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Daily Archives: September 5, 2010

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.