Post with 17 notes
Words With Friends : iOS
When I sat down and started this blog all those months ago, I didn’t think for one minute that I’d find myself typing about playing scrabble on the iPod, but here we are. I recently inherited an iPod Touch and so have dived into the gaming possibilities on the device and although Words With Friends is where I’m going to start, it isn’t where I’m going to end, and now iOS games will form a little portion of this blog along with their big cousins.
So, Words With Friends… For the uninitiated, this is two-player scrabble on iOS, allowing you to play with either a friend or a random stranger at the touch of a button. I read a little article about how amazingly rich it’s made the coders and you have to laugh because there really is nothing too this. The graphics are average, there’s no AI, there’s pretty much nothing except a small game engine and a large database of a billion scrabble games. I shouldn’t really call it scrabble though, as it uses a different board and slightly different letter scores, both undoubtedly to get away from copyright issues.
WWF is a great little time waster, but I learned in my week or so of regular play that unfortunately it has little to do with having a good vocabulary and a lot more to do with clever tile placement to deny your opponent access to the good board squares. In fact, winning this game has a lot more to do with what random two and three letter words you can come up with than knowing anything of length. Perhaps this is a problem with scrabble too; I’m not played it this intensively before, but if it is true, it’s a shame. On the plus side, I found myself to be very good at vicious board-lockdown strategies and managed a run of 40 or so games without being defeated.
It’s not a world shattering game, it’s not about to wow the gaming community as a whole, but it does entertain through slow days and is addictive enough to keep you awake at night squeezing out one more move, and for 59p who can complain? Sure, there are a bunch of cheating apps out there (and a bunch of cheats who use them) and the dictionary is pretty odd, coming up with words that you’d swear it just made up while denying ‘Jew’ (the number of times I wanted to write this is actually bizarre), but all in all it works well and does include a little chat client so you can poke fun at the people you are beating (or chat about the telly). The only real downside is waiting hours (or even days) for a response from your opponent when you are in the mood to play now, but with 20 games possible on the go at once, it’s likely that someone out there will reply.
-
tekkani posted this
