Lavonardo

Mattel’s entry to combat the 8-bilion-pound gorilla known as Scrabulous has not been well-received.

In addition to alleged bugs and other issues, the application is marred by the inability of americans to play. Due to distribution agreements, Mattel’s application cannot be played by US citizens, and that clearly cuts down the potential players a lot.

Haven’t touched the game yet myself, but will report upon getting exposed to it.

The details of the eagerly-awaited European release of the Rock Band game have been published. That is, the Xbox 360 release alone, as the other consoles will follow “later in the summer”.

The date is as close to optimal as they get - the 23. of May being my birthday also.

But the price is steep, the currently very cheap dollar is not reflected at all in the 240€ cost for the game and the initial set of instruments.

The only 2000+ point word in Scrabble continues to pull in visitors.

Found out the definition for singhiozzerebbe at the very source, the discussion board for the Scrabulous-game in facebook.

What does it mean, then?

Simply: “She/He would hiccup”. Quite efficient, packing all that into a single word. And before anybody asks, yes, the Italian Scrabble game actually has TWO Z-letters.

Didn’t play much pinball at the semi-irregular gamenight on saturday. And the games that got played, were nothing to write home about. Certainly not that good training for the Sörkka Pinball Open looming on the horizon.

On the other hand, the video games-side of things was a wee bit more successful. Against all odds scored a goal in NHL 08, and managed to both assist and shoot several in Pro Evolution Soccer. Even Halo 3 multiplayer was not an utter disaster. For that we have to go for driving games, once again. Though nowhere near as terrible as Moto GP, I was not really that efficient at the fourth installment of the Project Gotham Racer-saga.

Yeah, the name of the game is a blatant rip of the first song off Pearl Jam’s third album.

But that doesn’t diminish the appeal of Alejandro Guillen’s Spin the Black Circle.

Simple controls, addictive gameplay, effective physics model - what’s there not to like. Apart from the fact that once addiction sets in, the inertia/gravity combo is pretty hard to let go.

Yeah, it’s not game of the week still, and this is not the interactive fiction-dose that was promised (still haven’t finished Lost Pig.)

Finished the first episode of Forumwarz, the massively single player online game of forum domination and pwnage.

Had plenty of fun, was impressed by the implementation, and will definitely be back for episode 2, as soon as it is released.

The troll was probably not the easiest character class to play (having to rely on lots of supplies on harder runs puts a crimp on the wallet), but conceptually it was way more appealing than the other choices.

Interactive fiction - that is: games that use pure text for input and output - seems not to be the topic of a snazzy movie.

But against all odds, GET LAMP, a documentary film on the very subject looks to be very interesting indeed. Jason Scott, the director, has previously put together a well-received documentary film on the bulletin board systems communities.

The recently released trailer for GET LAMP is not exactly action-packed, but a neat dissection of the first ever internet community I actually participated, back in the early nineties, when USENET was king of the hill.

Come visit the growing municipality of Suur-Haaga, a small town with big opportunities!

[ via Pinseri. ]

Matt Barton started his history of computer roleplaying games in GameSetWatch, bartered it to Gamasutra to expand the readership, and has now expanded the subject into a 450 page book.

Dungeons & Desktops just went on top of my Amazon stack, and based on what I’ve seen on the web, will be good reading.

Links to the history in three chunks (I’ve covered them before, but cannot be bothered to look them up now): Early Years (1980-83), Golden Age (1985-1993) and Platinum and Modern Ages (1994-2004).

Based on uncovered evidence, it would seem that Days of Wonder’s Ticket to Ride is headed for the Xbox Live Arcade.

The two first XBLA takes on board games (Catan and Carcassonne) have been pleasant indeed, and there’s no reason to doubt this wouldn’t succeed as well. After all, there’s already a successful digital adaptation of the game, created and hosted by the company behind the boardgame.

The fourth season of Lost kicked off on finnish television last week.

