Recently on Offworld we played with words in two ways: first, by downloading our latest iPhone obsession, NewToy’s Friends With Words, as svelte and streamlined as an online-multiplayer Scrabble-alike we’ve played, and as perfect (read: dangerously addictive) as the original Scrabulous proved when it first dominated Facebook.
We then saw Flashbang co-founder Matthew Wegner solve PopCap’s fellow iPhone word-smither Bookworm with science, with a fully automated OCR word-finder that just might be expanded to a web service soon.
Elsewhere, we saw Spore, Fathom and more indie all-star devs joining August’s rapid-proto Experimental Gameplay competition, electro star Deadmau5 taking on Zelda, learned what Disneyland can teach devs about game design, and saw “worlds first computer programmer” Ada Lovelace coming to LittleBigPlanet with other historical friends.
Finally, we found a wicked Mario 64 optical illusion papercraft, looked inside Italy’s Art of Games gallery exhibit, read the latest, fantastically well researched update on the Tim Langdell v. Mobigame trademark battle, and our ‘one shot’s: Parappa and Umjammer Lammy play in “My First Rockband”, and gorgeously abstract picture-postcards from Wipeout HD (above).


