Friday Bullet Points about Legal Battles, Stupidity, and Cataclysm

It is a cold Friday in March, I turned a year older this week, and I am in a bit of a mood for no good reason besides being a cranky old guy.  So perhaps it is time for some bullet point bile, broken up into three categories.  Can you put each in its correct place?

• The New York Times to Impose Its New Wordle Order

The self-proclaimed “paper of record” took a bit of time from its nearly non-stop headlines about President Biden’s age to go after anybody who was out there peddling any games that seemed even Wordle adjacent.

A bit on the nose, eh Wordle?

The New York Times bought the game from its creator about two years back.  The game wasn’t original, the concept wasn’t original, and even the name had been used before.  But it became a hit during the pandemic and the Times wanted to expand its word games.  One does not live by the Sunday crossword alone I guess.

This week their lawyers began sending out copyright based take down notices to “hundreds” of Wordle-like titles.

This should have been no surprise.  The Times has a long history of sending its lawyers after any hint of what they consider infringement.  I remember back in the 80s when Infocom‘s company newsletter was called the New Zork Times.  They too received a cease and desist letter threatening legal action and had to change the name lest somebody mistake it for a product of the New York Times, which might cause confusion in the marketplace and tarnish the brand of the paper.

None of the regular sites I hit has gone down yet, but I will keep an eye out.

• Nintendo Shuts Down Yuzu

Elsewhere out on the legal front, Nintendo won its lawsuit against Switch emulator creator Yuzu, who acceded to the mounting pressure from the video game giant who had been framing Yuzu’s intent as being to circumvent DRM, which would put it in line for violating the DMCA.

In addition to ceasing all development and support of its emulator, Yuzu also had to agree to pay all of Nintendo’s costs, which totaled up to $2.4 million by their calculation.

Nintendo has long been as fierce as the New York Times in sending its lawyers after anybody using their intellectual property, including some innocuous fan projects, and vigorously stomping out anything that might cause one less hardware unit to sell.

Anyway, I am kind of sad I missed out on Yuzu because, for me at least, the worst thing about playing games on the Switch is actually being required to play them on the Switch.  I’d much prefer them on my PC.  Alas, no longer and option.

• Apple and Epic at it Again

Epic went spoiling for a fight with Apple and Google a few years back because… well, Tim Sweeney wants to be as rich as possible I guess.  As with his fight with Steam, he just wants to be the person collecting the tax and resents other who got there first.

The fight with Apple has gone back and forth since then and it had looked like things had settled down with Epic getting some of what it wanted, including the ability to have its own storefront.  And then Apple banned Epic’s developer account in the EU.

Sweeney was immediately out with histrionics, but Apple was also declaring that Epic was “verifiably untrustworthy” and would not live up to the developer agreement they had signed.  This will all draw the attention of EU regulators again, who will be wielding their Digital Markets Act, it “tax the US tech companies” regulations.

How do I feel about this?

Survey say… let them fight!

It is hard to feel sad when rich people are fighting to be incrementally more rich.

A follow up about how Apple is embracing the drama and that the EU is its real foe in this battle.

• Elon Invents Blogging

Having chased away all serious, paying advertisers on the Twitter platform… we have Cheech & Chong, Crypto scams (still!), and nazi ads left, and I block all of them besides Cheech & Chong… Elon has been thrashing around trying to find SOMETHING that will make money for his $44 billion boondoggle.  And so they have announced Articles.

From the @write account

You can have BOLD, ITALIC, and STRIKETHROUGH text.  And images!

Freaking amazing, right?  RIGHT?!?

Oh yeah.  Who needs quote blocks or inline links, just give us money and we’ll let you do long form and give them a special icon and tab on your profile.  We totally won’t change our mind in three months and disappear the whole thing the next time Elon has a brain fart, we promise!

I am just waiting until he finally gets around to re-inventing Twitter… a version without him on it.

• EA Jumps on the AI Bandwagon

I mean, EA has a long tradition of being dumb, or at least not being able to read the room.  And they are ramping up to lay off 5% of their staff.  So they have to give the investors SOMETHING to be positive about, and AI is the magic wand currently.  Just say that and Wall Street will love you, right?  So how did EA CEO Andrew Wilson do on that?  Let’s go check over at PC Gamer… and… oh my!

