What our customer's say!"An old version", This is an old version of scrabble. The graphics aren't great and it isn't easy to access definitions and hints. The scrabble player's use of words in expert are so uncommon, they make for an uninteresting game.
"Scrabble works! (With effort)", At first I couldn't get the thing to run. The screen would turn black and I was hosed. The trick is that if you have a firewall you need to give "Scrabble v2.0.exe" access to the internet (complete with the space). I couldn't find this in the ReadMe file. I found this while trying to install another version of Scrabble, "Scrabble Complete" which has better on-line support.
This version (Hasbro) has one decided advantage over Scrabble Complete (Atari) - if you are playing against the computer, it's easier to see where the computer is moving as it "flashes" while playing. Another difference is the music and sound effects which I generally find annoying in this version but not a big thing.
Other than that, the two versions are seemingly identical to the point that I think this is an earlier version of Atari's, but I don't really know. For the price, however, it's a very acceptable version of the popular game.
"Scrabble", This release is so old that it can only be played on a machine where the video card will go down to the 256 color mode. It is useless on a modern machine.
"Scrabble for the Mac", According to the Amazon.com information, this version of Scrabble was for Win 95, win 98, and ME, plus Mac OS. What I got was for Win 3.1, and Win 95, plus Mac. It would not load on my Mac I BOOK, OSX. I think this is a very old, old, version and not made to work on Mac OSX. I rated it a "1" because I can't load it, therefore can't use it.
"Not a bad Scrabble software game, excellent value", This is an excellent version of computer Scrabble, with one reservation which I will note.
The graphics are lovely--this looks like a Scrabble board, with wooden tiles and the correct distribution of letters, premium board tiles and scoring. You can even have sound effects to give the impression you are playing on cardboard and wood (you get the option to have clicks and whooshes in the sound effects.)
The software gives you the possibility to play over a local area network with another player, over the internet with an ISP (like MSN Game Zone) or against a computer player "Maven." You can play with optional hints for the "best" play (debatable, as the computer is not a particularly defensive player) and get a table of remaining letters and a game recap in the info section. A built-in dictionary can be customized. The rack can be organized by ascending, descending letter or vowels first, or you can shuffle to find your word combinations.
The only quibble I have with this software, which I deem an excellent value for the money, is that "Maven" is an annoying player. You can choose how good Maven is, from average, to champion, but it seems that the software algorithm to make Maven a Scrabble champ is to give YOU nothing but vowels. Exchanging the rack is no help--they just come back again. While I realize that making a Deep Blue computer version of Scrabble would require a Cray Supercomputer and the efforts of a thousand programmers, it's still somewhat annoying to play against Maven at a reasonable level. Still, if you can pull off a 123-point bingo word on a triple-word tile, it can be sweet, indeed. In your face, Maven!
Highly recommended.
