Game

In the high school cafeteria of Facebook apps, Scrabulous is like that girl who gets in trouble for showing too much skin, only to throw on a hoodie and be let back into the principal's good graces. Sort of. The game has effectively returned, but with a redesigned board, a few original play options, a different points tabulation system, and a new name, Wordscraper.

Props to Adam Ostrow of Mashable for picking up on this one early.

The Facebook application Scrabulous had been taken down by its creators earlier this week when Hasbro, the game manufacturer that owns the … Read more

Nintendo on Tuesday filed lawsuits in Japan against five companies it said are allowing the illegal downloading of games from the Internet and the subsequent playing of those games on the company's hit DS handheld device.

The video game giant filed its suit along with 54 game development companies, all in the hopes of stopping the defendants--which it did not name in a press release--from enabling the downloading.

Nintendo "filed a legal action with the Tokyo District Court regarding game copying devices such as the 'R4 Revolution for DS' seeking to stop the importing and selling of those … Read more

Allowing journalists access to an uncensored Internet apparently isn't on the International Olympic Committee's list of things to do before the Beijing games begin next week.

A day after journalists learned their Internet activities would be limited, a senior IOC official admitted to Reuters on Wednesday that committee members had cut a deal to let the Chinese government block sensitive Web sites, despite promises of unrestricted access.

"I regret that it now appears BOCOG has announced that there will be limitations on Web site access during games time," IOC press chief Kevan Gosper told Reuters, referring … Read more

Inventor Daniel Young says the pieces on his New Wave Chess & Checkers board are so immovable, the games can be played in a hurricane. We're assuming a checkmate won't be the first thing on your mind as the winds hit, but we nonetheless like the idea of a game board with that kind of holding power.

Young, a designer for Paradoxy Products, discovered that by cutting slits into the fluting of corrugated board he could harness the material's ability to hold and release inserted flat objects like chess or checkers pieces.

"Slitting transforms ordinary corrugated … Read more

Flash games can be obscenely fun to play, but not so easy to make. There is, however, a wonderful market of game building tools, including standouts like Microsoft's Popfly, and Sploder that have seen steady improvement. PlayCrafter is a new entrant to the fray with a tool that lets you build very simple, enjoyable games that run right in your browser.

Like the Incredible Machine and games that have come since, Playcrafter is a piecework creation tool that centers around combining various parts ruled by an in-game physics system. All game pieces are drag and drop, and each bucket of parts can be customized by color, point value, or in some cases down to their interaction with the in-game physics engine (hello, zero-friction mini golf).

Included in the builder are genres like Breakout (see Pong), Mini Golf, and Memory. These are simply templates, as you can remove each element to begin anew. There are also various sets of ready-made parts that plug in to the building environment. You can simply mix and match these to create a franken-game that blends genres completely.

Making a good game is about more than templates. Playcrafter requires a little bit of gaming know-how to create games that make you want to come back for more. The good news is that you can dive right into a creation that's half-baked in order to play-test it, and figure out where the weaknesses are, something that makes building games almost as fun as playing ones created by others.

When finished with a creation, you can share it with others in the built-in community page. The "fair," as it's called, shows which games have received the most play, along with their general difficulty level. You can also quickly eyeball which ones are worth playing from their thumbnail and see when they were last edited.

Playcrafter is off to a really fantastic start. There's a revenue sharing system in place that rewards game makers for heavily played titles, and enough game types to let you build 10 or more titles that are completely different from one another. Players looking for a truly unique experience, however, will still want to rely on honest to goodness game developers that distribute their work to sites like Kongregate, Miniclip, and others since Playcrafter is missing some of the deep community elements like in-game chat, and a rewards and payment system that will let creators make premium titles--all things to expect in future updates.

Video of the tool in action is after the jump.… Read more

Over at Venture Beat this morning, Dean Takahashi has a piece about what appears to be a fairly well developed in-game advertising program that has been under stealth development at Google.

"Sources close to the matter said the company has developed an in-game advertising technology that allows it to insert video ads into games," Takahashi wrote. "In demos of the technology, a game character can introduce a video ad, saying something like, 'And now, a word from our sponsor,' before showing a short video at the end of a sequence in a game."

He also wrote … Read more

The saga continues: Electronic Arts, which handles digital versions of the board game Scrabble for North American parent company Hasbro, has claimed that malicious hackers were responsible for the disappearance of its Facebook application on Tuesday.

The game had crashed on the same day that the creators of Scrabulous, a popular imitation game, blocked access to North American visitors after a legal complaint from Hasbro. With the real Scrabble inaccessible, irritated fans assumed that there was a server problem--the game is in beta, after all--and filled the application's discussion wall with angry comments.

But the real problem, EA has … Read more

The more you tell people they can't do something, the more they'll try to do it.

It's the same with drugs. It's the same with turning your cell phone off at the movies. And it's the same with censorship.

There are many journalists lifting their laptop lids in horror at discovering that the Chinese government is now dancing the censorship two-step.

After all, the journalists wail, the Chinese, when they were bidding for the games, promised open Internet access. They promised it would be 80 degrees and sunny every day, too.

However the Internet, just … Read more

If you've every wanted to live forever, legendary game designer Richard Garriott--also known in the video game community as "Lord British"--may give you the chance.

That's because Garriott, who has paid well into eight figures for the chance to go to space, is planning to take the DNA of several of his games' players with him for eternal stellar posterity.

The mission, known as "Operation Immortality," will launch this October when Garriott will fly aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station, taking with him a time capsule that will include … Read more