Game Classification

Scrabble Rack Attack funkitron, Atari (U.S.A.), 2004  

Informations Analyses Serious Gaming
 

Classification

VIDEO GAME
(Edugame)

Keywords

Purpose

Besides play, this title features the following intents:
  • Educative message broadcasting
  • Training
  • Licensed title

Market

This title is used by the following domains:
  • Entertainment

Audience

This title targets the following audience:
Age : 3 to 7 years old / 8 to 11 years old / 12 to 16 years old / 17 to 25 years old
General Public

Gameplay

The gameplay of this title is Game-based
(designed with stated goals)

The core of gameplay is defined by the rules below:

Similar games


Scrabble Rack Attack Scrabble Rack Attack is a Scrabble game, but no ordinary. The biggest difference is, that you have only seven letters to use.

Before you start a game, you choose the game modus you want to play. One Rack, Rounds, or Extreme, furthermore you can choose to play with or without time limit.

If you play with time limit, you have 5 minutes to make as much points as you can, before the round (or the game) ends in easy mode. In normal, you will only have 4 minutes, while in hard, you only have 3 minutes.

In One Rack you play a single one-round game. While Rounds and Extreme offers multiple rounds.

So, when you now start a game, the computer will generate you seven letters. And your playfield will show you all possibilities with 3-, 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-letter-words. So you can see that you can, for example, combine 21 3-letter words, 8 4-letter-words, and so on. When you now combine a word, the corresponding hidden word will reveal itself and you score the points. When you succeed in finding all words in a category (like all 3-letter-words), you receive bonus points. If you produce a wrong word, it just will be rejected, the same goes for words you already have found.

If you playing with rounds, than you have a round limit you must reach, before you can proceed to the next level.

But that's not all in a level. You will see how many points you have on your Scrabble Scoring Meter, and you will see the bonus flags there too. Reaching the Double Word Flag will double all your points you get now, then you can aim for the Triple Word Flag, which will triple your words. Furthermore, there is a 1-Minute-Time-Flag, which will give you an extra one minute, if you play a time based game. And finally, there are the bonus points on top of the Score Meter, to catch them, you must find all words. But hurry, the longer you need, the fewer these final bonus points will be.

The third game modus, Extreme, is really extreme. Here you can't allow yourself to make errors. Errors (wrong words) in the other modes will just get rejected, but here you will loose one word. So if you produce a typo, regardless the length of your word, one of the 3-letter-hidden-words will turn into X's and you can't find that word anymore, if all 3-letter-words are found/lost, it continues with the 4-letter-words, and so on.

You have two possibilities to play the game, either mouse based (clicking the letters) or keyboard based (typing the letter). Once you found a word, it will reveal itself. You can click on it, and Maven will give you it's definition (both description and grammar) and sometimes you can that way figure out more words, like the plural form to a word you found. If you are stuck, you can ask Maven for a help (help button), and he will help you, first only with the beginning letter of a word and the amount of letters in it, but, if you ask again, he will also give you all letters (unsorted) in the word. And with every new help you will get a bit more from the beginning of the word, until the whole word is revealed.If you end the round (by going to the next level, or quitting), the game reveals all words you don't find, and you can ask Maven for it's definitions.

In additional to that all, the game offers 3 different highscores, one is total-point-based, one is round-based, and one is word-point-based.

The dictionary, the game uses is the North American Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 3rd Edition, and with this you may get stuck in a game, because it contains many non-regular words. [source:mobygames]

Distribution : Retail - Commercial
Platform(s) : PC (Windows)

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