VentureBeat » Writer Rumble

GamesBeat weekly roundup: BioShock Infinite delayed, Epic Games president retires, and Kixeye expands to Canada

Jasmine Maleficent Rea — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 18:44:45 +0000

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Epic Games president Michael Capps retired, Call of Duty: Black Ops II earned $1 billion in 15 days, Irrational Games pushed BioShock Infinite’s release date again, and Zynga filed to make real-money gambling games in Nevada.

You’ll also find reviews for Far Cry 3, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Dragonborn, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and Writer Rumble as well as previews for Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time.

News:

Mobile news:

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Interviews:

Previews:

Filed under: Business, Games

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Writer Rumble is a vicious but therapeutic exercise for former English majors (review)

Giancarlo Valdes — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 22:37:13 +0000

Armed with only her parasol, author Jane Austen doesn’t look like a formidable fighter. But that didn’t stop her from beating my magnifying glass-wielding champion Agatha Christie with a torrent of three-, four-, and five-letter words. In some weird way, I felt like this was my punishment for not finishing Pride and Prejudice back in college.

Developed by Feel Every Yummy, Writer Rumble is a fighting game that pits some of the literary world’s most renowned writers against one another in mortal combat. But instead of whacking each other on the head with their fists, they attack each other with the most powerful weapon of all: words. A board full of random letters determine your moves, and you must slide your finger to form as many words as you can in quick succession before your opponent can do the same.

Out now for iOS devices at $0.99 and early next year for Android, Writer Rumble is also the first title published under GameFly Games, the newest business venture for a company usually known for its long-running games rental service. It’s a solid debut, as Writer Rumble’s quirky premise makes it stand out from the glut of other word games on the App Store.

What you’ll like

Tense multiplayer matches
While a single-player survival mode, where you try to last as long as you can against waves of increasingly powerful monsters, is available, it’s merely the training ground for the competitive online battles in the “Fight with Words” multiplayer. Like in other fighting games, your strategy starts by choosing the right character. Each writer comes with his own arsenal of power-ups that regenerates over time, and this can drastically alter the battlefield for a few seconds: One forces your opponent to spell backward, another triples the damage points for your next word, and a particularly nasty one flips the entire letter board upside down.

When your opponent gets into a groove by unleashing consecutive attacks and tricky power-ups, it’s easy to slip up and cause your own demise: Every time you misspell a word in multiplayer or make up one that doesn’t exist, the game slices off a part of your health bar. Once you get over the slight learning curve, however, matches become incredibly close, boiling down to who can recognize and correctly spell different words the fastest. And if you have an iPad, you can share the panic-inducing agony with another person next to you in splitscreen multiplayer (pictured above).

Sense of style
Writer Rumble’s homage to literature extends far beyond the battles. You flip through the menus much like a book, with each area introducing a new “page.” Quotes from these authors (as well as others not in the game, such as Ernest Hemingway and Sun Tzu) keep you busy during loading screens. And the Saturday morning cartoon versions of the writers are charming as you can find direct references to their line of work in the way they look and act. Hell, even H. P. Lovecraft’s creepy Cthulhu monster looks adorable.

What you won’t like

Technical problems
Writer Rumble crashed a few times on my iPhone 4S, forcing me to reset the game. And during some multiplayer matches, the screen locked up after receiving pop-up notifications of someone else wanting to start a different match. In those cases, I was unable to use the letter board at all, and I had to wait until I lost or quit the app myself for it to work again. It didn’t happen too often, but it was enough to be annoying, especially in battles I knew I should have won.

Conclusion

I don’t normally obsess over stats like kill-to-death ratios in multiplayer games, but my three wins and 14 losses in Writer Rumble feels devastating. And I can barely look at the insane survival scores people keep posting on the leaderboards. I like to think this is because some players have superhuman reflexes or an encyclopedic knowledge of odd words and not because I simply suck at it.

The good news is that Writer Rumble is fun no matter what side you fall on. With an art style that easily won over this English major’s heart and battles that keep you guessing until the end, it’s certainly one of the most action-packed word games you’ll find on your mobile device.

Score: 80/100

Writer Rumble is available now for iOS devices on the App Store for $0.99, with an Android release planned for 2013. The publisher provided GamesBeat with an iOS download code for the purpose of this review.

Filed under: Games

GameFly set to publish its first game, Writer Rumble, for iOS tomorrow

Jeffrey Grubb — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 18:28:04 +0000

Rent-by-mail company GameFly is spreading its wings and learning how to diversify by offering up its first game under the GameFly Publishing label.

GameFly’s first release is an iOS (and eventually Android) competitive word puzzler from developer Feel Every Yummy titled Writer Rumble. Writer Rumble takes the concept of finding words in a grid and makes it a head-to-head battle. Players take control of characters based on classic literary figures like Edgar Allen Poe and Agatha Christie. Each writer is imbued with their own unique powers that makes it easier for the player to score points or harder for the opponent to do so.

The game features a single-player campaign where players must speed spell against creatures and enemies ripped from the pages of classic novels. It also has an impressive local competitive mode where two players can play on one iPad. This mode plays a lot like an arcade fighting game where the two players are elbow-to-elbow. The game also features an online head-to-head mode.

In addition to its rent-by-mail gaming service and this new publishing venture, GameFly also operates a game news site called ShackNews. In September 2009, 1Up.com editor Garnett Lee left to become GameFly’s director of editorial. On its blog, developer Feel Every Yummy credited Lee — calling him “instrumental” — in making Writer Rumble’s release a reality.

Filed under: Games