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Scrabulous Is Dead, Hasbro's Version Brain-Dead

eldavojohn writes "Sometime this morning, Facebook shut down Scrabulous to American and Canadian users. Scrabulous, we hardly knew ye." This is sadly unsurprising, now that Hasbro's finally taken legal action against the developers, after quite a few months of letting it go unmolested. Seems like they waited until there was an official Scrabble client available (also on Facebook), while the snappy and fuller-featured Scrabulous kept people interested in a 60-year-old board game. The official client, which is at least labeled a beta, is a disappointment. This is not a Google-style beta release, note: it's slow to load, confusing, and doesn't even offer the SOWPODS word list as an option, only the Tournament Word List and a list based on the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Too bad that SOWPODS is the word list used in most of the world's English-speaking countries.) It also took several minutes to open a game, rather than the few seconds (at most) that Scrabulous took — it's pretty impressive, but not in a good way, that the programmers could extract that sort of performance from the combination of Facebook's servers and my dual-core, 2GHz+ laptop. The new Scrabble client has doodads like 3D flipping-tile animations, too, but no clear way to actually initiate the sample game that jamie and I have attempted to start. I hope that once we get past that obvious hurdle, we'll find there's a chat interface and game notebook as in Scrabulous, but my hopes are low.

9 of 395 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why didn't they just buy scrablous? by Reverend528 · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than making asses of ourselves"

    Fixed that for you.

  2. Re:Older than me! by eln · · Score: 5, Funny

    When Newton said "if I see farther than other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" (and he wasn't the first to say that)

    I totally agree. Someone really should have sued Newton for copyright infringement for that quote.

  3. You're doing it wrong. by Lilith's+Heart-shape · · Score: 5, Funny

    If these guys can do Scrabble so well, why not encourage them to do other Hasbro games in a way that makes Hasbro money?

    Stop making sense.

    1. Re:You're doing it wrong. by digitrev · · Score: 4, Funny

      David Byrne, is that you?

      --
      Cynical Idealist
    2. Re:You're doing it wrong. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      David Byrne, is that you?

      I ran in to David Byrne just the other day. He's same as he ever was ... same as he ever was ...

  4. Re:Sixty Years Old?! by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 4, Funny

    Chessulous? Pokulous?

    Pikachulous! I choose you!!

  5. Re:If the Scrabulous people have any pride... by philspear · · Score: 4, Funny

    Pride goeth before the fall. And that's what this is: hasboro saying "Mine! My game! Not yours! I do with it what I want! You dint ask purmissin!"

  6. Re:If the Scrabulous people have any pride... by The+FNP · · Score: 5, Funny

    No, the whip company is finding many new potential sources of revenue on the web.

    --The FNP

  7. Re:same old story by BronsCon · · Score: 5, Funny

    HIV. It's about as active as scrabble and gets just about as much attention from the general populace. A ton of people have it but nobody really talks about it anymore.

    --
    APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.