying since I have an excellent next word to play which should score 22 points. We're now into the endgame, with scrappy words using up letters, so that could well win me it.

But I need him to have his turn first. Come on ...

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Fish Listening to Radio: they've got the radio!

An Xbox Indie game, this has a certain charm to it. It looks hand-drawn, and is just line drawing, but as you progress through eating woms then it slowly colours bits of the game world in. I've had ideas about games being slowly coloured in through progress for ages, so it's good to see something taking the idea and running with it. It's a fairly simplistic game, where hooks descend and ascend and you must eat the worms on descending hooks but avoid the ascending ones. The more worms you eat, the more points you get. The hooks can also attach to the fishes' radio, and if so you must rescue it before it's taken out of the water. You get no points for that.

The single player is OK, but it shines in multiplayer, where you are trying to get the same worms to get more points than the other, but trying to save the same radio. A strange mix of competitive and cooperative play.