Sunday, September 19, 2010

Googleoids... I'm #3. And other stuff.

So, I've been playing some more Droid games lately. And Googleoids caught my attention. I love word and anagram games and loved the idea of the game: 8 letter anagrams, each letter is encapsulated within a google image search result of each of the letters. The letter/image capsule float around the screen as you drag them into slots at the bottom, trying to figure out the 8 letter word or submitting smaller words for lesser scores.


As you can see from the screen shot, I (as Jackalshorns -- an anagram of my name) am currently #3 on the leader board.

This was exciting the first time I saw it, but then I noticed a few things that made me less excited: The leader board wasn't all that well populated (not many folks play the game and submit their scores), and there were only a handful of 8 letter words in the game's database.

Kudos for the concept, but as with most games (or movies, books, songs, etc) the execution is critical in order to get a great payoff. I certainly hope that someone takes this game to the next level.

I'm not sure how hard it would be to get a nice mix of 8 letter anagrams that vary in difficulty/rarity in order to come up with a more compelling word list for competitive play, but certainly this would make leader boards much more interesting to competitive players.

Other Stuff


I sincerely hope to start writing more frequently, especially since I'm about to enter a phase of playing lots more games... From Facebook to Droid to PC and Console games now that the holiday season is upon us.

I'll start crafting some lists soon. Mostly I assume I'll try to get my hands on the blockbuster console releases (e.g., newest Halo, Dead Rising, Ratchet & Clank, Call of Duty, etc). But then I also need to think about the next wave of motion controller (or controller-less controller) games, too.


And, of course, I need to keep up with the games here: http://www.insidesocialgames.com/ for work and such.

But wait, there's more... Now that OpenFeint is available on Droid there are lots more quality games that I can play from my phone.

Damn it feels good to be a gamer right now.