I play this game a lot. With a lot of friends. The addictive scoring and 1 up was similar to Scrabble as well. Scrabble focused on a lot on your vocabulary and word play but Words with Friends is different in many ways.

An overview

First off they have a much smaller board that they use compared to scrabble. The focus is on capturing tiles that have double word score and triple letter score. Exchanging letters is a move where you can trade how many ever letters you want while missing a turn. I don’t think Scrabble had this.

You have achievements in your main score. This is just a vanity thing though, you can’t use the points you get here to trade in for anything else. Perhaps Zynga could have something here that would make it more interesting.

It’s syncronous across platforms. So whether you play on Android, iOS or the web you are auto synced to the last move (this is a HUGE boon when I’m travelling and playing and then go home and power my desktop).

Something annoying

I thought I was the only one that did this, but as Ben writes on the review he did of this game.

The interface is simple enough. My biggest quibble with Words is the difficulty in moving letter tiles to their intended location on the board. The camera will zoom in automatically when you begin placing letters. Most of the time, though, you will need to do some replacing. But you can fiddle as long as you need to before playing a turn. One you’ve positioned your tiles, tap the Play button. The app will ask you to confirm—you can recall the word if you have second thoughts—and will buzz you if you try to pass off a phony word.

Something very different being missed

Drew Millard has a great point to make in playing this game in his review.

“There’s another mitigating factor to the game that people tend to completely forget. When you’re on your iPhone, and your opponent is on their iPhone, the flow of a conventional Scrabble game is interrupted. When you play Scrabble, there’s a socially acceptable time limit between moves, before your opponent gets annoyed and doesn’t want to be your friend anymore. For the sake of argument, let’s say this time is about three and a half minutes. Meanwhile, you can take three and a half days between your moves in Words if you want. This has two ramifications. One, you tend to just play off of whatever word your opponent just played, because you’ve probably lost sight of your overarching strategy, and the game highlights the most recent word played. Two, you tend to play really, really long words, because you can take as much time to think about your letters as possible. This effective lack of a play clock completely changes the nature of the game. And that, (words with) friends, is why Zynga With Friends has made a broken game.”

Something ridiculous?

The board is different in size so you tend to go with words on the outside and then go inside to try to get words. I have seen some ridicolous words being made and I saw this screen shot. The name of the word is oxyphenbutazone. 1670 points. Who woulda thunk?

BYOC.in has been trying to be a premier gaming platform for Indians for quite some time. The concept is you bring your own computer (that’s where you get BYOC from) and you play games in a huge LAN festival that goes on for a few days.

So far they had lacklustre games and I was there for one of the first few. Over the last few years they seem to have improved on both things. More games and better organisation.

I have to see how to get to Gurgaon now on the 6/7/8th of January where this event will be held. At the Ambience mall (the 1km mall of the north).

They have  a few games that are quite interesting. Starcraft 2 and Quake are in for Rs 15,000. Rs 10,000 for Starcraft 2 and Rs 5,000 for quake. That’s totally awesome since I play both these games.

But what is surprising is Angry Birds has a competition itself! I’m waiting to see what rules they have and how they determine the winner, but perhaps this is the first time in India a social gaming competition has crept in. Will it be on the iPad? iPhone? PC?

I’m totally ignoring the return of the usual suspects – Dota, CS, COD4 etc.

Great points here. Full post here.

Zynga’s genius has been its focus on delivering games that fit today’s digital lifestyle. Zynga’s games can be accessed instantly — there is no brick or mortar or online store to visit, no waiting for the game to download, and no need to manage installation particulars. You can effortlessly play Zynga’s games with friends — there is no need to make sure your friend has the same “system” or “OS”.

The user interface and user experience dynamics of Zynga’s games are designed to eliminate the steep, frustrating learning curves and ponderous manuals or guides that are typical of most hit packaged goods games. If you only have five minutes to play, Zynga can accommodate you. And in a world where time is quickly eclipsing money as the most valuable currency, this is transformative. Finally, Zynga lets you experience the game before having to pay for it, eliminating the angst and risk aversion that accompany any consumer choosing a $60 console or PC game.

By embracing today’s digital lifestyle, Zynga has done something profound. It has built a multibillion dollar company that creates products that almost no one particularly likes. Their virality is a forcing function of their design and is not based on word of mouth. Very few of their users ever choose to pay for the experience (and the length of time the games provide entertainment for the users could almost be termed disposable). This is not necessarily a criticism but rather recognition of the role these games have played in leading a fundamental disruption of the industry.

Life is in living. Not existing. Rich, immense and deep living – Arnold Schwarzenegger

I have been a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes right from the first time I read Arthur Conan Doyle’s rendition. What is so damn attractive to his characterisation is not the brilliance displayed by Sherlock, but the fascinating depth in the mundane.

What can seeing a persons twisted collar tell you? What was he up to. You piece things with observation and rationally deduce a possible conclusion. You then test theories. Sherlock Holmes was a scientist by nature, but he experimented and fed off people and their liabilities. And the resulting fascination in the stories is because at the core it’s about the depth that one person can have. Imagine what 6 billion could tell us.

