Customer Reviews

Scrabble (Jewel Case)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I was really looking forward to this game, as I enjoy word games as a rule. And I have to admit, once I got into it, I enjoyed playing. There are some definate problems that would make me hestitate from buying it again, or from recommending it.

1. Some executive must have gotten really paranoid and cheap when the game engineers were designing this game. In order to keep you from putting multiple copies on different machines, say office and home, or to keep you from giving one to a friend, they fixed this "lost revenue" problem by designing the game so that you cannot play the game without the installion CD. I cannot believe the amount of money they would get out of selling an extra couple games makes up for the aggravation the company is giving to it's customers. Not to mention the plain bad taste left in one's mouth over this chintziness.
2. You have to have 256 colors on, and this is a problem. It messes up constantly.
3. It fills the entire screen, you cannot shrink it into a window and easily do other stuff while playing the game. You have no options.
4. I put in words that I know were good, but since they weren't in the dictionary, the words were kicked out. The dictionary needs to be changable and when you play the computer both sides should have access to the new word.
5. It takes a long time to boot up.

I was worried after reading some of the reviews that this version (written for Windows 3.1/95) would not work well on newer computers. But I purchased it anyway, and installed it on a new computer (Jan 2002) running Windows XP. It works great! When I start up the game, the operating system/game seems to be smart enough to figure out what to set the colors and/or screen resolution to, and the game comes up fine. When I exit the game, the computer screen goes back to its original settings. This is all automatic, and you can just sit back and enjoy the game. I love Scrabble, and this computer version is really, really fun to play. Its nice to be able to take as long as you want to play on your turn without your opponent getting impatient, and its nice to not have to wait very long for your opponent to make their move. The dictionary used may be slightly out of date, and there are some new words that would be nice to be able to use. However, there is no provision for being able to add new words. Nevertheless, I would highly recommend this game -- even though its a very old version -- to anyone who likes to play Scrabble.

This scrabble game works well and is fun to play but be forwarned - the PC version only works in 256 color mode. If your PC is set to truecolor, you will have to switch color settings every time you use it.

This does not work with Windows 2000. Don't waste your money.

This game will run on Windows 95 but with the release of Windows 2000 and XP the game has to be put to sleep. Infogrames Entertainment has to come out with an updated version for the newer OS's and computers.

This is a 19th Century game still being sold in the 21st Century.

This product is terrible. It forces you to reduce the number of colors your monitor can display to 256, and then uses colors that make the text unreadable.

It can not be fully installed on a hard disk making it necessary to leave the cdrom loaded whenever it is used.

It is more concerned with making noise and animation than a functional game.

I really enjoy the computer version of the Scrabble board game. When playing against the computer, you can choose to play between one to three opponents, depending on how fast you want the game to go. Separate statistics are compiled for two, three and four person games. The game loads quickly, and the graphics are good, although the angle the board is set at can make it a little hard to read the point values of the squares. My only complaint is that your monitor must be set at 256 colors, so I have to reset this everytime I play the game...it's not a big deal, but it is a little inconvenient.

I would definitely recommend this software.

Yes, you have to run the game in 256 color mode. Furthermore, every so often, the colors go "crazy" and you can't really see anything. To fix this, you have to pause the game (intermission), switch out of Scrabble and back to Windows, switch back to the game and unpause the game. It take 10 seconds and is a hassle, but the game is great. The computerized opponent is really good, and I rarely win on the advanced setting, which is a low setting.

This program has a very bad interaction with the ZoneAlarm Firewall. It disables all network activity and forced me to reinstall Windows 98 to fix it.

The Mac version runs well in the "classic" Mac OS (I use 9.2.2). It also runs perfectly in OS X (I use 10.2.8) running the "classic" environment.

This version does NOT run well in Windows 2000. I have read that it does run well in Windows XP, but I haven't confirmed this.

If you are using Windows 2000, buy version 2 of this software.