Sunday, March 01, 2009

Scrabble Advice

Some time ago, two brothers from India developed an application for facebook called Scrabulous, that allowed facebook users to play Scrabble against each other. Other than the name, it was no different from Scrabble. It also wasn't licenced by either of the companies that own the trademark to the game. Legal battles ensued, and eventually Scrabulous was shut down. In the meantime, Scrabulous was reinvented as Lexulous, a Scrabble-like game but not Scrabble, while Hasbro, the company that owns the trademark in Canada and the US, and Electronic Arts have developed their own version of Scrabble, which I assume is legal. Mattel, which owns the trademark in the rest of the world, has also developed a version of Scrabble which I shouldn't be able to play because I am not outside of the US or Canada, yet I just did. My impression is that Hasbro's version was hastily put together, ostensibly because they wanted to get the game to their fans on facebook as soon as possible, but more likely they were trying to prevent players from switching their allegiance to Lexulous. The application is still in beta, so there are lots of bugs. Also, it's usually referred to as Scrabble Beta on the discussion board.

Personally, I haven't experienced any of these bugs. The only problems that I've had is that the game is slow to load, if it loads at all, when they're doing server maintenance, but this isn't really a bug. But people are reporting alls sorts of bugs to the discussion board for the game (which is not the place to report bugs). One of the more common ones that I've read about is that the tiles that appear in the virtual rack are not the players actual tiles. The latest such question was as follows

i leave the screen, come back, and my letters have changed............wtf?

To which I responded with the advice
The problem is not Scrabble Beta, but your screen. It has become infested with tiny little ants who are rearranging your pixels. Clever little buggers they are. Just tilt your screen to the side, and shake it a bit, kinda like an Etch-a-Sketch. That should clear things up. Oh, and get some bug spray and spray it into the vents at the back of your monitor, to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen again.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

"Oh, and get some bug spray and spray it into the vents at the back of your monitor, to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen again."
LOL :D

The Book Chick said...

You did not write that, did you? That is too funny, I have no idea how you come up with this stuff. What would be funnier is if someone actually followed your advice :)

Anonymous said...

No you DIDN'T!