Truth in Headlines

I am not positive the bong hit was verified, but Andrew did ramble on about 3 billion people using EA tools to make games while he painted a picture of a future where EA simply didn’t have to pay any of those pesky creative or technical people who actually make literally everything they sell today.

There was some law of hiring I recall where bad managers only hire people dumber than they are, so when we’re at a point where the CEO of EA wants to fire everybody and I am starting to suspect that we are seeing this in action.  Dumb guy achieves life goal, promoted to CEO and fires everybody.

That is probably being too hard on him.  As we all know by this point, as a public company you must meet the infinite growth demands of Wall Street, and when you’ve got nothing you have to make shit up.  This is a classic “making shit up” performance.  He’ll probably get a huge bonus and lay off even more staff.

• Cataclysm Classic Closed Beta Begins

Finally, Blizzard announced that Cataclysm Classic, which will remake the WoW Classic progression servers now lingering in Wrath of the Lich King into a new world, has started its closed beta test.

Can you re-run a cataclysm?

I’ve actually been waiting for this to show up, having worn out on Wrath Classic after five characters.  However, closed beta doesn’t mean we’re close to actually getting it, and the roadmap that Blizzard put out at the beginning of the year made it seem like we would be into summer before the cataclysm hit.  Still, it is nice to see it is finally in motion.

And on that bit of upbeat news, it is off to get through the day and to the weekend.

Friday Bullet Points from the Worldle-verse

The BBC is concerned that we may have fallen out of love with Wordle, though I still play it every morning and post it to our Discord channel where we share the misery of words that eluded us… plus remain mystified how hard it is to NOT guess the word with Anti-Wordle.

• Wordle 666

We may have fallen out of love with Wordle, but it is still part of my morning routine.  I wake up before my alarm goes off… an old person feature… pick up my iPad, put on my glasses, and do the Wordle every morning.  Some days I am better than others.

Wordle game 666

I did not try to get Wordle 666 in 6 guesses, but there it was.

Look, if Elon can constantly use 420 as his go to number I can have some fun with 666.

Also, that is from our Discord channel where Potshot and I post our scores.  I should probably update my handle, as “Stannislav” is from New World, and we haven’t played that in a year.

• Heardle Going Away

Meanwhile, on the Worldle-like front, it seems that Spotify has fallen out of love with Heardle, the musical version of the daily game that they paid an undisclosed amount for last year.  When I logged in the other night… as I do the Wordle when I awake, so my wife and I do the Heardle when we get into bed at night… I got this pop up.

Heardle is going away

Over at Tech Crunch Spotify is quoted as saying:

After careful consideration, we have made the difficult decision to say goodbye to Heardle as we focus our efforts on other features for music discovery

Basically, they thought this would make them money and it didn’t, so they are throwing it away.

Now I have to see if there is a Heardle replacement out there.

• DOS Wordle

Stuck back in the world of pre-Windows technology?  Still working from a DOS prompt and feel left out of the Wordle thing?  Well, WorDOSle has you covered!  Yes, somebody has brought a clone of the game to DOS.

WorDOSle for my friends

The question remains, do you store it on a floppy or do you waste some of that 10MB hard drive to keep it handy on your machine?

• Guess the Game

Anything can be made into a Wordle-like game it seems.  And so we have Guess the Game, which gives you screen grabs from a title and you have to guess which game it is.

No luck for me guessing this

You might think, writing a video game blog, I might be at least okay at this.  But no, I am awful.  I play the same games over and over, rarely branching out.  That said, I did get Untitled Goose Game when it came up, and on the first guess.  Some games get enough press coverage that you just absorb them.  (And no, the first image did not actually have the goose in it.  It was just the art style that triggered my recognition.)

• WoW Wordle

Okay, what if they made a Wordle knock-off that was about one of the games into which I have hundreds of hours of play time invested.  I would be good at that, right? Raidle.io seems set to prove that hypothesis wrong.

I did not even get close

The problem is that it isn’t words per se, but WoW names, locations, and related action words.  I struggle to even come up with options it will accept because it turns out I don’t pay a lot of attention to what is going on in Azeroth.  Kezan, for example, I had to Google:

Kezan is a tropical and volcanic island located in the South Seas, not far from the Lost Isles, southwest of the Maelstrom, and northwest of Zandalar.

Was never going to get that.

