Path: utzoo!dptcdc!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bbn!bbn.com!denbeste
From: denbeste@bbn.com (Steven Den Beste)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: EA "Scrabble" bugs?
Message-ID: <38731@bbn.COM>
Date: 17 Apr 89 14:14:20 GMT
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: denbeste@BBN.COM (Steven Den Beste)
Distribution: na
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 39

My girlfriend is a Scrabble freak, so one time when she was accompanying me to
"Memory Location", she picked up a copy of the Amiga version of the game from
Electronic Arts. Comments follow:

If they had chosen a smaller font, and had displayed the name, computer rating
level and current score on one line, they could have made the small racks
larger and could have included the point value on the letter pieces.

We came up with other things we hated about it, too, but none of them is very
important except one:

We think there may be a bug in the score calculation code. She tacked the word
"astir" onto the end of "yen" as followes:



	         A
	y  e  n  S
	         T
	         I
	         R

with the "R" landing on the triple word score on the bottom of the screen. By
our calculation this should have been 26 points. The computer awarded us 74.

My girlfriend was incensed at this. If the scoring is buggy, then she would
have to keep score by hand, which is more than a little bit of a pain.

We're not sure we believe all the words it has in its dictionary, either. It
formed the word "WI", which we couldn't find either in my American Heritage
dictionary, or in her 1978 edition Scrabble dictionary.


If anyone out there has any relevant experience with this game, we'd appreciate
it if you would EMAIL (not POST!) a reply.


Steven C. Den Beste,   BBN Communications Corp., Cambridge MA
denbeste@bbn.com(ARPA/CSNET/UUCP)    harvard!bbn.com!denbeste(UUCP)