Archive for September, 2008

Indie devs make their own Pre-Portal Portal

September 16, 2008 at 11:44 pm · Filed under Gaming ·Tagged ,

For everyone who played and loved and probably replayed the smash hit Portal, a few plucky developers are making their own free mod of the game.  And unlike other Portal mods that are just map packs (such as the 3D version of the flash game) this is a full fledged prequel with a pre-GLaDOS storyline.

Portal: Prelude, as its name states it, is an unofficial prequel to the game Portal. Its story revolves around the pre-GlaDOS epoch, even before she was plugged in. At this time, test subjects were monitored by real Aperture Science employees whose work was tedious, lengthy and repetitive. This is why they decided to build a great artificial intelligence that could both replace them in these difficult tasks, but also take responsibility for many other tasks within the complex and compete with Black Mesa’s superiority. All employees of the Aperture Science complex are now eagerly awaiting GlaDOS. Maybe even a little too eagerly, as the upcoming events will tell…

Since Valve is expanding the Portal franchise on their own, they are working extra hard to launch this free mod.  We expect Portal: Prelude to be released by the early October.

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My life with Scrabulous

September 12, 2008 at 6:39 pm · Filed under Gaming, Internet ·Tagged

While I’ve had to spend the last few years dredging through the countless apps on facebook, being bitten by zombies and vampires and probably some Frankensteins, I really only used one app, the Multiplayer Trivia one.  Even now I spend virtually no time on the site, so I don’t even play that anymore.  Well for those of you who don’t know they had a really good Scrabble app called Scrabulous, and Hasbro thinking it wasn’t very fair to their copyright (and it wasn’t) got Facebook to kill the app.

Piqued by my interest in the new site design I logged back into the old ‘book and also tried the new *OFFICIAL* Scrabble app.  It was terrible, sucked, no fun.  Yes you play with friends, but you can’t play right away, you’re stuck with long-term matches, like playing chess by mail.  And this in turn inspired me to try and find the missing Scrabulous.  Which I did, at scrabulous.com, and it is really cool.  You log into the website and jump into a lobby, which seem to always have plenty of players, and can get started quickly and easily.

There are a couple of notes for those who have only lived with the board game version.  First off, all matches are automatically timed, if you run out of time you lose, which is fair considering it is an online game.  Second they have two different dictionaries and they have numerous options when it comes to bogus words.  Most of the early matches I’ve played used the easiest option where the dictionary automatically bumps bad words, no penalty minus wasted time.  The others allow opponents to challenge with varying penalties, and it’s much easier than flipping thru a thick Scrabble dictionary.  It is a fast, efficient version of the game.  If those reinforced gameplay rules are a massive turn-off, then stick to the board game, otherwise I would say that scrabulous is so easy to get in and play it’s worth it for anyone who cares even a modicum for the Scrabble (c).

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