I'd been getting increasingly addicted to the Facebook game Scrabulous. Hell, I was even about to win a game or two. So it was a bit of a shock this morning when I discovered that Scrabulous was taken down. Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble in the US and Canada, threw a C&D order at Facebook.

Scrabulous, for those of you who don't follow the game, was written by a couple of guys in India, using the Scrabble rules and board. They never bothered to buy a license for the game. It's doubtful they'd have had the money anyway.

Hasbro and Mattel, which own Scrabble, have been vocally cranky for months about the fact that Scrabulous was enormously popular and earning them no money.

Hasbro's solution: sell a license to Electronic Arts to create an "official" version of Scrabulous. Wait until the EA version is ready, then cease-and-desist Scrabulous to death and force all the Scrabulous players to move to the "official" version. Step 3: Profit!

One problem: Hasbro's timing was off. The EA version of Scrabulous is still in beta. EA's servers were totally unprepared for the load. They've been down all afternoon. (I wonder if anybody at Hasbro bothered to warn EA that they were about to do this?)

I played a bit with a very early version of the EA beta awhile back. There's a reason nobody wanted to use it. Scrabulous was faster and had a better UI. It's possible they've improved it since then, but I can't tell. I can't even load the site.

At least 60,000 potential Hasbro customers are now very, very pissed off. (That's the number of people who've signed on to "Save our Scrabulous" groups on Facebook so far.)

I do so love corporate stupidity, especially when I get to point and laugh at it instead of trying to fix it.

I have discovered through experiment that it is possible to take your old Quake PC CD-ROM, perform some mildly arcane magic, and get it up and running at full speed on a Macintosh G5.

Looks a helluva lot better than it ever did on my old Pentium, that's for sure.

I leave video game design to the professionals, like strahd72, aefre, ketina, fraxl among others. Take what follows with an appropriate grain of salt.

( Game design, aesthetics, storytelling, and Bioshock )

I have, no shit, found somebody who ported the first-person shooter video game Quake into text-based format.

I'm in awe of the kind of genius it takes to think that this was a good idea.

( Here, have a partial transcript of my first game. )

For those who can't live without it, this and a ridiculous number of other text adventure games can be found here. You'll need a z-machine interpreter.

Right. Back to grading.

ETA for the old and nerdy: If anyone's wondering what got me thinking about text-based games again, it was a discussion of the never-released Infocom Hitchhiker's Guide sequel that drew in most of the old Infocom developers.

Via theferrett, possibly the ultimate in Rock Band drumming:



I like that kit too. theferrett pointed out that it's been substantially modified; a real bass pedal drumming against a practice pad, with new pads on the drum heads for better response.

Male voice: "Hey, waysofseeing, are you a girl?"

::silence::

Msg: You have been removed from the game by the host.

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What I really need to do the next time is to get bubblesutonium to chat up the other players in the game while I play. That oughta screw with everybody's heads.