And continues directly where the third season ended, with a rift-inducing arrival of “rescuers” and flashforwards. The identity of the former is very much under wraps, but seems not to be of good news to all inhabitants. As to the second point, the main storyline still seems to occur on the island, I’m using that as the zero-point in the timeline.

For new arrivals on the scene, the production company has put together a nicely compressed view on the first three seasons. Its duration, at a mere 8:15, should not deter any viewers.

Via Domus, the Lost video game is out in Finland also (seemed to enjoy a rather delayed release), but following mainly lukewarm reviews I’m in no hurry to pick this up. With the sizable backlog that doesn’t diminish by itself, this wouldn’t get much playtime right now.

Yeah, as the most observant of you have noted, this class of entries actually is about “games of an indeterminate period”.

Anyway, I expect that entries will be added about recently enjoyed games, and created a separate category for them.

Forumwarz remains enjoyable, located an interesting interview with the authors and appended a link to it in the original entry.

Next up: something from the interactive fiction-side of the yard - it’s been a while since the last IF-post.

I’ve been playing a couple of games of Scrabulous on facebook lately.

The legally quite contested take on the classic Scrabble word game works well, and is recommended to all fans of the game. This version of the game is optimized for sneak peeks during the working day, since the interaction between players is minimal and there’s absolutely no need for simultaneous activity (there is a token messaging mechanism for gloating).

The game works as expected, and keeps statistics across the tens of million games played. Sadly, the statistics on used words is not available, since easy browsability would lead to rampant cheating. That is, if looking for words outside the game IS indeed considered to be cheating.

Dictionaries are available in three languages, and I seriously think whoever’s been using words like “SINGHIOZZEREBBE” (worth 2000+ points alone) to outscore his opponents has probably has probably been shooting for this word since the very beginning of the game - the fact that the same guy has used the word in multiple games is even scarier. My top word’s been worth 36 points thus far, “JETS” hit both a triple-square and used the “s” to complete another word - hence the unexpectedly high take.

Kevin Kelly argues that a thousand fans are enough to support an artist. Where the definition of a fan more or less is determined by his willingness to spend one day’s wages annually on something the artist supplies.

If that’s the criteria, then there aren’t many causes I can consider myself a fan - after all most bands produce a single album per a couple of years, and tour Finland even less often. And unless there’s a considerable backlog to pick up of an author, single books don’t break the limit either. Games might come close, but they’re hardly the products of an individual artist these days, rather a sizable production company.

Nine Inch Nails, whose new album Ghosts I-IV was released on tuesday in multiple formats broke all the expectations with the most expensive variant - the 300$ alternative was sold out in a day.

Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away today.

I know I would be a worse human being if it wouldn’t have been for role-playing games.

GDC finished a couple of weeks ago, TED was last week, ETech kicks off today, and SxSW is next week.

That’s a lot of press releases to grind and read, not to mention sessions for attendees to sit in and try to craft intelligible blog entries of.

And I’m sure there’s indeed wheat among the chaff, but just haven’t been able to summon the energy to browse the presentations available.

The games will be held in late may, 23-24.5. to be exact, in a location to be disclosed later.

Rules and instructions are available.

Missed the tournament last year (though being half the world away is an acceptable excuse), had great fun back in 2006, even if the results were not exactly top-shelf.

The attached image is of Pat Lawlor’s Safecracker, the curiously short-cabineted boardgame/pinball combination that has evolved into one of my favorites lately.

If the prospect of a postmodern webgame that concentrates on the wrong side of the internet culture appeals to you at all, ForumWarz is heavily recommended.

ForumWarz is a beautifully realized implementation that emulates the whole internet in a single browser window - be it forums, instant messaging, misanthropic people, suspicious webstores or spam, it’s all here. And as a game it’s a great parody

Me, I’m a third level troll, on track to pwn as many forums as possible with tools such as spoiler generation and gratuitous ASCII art.

EDIT (16.3.2008): Andy Baio < href="http://www.waxy.org/archive/2008/02/25/forumwar.shtml">interviews the authors. It’s not your average interview:

We used to drink beer and go out for dinner at every meeting, but after a couple of months that got expensive and unproductive.