• Digits Looks to Replace Wordle

Finally, the New York Times has a new puzzle game that they are hoping will capture the Wordle enthusiasm from the days of Covid.  It is called Digits, and it requires you to do math.  Specifically, you have to use some numbers provided and mathematical operators in order to come up with the number displayed.

Digits explained in some way

You do not, however, have to use all the numbers, a detail I missed on my first pass.  I manage to get this right fairly often so far, though it is not exactly the sort of thing my waking brain is really built to deal with.

 

 

 

My Daily Wordle Routine

I have mentioned Wordle and Wordle-like games before, as well as a few of the cinema focused variations.

A decent day at Wordle

The test of time though is whether or not you keep playing.  Somehow a few of the ones I mentioned have become part of my daily routine.

I do enjoy a routine, and Wordle is now part of the start of my day.  Most mornings I wake up around 6am.  This isn’t because I want to or because my alarm goes off… my alarm is set for 7am… it is because I have become my grandfather and now wake up at 6am under pretty much all circumstances.

On waking… and probably scooching the a cat to give myself some room… I pick up my iPad off of the night stand and look at email and the morning news headlines in Flipboard.  I do not look at the blog stats, but only because my iPad is from 2015 and out of support so the WordPress.com app no longer runs on it.

Anyway, the next thing I do is open up Chrome and do the five morning puzzles, which are:

Wordle

The original, now owned by the New York Time.  It is generally a pretty simple task judging from my stats… and remembering that I managed to solve it in be, on my iPad, at around 6am every morning.

My morning Wordle stats

And I think its simplicity is part of the attraction.  I mentioned Quordle and Octordle previously, but I don’t think 6am me is up for that.  Also, both of those really need a full monitor to play effectively, not my out of date iPad Air.

Anti-Wordle

It is hard to explain why I do this one daily, as I am pretty bad at it.  Somehow I managed to solve this in fewer moves than I do Wordle far too often.  Every once in a while I will get a good run and get to ten or thirteen guesses before I am locked into the obvious answer.  But three or four guesses are a lot more common… or feel a lot more common.  The upside of the game is that it doesn’t bother keeping stats, so it is only how well I did that day.

Tradle

This one is probably the most amusing.  As noted previously, you get total export value and the array of goods exported and you have to guess which country or territory it is.  Potshot and I toss our daily scores into a Discord channel everybody else has muted and this is probably the one we chat about most often.

Trouble spots for both of us are the Caribbean, west Africa, and the Balkans… though the Balkans are trouble for everybody historically.  They all comprise areas with a lot of small countries so you can end up playing a game of guessing hopscotch, getting slightly closer but never quite arriving in your six guesses.

We have adopted a “places beginning with ‘saint'” strategy for the Caribbean, and when faced with West Africa I go for Benin or Cameroon.  The Balkans though, you just have to be lucky.  And even with our strategies, some days the automate system throws some genuine bullshit out way.

Really Tradle? I checked, nobody lives there!

Still, even with the geographical foibles, I do okay with it.

My Tradle stats

Probably the most embarrassing thing is when you get repeats… because the country is picked daily by RNG so far as I can tell.. and you do worse when the same place shows up.  I think we had Portugal three time in the last four weeks and I got it in 2, 3, then 5 guesses.

Framed

This has ended up being my favorite of the movie themed variations on Wordle.  I like when they put up a really obscure image from a movie and I get it on the first go.   Though almost equally amusing is when I managed to guess correctly for movies I have never seen.

It has a fairly deep field of movies and, as I said in my original look at it, whoever put it together does a very good job of progression with the six images, going from pretty obscure to obvious if you’ve seen it and remember it by the final pic.  I feel like I do pretty well on this one, though my record is far from perfect.

My Framed stats

If I get it in one I probably know the film, if I get it in six it is often something I’ve never seen but they’re rubbing my nose in it with the lead actors or a well known scene.

Actorle

I thought this game was ridiculously hard when I started on it and could only solve it by cheating rampantly, using Wikipedia to match up blanked out title strings.

However, I have gotten better at it over time.  I mean, I still cheat, just not as completely as I used to.  Once I get one title from the list nailed down I am pretty good at solving it, so I have resolved not to cheat until I get at least once hit on a title.  Also, trying to match the x’d out title names with Wikipedia was a pain in the ass.

