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Monthly Archives: September 2010

Shuffled Row for Kindle Impressions

In keeping with the spirit of the eReader, Kindle, Shuffled Row is a word game for the Amazon-created handheld device. Of the two word games released by Amazon this summer, namely Shuffled Row and Every Word, it is Shuffled Row that is definitely the most addictive.

The game starts off with a cache of 60 letter tiles with a certain, predetermined number of each available per round. The letter tiles are kind of like Scrabble pieces and each has an assigned letter value. The tiles are doled out periodically and as they appear, you must come up with a word that will clear them off the board to make room for more tiles.

The longer the word you create, the more you score for that word. You must use at least two letters to form a word, but no bonuses kick in until you are forming words at least four letters long. The point of the game is to use all the tiles with none left over, which, if you pull it off, earns you an Empty Rack Bonus.

It’s relatively easy to breeze through the game on short words alone, but doing so comes at the cost of a lower score; earning a higher score requires more risk, more patience and a wider vocabulary.

One negative is that the game, like Every Word, is a battery hog on Kindle and you can easily drain down a full K3 battery in only a few hours of playing Shuffled Row, whereas if you purely use your Kindle to read books, one charge can last three to four weeks.

Shuffled Row is great for those with hitting the road with travel deals, like a family vacation, though, because even if your kids don’t have the patience to spend the whole drive reading, something like Shuffled Row can keep them engaged. Variety’s the perfect spice to make Kindle even more useful, and Shuffled Row is certainly a welcome addition to my K3′s library.

Best of all, it’s free.

Experimenting with Shaiya

I’ve been staying away from free online MMOs lately since a lot of them are boring and incredible time-sucks. Searching for good car insurance quotes is often a far better use of my time, in fact.

But lately my wife’s been hooked on Shaiya and I decided to check it out because it was more of an RPG than an RTS. I will say that for a game that’s free, it’s not bad. I’d compare it favorably to Dungeons and Dragons Online. The graphics are not spectacular, but they are good enough, and it is like playing a PS3 or 360 RPG in some respects.

The biggest difference is that console RPGs just have better stories and graphics, in my opinion. As an occasional visitor, Shaiya is sometimes a good distraction or stress-break. But I can see how it could become an obsession, so I’ll be careful how often I fire it up.

Kindle 3 is very nice

I’ve had my Kindle 3 for over 10 days now and I have to say that, despite some talk of under-performing batteries and other problems, I’ve experienced none of those difficulties. My Kindle 3 is smooth, nearly flawless and easy to read. The WiFi performs smoothly and about the only time the battery drains significantly is when I play Every Word or Shuffled Row.

In short, as the season turns to weather appropriate for heated mattress pads, I am enjoying the thought of some terrific nights curling up with my Kindle 3 and trying not to drift off to sleep before I at least make my way through a couple chapters a night.

Alan Wake impressions

For our anniversary, my wife bought us the long-awaited Xbox 360 game, Alan Wake. It’s a great suspense game with a healthy dose of survival horror tossed into the mix. And so far, from what I’ve played of it, it’s the finest example of the genre since Silent Hill 2 on PlayStation 2. Yes, I like it that much! And what a great personalized gift for my wife to think of!

Alan Wake focuses on a writer of popular suspense novels who goes with his wife to Bright Falls, a town in the Pacific Northwest that looks just beautiful and gorgeous on the 360! Well, during the day it does. At night is a different story as the locals tend to go mad and try to kill you.

Instead of standard weaponry alone, your most important weapon in Alan Wake is one’s flashlight, since only light can drive the possessing spirits away long enough to make them vulnerable to physical attack.

It’s a chiller of a title, yet offers a great narrative over the course of the game. We waited until the game dropped in price, but Alan Wake was certainly worth the wait.

Every Word for Kindle impressions

The new game for Kindle owners, Every Word, has barely been out two months and is already the topic of some controversy. It seems that within a month of its initial release, Amazon pulled the original game from availability and released a new version. Why? Because a variant of the “N-word” apparently pops up in the game, and Amazon didn’t want to cause offense. The word in question was not the N-word itself, but an adjective that means “miserly” or “stingy.”

And you know what? I’m OK with that. I’m not saying that political correctness is always OK, but if a company can avoid using a word that might tick off certain parts of their customer base, it’s just smart and good business sense to avoid such a word.

Of course, some folks, over-reacting to the minor change, have now given the game a new nickname, “Almost Every Word.”

Unfortunately, the minor dust-up could have been avoided had the game been released without that combination in its dictionary to begin with. And the controversy kind of masks the fact that Every Word is actually kind of a fun little game, perfect for the Kindle audience of book readers.

Played a bit like the board game Boggle, the game tosses a set number of letters at you and then asks you to come up with all the words that can be formed by them. To progress to the next level, one must come up with the one or two words that can be formed using every letter on the board once. This particular N-word variant was one such combination in the game. Using it was necessary to advance to the next level.

I’ve played Every Word on my new Kindle and while it accelerates battery use, it’s a fun game that is addictive to play because it’s very hard to ace all ten levels, especially since the game has a generous library of letter combos, so there’s not a lot of repetition. My only complaint (other than I’ve gained back five pounds lately and I hope I don’t need HCG shots Austin Powers-style to lose ‘em again, which has nothing to do with Every Word or Kindle) is that I have run into knowing some words that can be made out of certain letter scrambles that the game does not include in its dictionary.

And I’m not just talking about archaic synonyms for miserly, either, but some rather obvious and simple words. Oh well, no game is perfect; but Every Word is good addictive fun for most avid readers – in other words, the Kindle crowd.

Kindle 3 Impressions

Well, my Kindle 3 arrived today and despite feeling like I should check my door locks in case the neighbors saw what the UPS guy brought me, I couldn’t be more pleased. I had hands-on interaction with the K2 in a Target, and I really prefer the new K3 layout. I like the aesthetic of the D-pad better than the more joystick-like K2 5-way controller.

I also really liked the design of the secure packaging the K3 came in; it really seemed smartly designed to eliminate jostling.

My K3 is a Wi-Fi only and I was actually pleasantly surprised with how smoothly it integrated into our home WiFi system. The K3, after start-up, did an automatic scan, found our system, and all I had to do was enter in the password… after that, the K3 did everything!

I had about 57 eBooks either purchased or sampled from my time using K4PC, and the K3 found them all. It automatically downloaded all but 14 of them and the rest of those downloaded individually with no hassles.

I also appreciated I could read and interact with Kindle from the first moment, while it was charging.

The whole experience thus far has been very intuitive, very friendly and very enjoyable. I love the contrast, and the customizability of the interface.

All I can say is that those who are having problems must have received a bad unit, because this K3 I have is a dream… I was told it should take 3 hours to charge initially, but I’ve had it plugged in just under two hours and the light just went from yellow to green, so this K3 is exceeding all my expectations.

This is my first-ever K3 and I can say confidently that barring the unforeseen, I will keep it until at least the K5 generation debuts.

My only complaint so far – and it’s a minor and understandable one – is that when playing games like Shuffled Row and Every Word on Kindle, rather than reading books, the battery seems to drop a whole lot faster. Then again, even those games are bound to take up more battery than is required to simply display text.