Sherlock Holmes

I have been watching the BBC Sherlock series and I love it. It’s superbly written, the actors fit the part and the plot is adapted to our modern times. So where there are weather maps on mobile, the use of ipads and stuff, you can see why Sherlock is a timeless character because he deduces people.

Here’s what the actor playing Sherlock, Benedict Cumberbatch had to say,

“Our daily lives are so mundane, we get taken over by what is immediately in front of us and we don’t see beyond that. ‘We don’t observe as he (Holmes) keeps on saying, we see things, and what is so thrilling about him is it all suddenly becomes a potential adventure.

‘I think if you look at the example of Holmes, or at least what I have learnt from playing him, is that you see extraordinary depth in the smallest detail. It’s joining the dots, that’s the fun thing, building a narrative.

‘So I sit on trains and I try to see, “Is that mud on the bottom of a boot?”, “I wonder where he has been”. “That collar looks a little bit frayed”, “I wonder whether he is has been travelling for a while or has he forgotten his washing?”

And if you haven’t already, watch this trailer and get the show.

Daniel Craig is best known as James Bond. But what was not known was that he had to step in as Writer for Quantam of Solace along with the director to complete the movie. He shares this thoughts on doing a complete job here in the interview. The last 4 lines are the ones I want you to read.

It seems that the script is sometimes an after-thought on huge productions.

‘Yes and you swear that you’ll never get involved with shit like that, and it happens. On “Quantum”, we were fucked. We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers’ strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn’t employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, “Never again”, but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes – and a writer I am not.’

You had to rewrite scenes yourself?

‘Me and the director [Marc Forster] were the ones allowed to do it. The rules were that you couldn’t employ anyone as a writer, but the actor and director could work on scenes together. We were stuffed. We got away with it, but only just. It was never meant to be as much of a sequel as it was, but it ended up being a sequel, starting where the last one finished.’

It was still a massive commercial success though. So it wasn’t a failure in that sense.

‘No, quite. Thank God it worked, and it worked like gangbusters. But for me personally, on a level of feeling satisfied, I would want to do better next time. That’s really important to me.’

To give a better performance?

‘No, the whole film. If you’re going to do that sort of stuff, you’ve just got to get it right. You’ve got to give it your best shot. When you’ve got all that talent, everyone gunning to make it good, you’ve got to get it… For fuck’s sake, it’s a Bond movie. You want people to go, “Whooah!” – a sharp intake of breath during a movie is never a bad thing.

Bob Dylan:
You have to have belief. You must have a purpose. You must believe that you-can disappear through walls. Without that belief, you’re not going to become a very good rock singer, or pop singer, or folk-rock singer, or you’re not going to become a very good lawyer. Or a doctor. You must know why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Playboy:
Why are you doing what you’re doing?

Dylan:
[Pause] Because I don’t know anything else to do. I’m good at it.

Bob Dylan in a playboy interview.

I have about 150 subscribers (Thank you guys and girls I love you). I have noticed that a lot of people read the feed through RSS only. I didn’t want to flood your feed with stuff, but of late I read tons of interesting links and I have some short quips on that.

The grandfather of that, though, is John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. I thought of that concept independantly but like Apple doing windows, Gruber did it to his blog and I was smitten.

So I got a hold of the necessary plugins to make it work in WordPress and this is what I have.

In your feed if you see a star on the left, that’s a blog post. Kinda like this one.

If you don’t see a star, it is a link to something I found interesting. A star at the bottom of the post would show the permalink to my blog post so you can bookmark it later on should you wish to do so.

I have tons of interesting links to share. Hopefully this filtering of content I read would help you find interesting stuff too.

I also know you are already applauding my MS  Paint skills. Thanks.

Command and Conquer Generals was one of the best games in terms of Strategy when it was released. EA sports had announced a while back that they were setting up an exclusive Command and Conquers Studio. Bioware then jumped in and mentioned a secret project. This was followed by them roping in Jon Van Canegham (Might and Magic’s co creator) and boom this is what they are going to give us soon.

There goes my 2013. If you are interested, Gamespot has a nice interview with the executive producers of Command and Conquer Generals 2 here.

I’m a video game junkie. You should be too. And this is the perfect set of gifts for the both of us. Amazon.com has some amazing deals on Video games (a lot of the great titles on the PS3 and Xbox are under $ 20) you guys should hit this link here – Amazon’s game gift deal. There’s no referrale code from my end nothing. Just grab as many games as you can and start playing!

The one I’m interested in Super Street Fighter 4 is selling for $15.99!

I like how Twitter integrated the new UI to provide a bigger emphasis on Social and sharing. A lot of the stuff, in terms of the UI, is to help manage information from your network. You’ll see that they have de-emphasized stuff like DM’s and added Discovery and Trends.

I really like the new UI Design that Twitter’s implemented. You can see a lot of the stuff up at fly.twitter.com as well.

Dan Frommer, from Splatf.com, has a fantastic round up of 10 things about the new Twitter as well.