Once I get a title, usually through guessing at a few actors who have been in a lot of things… Bruce Willis is a latter day Michael Caine in that regard, and Chris Evans will unlock most of your MCU titles… then I go to Wikipedia.  So my record is surprisingly good because I cheat.

Yesterday’s Actorle with my stats

Still, I do get one now and then without cheating at all. Keanu Reeves came up one day and I got that on the first guess.  Titles with special characters, like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure are easy to spot.

However, the makers of Actorle have come up with a new version, Actorle.tv, which is, as the title suggests, based on TV roles rather than film roles, and that can be a lot more difficult.  They pretty quickly had to put a switch on the page to show only major roles, because JFC you can guess almost any actor these days and you’ll find they’ve had a one episode appearance on The Simpsons.  Still, I bang away at it.  Even with profound cheating engaged I am still bad at it, in part because I don’t know as many TV actors as I do film actors it seems.

Heardle

Finally, there is Heardle, which I mentioned in passing, but which has become a regular on my rotation, just not in the morning.  Instead, I play this in the evening with my wife who prides herself on her music knowledge.  I can get the really obvious 70s and 80s songs, but need her to get me past that.

And she doesn’t put up with losing, so if we’re on the last guess, she’ll get Shazam out on her phone to tell us what it is, so our record is completely bogus.  It is also pretty short because, as the New York Times bought Wordle, so Spotify bought Heardle and, in doing so, managed to reset our stats.

That thing about the stats, it is a lie

My wife also has no patience for scoring and often tells me to just go out to the sixth guess, which gives the maximum amount of play.  She does still get a few on the first guess, but mostly we’re there on the last guess, with Shazam helping us probably a quarter of the time.

Wordle Goes to the Movies

I wrote a post last month about Wordle and games jumping on the simple daily format idea, highlighting a series of games that were mostly on the same idea.  But the whole Wordle thing is still rippling through the internet and I keep running into new variations.

Today I thought I would focus on entries that were focused on movies… because having a theme is good I guess?

• Actorle

The idea here is that you are given a list of X’d out movie titles, so you can see the number of words and letters only, the year of release, some genre information, and its IMDB rating.  From that you are supposed to guess the actor that was in all of those films.

The Actorle screen

If you guess the wrong actor, nothing changes, unless that actor was ALSO in one of the films listed, in which case that film is shown on the list with its title.  Getting something, anything on the list usually means winning.

Nothing tells you how little you really know about movies than movie trivia, and I played this for a week and never won a single round, trying to cypher out the titles or guessing based on actors the date ranges.  I do not think I have ever guessed a single film title correctly unless I have guessed an actor in order to narrow things down.  My brain just won’t process the Xs.

So I began to cheat rampantly here, taking the most awkward word grouping on the list and going to Wikipedia to look up films for that year in order to find a matching letter pattern.  That works pretty well, except when the release date is incorrect.

Still, my failures could be your success.  This is the right game for somebody, just not me.

You can find Actorle here.

• Framed

Framed, on the other hand, is much more my speed.  No words, just pictures, and I can be a very visual person.  You get a series of six images from a film and you have to guess the title.  The images get progressively easier, with the first couple often being distinctive by not showing any actor of key element of the film.

Framed

I almost always guess correctly eventually, though when you get to guess five they usually throw the star at you and the last image is generally something that very much screams the film at you if you have ever seen it.  I tend to blow the first two, then get it somewhere between the third and fifth guess.  I’ve only gone to the sixth guess once, and I have never lost, which should tell you how big that sixth image generally is.  I’ve gotten films I’ve never seen on the last two guesses.

You can find Framed here.

• Moviedle

The most recent one I have found, Moviedle is kind of like Heardle, which I mentioned in the previous post, except it is visual.  Here they show you a quick visual clip, one second long, that is a mash up of images from the film.

The clip about to commence

If the first zip through doesn’t tip you to the film, you can rewatch the clip slower and slower so that each image is more obvious and distinct.  It can be hard to pick out faces on that first glimpse, but it gets easier with more time.

I have only played this a few times so far, but my impression is that if you have ever seen the movie in question and have any memory of it, you’ll likely get it right and, if a film has left any sort of strong impression on you or has a unique visual style, you’ll probably get it on the first guess.

