Local mutant Danilo Campos has released Oddage, a new game for the iPhone that forces you to find the word that doesn’t match the others as a timer ticks down. It’s all the fun of a standardized test with none of the pressure of getting into a good prep school!
(I tease. I’ve been playing it for the last couple of weeks. It’s perfect for whiling away a minute or two while standing in line for the unemployment checks while regretting how I didn’t get into that good prep school.)
It’s $3 on App Store. No charge for its default “Klingon Universal Remote” skin.
It can’t be worse than Brain Age for the DS, which is one of the most irritating games that I’ve played in my life.
I’ve always hated odd-one-out puzzles, because I *always* see multiple possibilities. Recently I saw “a helicopter, an airplane, a kite, an eagle” — answer: A kite, because it is tethered. Why not an eagle, the only thing alive? Or a plane, the only thing bigger than a helicopter?
I guess I’d have to think for a while to think of alternative answers for the puzzle posted (hmmm… A tailor, because it’s the only thing that starts with a letter from the second half of the alphabet?), but I’d be willing to bet that the harder ones are more ambiguous than this.
@SamSam: I find that kind of ambiguity unsatisfying, so I’ve tried to eliminate it from the gameplay as much as possible.
All content in each category of Oddage has distinct lines of commonality. It’s not something fuzzy, like “things that fly,” but something concrete like fruits, elements from the periodic table, ancient civilizations, etc. The dichotomy should always be blatant and in building the category list, I cut anything that blurred that rule.
That said, it’s still hard because you have to read and process the content in a limited space of time. The moment you start depending on visual pattern matching, you’re toast! The difficulty is ramped not by blurring lines of distinction but by increasing the number of potential responses — up to ten total buttons. This has the added benefit of making every game session completely different from any other. For just round one, for example, there are about 656,234,040 possible permutations for just the three dominant words, with over 2,400 potential category combos over the course of a game.
http://www.oddageapp.com has some gameplay video to give you more examples.
Thanks for the info, Danilo. If I ever get an iPhone, I’ll look for this.