 

Wordle and Things like Wordle

If you have been paying attention to things over the last two months, or follow anybody on Twitter, you might have heard about Wordle.  It became a huge deal back in January/February and you could hardly go on Twitter without seeing somebody posting their scores.  I had to mute the word “wordle” over there it got so bad.

A decent day at Wordle

It is a simple game web game, and something of an accidental hit according to the developer in a presentation at GDC.  I ended up playing it daily myself.  It is a simple, fairly easy, daily game that makes you think a bit.  You can find it here.

Of course, its popularity spawned a host of imitators.  On dev who made a mobile app that was simply a copy of the game wash shamed off of the app store by public outrage.  However, there are still a bunch of other clones there.

The game itself was bought by the New York Times and we’re all waiting for them to screw it up somehow.

But in addition to the straight up clones, some devs out there have taken the Wordle concept and run with it for different daily experiences.

For example, there is Quordle, where you have to guess four 5 letter words.  You get nine guesses, but you have to coordinate all four columns.  While I get Wordle most days, Quordle I am about 50/50 on.

I missed the last word on the last guess

Double consonants are my Achilles heel in these games.  You can find Quordle here.

If four five letter words are not enough, then there is Octordle, where you have to figure out eight words.  I play the above every day on my iPad when I wake up in the morning, but Octordle I save for my wide screen desktop monitor and let it sit in a tab for most of the day as I think about it.  Even then I am always in a bit of a hurry and I rarely win.

I was down to “theft” and “teeth” and chose wrong… in a hurry so forgot the H placement

If you like that many words, you can find Octordle here.  It has both a daily and multi-play options.  One if its drawbacks is that it needs a lot of five letter words, so you get some oddly rare ones in the mix when compared to Wordle, where the most common word that fits the clues is almost always correct.

Those three all have the problem, for me, where you end up with some letters where there are half a dozen words you could make out of them given the clues you have.

But say you don’t want to guess the word.  Say you want to lose… or just take a long time guessing.  Then there is Antiwordle.  Here you try to avoid guessing the word.

Antiwordle

This has rules so you can’t just avoid the clues.  You cannot re-use letters that have been eliminated.  You have to use any letter that you have guessed correctly, and if you guessed it in the correct spot, you must use it in that spot going forward.

Embarrassingly, I have had days where I have gotten Wordle in five or six guesses and then Antiwordle in three.  Anyway, you can find Antiwordle here.

But suppose you just don’t like word games.  What if you like geography?  Well, there is Worldle, because of course there is.  Daily it shows you the outline of a nation and you have to guess what it is.

I want to say Northrend…

The primary problem for me is that some countries have very distinctive and memorable outlines… and some of them are just roundish, sometimes oblong, blobs.  Out of the context of their neighbors, where I could name them in a flash, places like Estonia, Slovakia, Bosnia, and Botswana kind of blend together in my brain when they are alone.

You also cannot use size to judge, as they scale them all the same in the picture, so Monaco was the same size as Australia when shown, such that you could pick out the detail of the harbor.

If you like maps you can find Worldle here.

But say you like trade rather than maps.  Then there is OEC Tradle, where you guess the country based on its exports and how much they total up to.

The oil and gas was kind of a tell

The primary exports are the general tell.  It is good to know who exports cars or oil as well as some secondary, as well as gauging that with the total export value.  I knew this was too low to be Saudi Arabia, so went for the smaller gulf states.  Oddly, Qatar was also the Worldle answer in the same week.

Then there was Spain, which I knew had a reasonable car export.

Cars, pork, quite the mix

So if you’re up on international trade, you can find OEC Tradle here.

But what if you just want to play again.  Tipa has been playing a daily title called Rogule, which came out of the 7 Day Rogue Like Challenge 2022, in which she also participated.

This gives you a daily web based Rogue-like to play.  But if you die, you’re done for the day.

And I am going to die to a rat almost immediately… welcome to Rogue!

I actually survived the rat with 1 hp, then later died to a snake.  It is a decent adaptation of the Rogue gaming style.

Like all Wordle knock-offs, it gives you a score at the end of you match that you can post to social media in order to annoy your friends, or at least push them to learn how to use the mute feature for words and people.

If you want to try you can find Rogule here.

There are, of course, many others, like Heardle, which has you guessing song titles, at which I am very bad, and various other trivia based versions.  But these are the ones I have found a bit interesting.