multiplayer

Remember Scrabulous, the Facebook-powered Scrabble knockoff that was all the rage a couple years back? I was a serious addict, but lost interest after all the name changes, lawsuits, redesigns, etc.

Thanks to my evil friend Denny, my addiction is reborn--and mobile. Words With Friends is a two-player crossword challenge that offers turn-based, Scrabulous-like competition. It's not perfect, but I'm loving it.

The game lets you complete online against random players and/or friends. (Built-in Facebook/Twitter links let you post an invitation as a status update.) You can have up to 20 matches going at once, with … Read more

Military-based action games have become the first-person-shooter staple thanks to franchises like Call of Duty. We've seen attempts to capture the same experience before, but Battlefield: Bad Company seems to do the best job at tackling the genre with its own take on things.

We've been playing Bad Company 2 for a while now and enjoy some things, but dislike others. Does it have a leg to stand on, or does it rely on too many elements that Modern Warfare 2 has seemingly perfected?

Dan: As a potential rival to the juggernaut that is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the equally awkwardly named Battlefield: Bad Company 2 certainly looks the part. It has a collection of multiplayer games, a semi-throwaway single-player campaign, and the long-standing provenance that comes from being an offshoot of a well-liked classic game series.

And, in fact, this buzz-heavy shooter is very well-made and has much that catches our attention. It's main claim to fame is wildly destructible environments, which is a press-release-like way of saying many of the actual buildings and structures in the game can be brought down by rockets, bombs, and other high-powered attacks.

Certainly that destruction mechanic was engaging enough to keep us roped into a single-player campaign that started off strong with a gripping WWII raid, but soon fell into shopworn cliche (and unlike the similarly cliched Modern Warfare 2, it lacked the frenetic energy to keep us from asking too many questions)--at least for a few hours.

But the main attraction is the online multiplayer, and on this count, the game both hits and misses. The ability to bring a building tumbling down on someone's head makes for battles that feel different almost every time, and the mission types stay far away from the typical team death match shootouts, making this a a must-try for fans of military first-person shooters. … Read more

It's a good week to be a gamer. We've rounded up five just-released titles that offer a little something for everyone: 3D platform action, a space-themed take on Facebook fave FarmVille, havoc-wreaking airborne zombies, and more. Take a look:

Assassin's Creed II: Multiplayer Created exclusively for the iPhone and free until March 3, ACII: Multiplayer looks nothing like the third-person action-adventure games that preceded it. Rather, it's a top-down, online-multiplayer game of kill-or-be-killed. It requires Wi-Fi, but Ubisoft's servers automatically link you with up to three other live humans. I found the game a little … Read more

10 Pin Shuffle Lite is a preview version of 10 Pin Shuffle, a physics-based shuffleboard simulator with polished graphics and a convincing interface.

The interface is simple but subtle: you look down the length of a traditional, barroom shuffleboard table, with a realistically rendered shuffleboard weight in front of you. You have a number of options for positioning and shooting the weight, with left and right arrows that slide the weight laterally, and another pair of arrows that let you rotate your aim to the left or right. You can also just tap and drag the weight into position, and … Read more

Last May, I began a series of behind-the-scenes meetings with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield about Tiny Speck, the company he and three partners had just started and the game they were working on.

That game, which they announced on Tuesday is called Glitch, has been in the works since last March and much has changed about it in the interim--the artistic styles, the back story, the core game mechanic and the size of the team building it.

Glitch is a social online game that takes place in the imaginations of 11 ancient giants and tasks players with essentially growing an … Read more

On Tuesday, as reported first by CNET, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's start-up Tiny Speck announced its new online social game, Glitch.

As described on Glitch.com, "It's called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the 'glitch'--a grave danger of disemprobablization. This results in a time-traveling effort at saving the future, going back into the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and … Read more

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to live inside the imaginations of a group of ancient giants, get ready to play Glitch.

A new game that went into alpha testing on Tuesday, as reported exclusively by CNET, Glitch (see related behind-the-scenes feature about its development) is a puzzle-heavy, Web-based social MMO built around sending players billions of years into the past to develop the optimistic future that today seems increasingly unlikely.

"The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants," said Stewart Butterfield, the president of Glitch developer Tiny Speck, … Read more

Last July, TechCrunch ran an item about Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's recent tweet that his new company was hiring.

"Maybe I make a terrible boss, but at least I know it," he tweeted. "Work with me." And based on that tiny little missive, his until-then unknown start-up Tiny Speck was flooded with job applicants hoping they join Butterfield as he and his partners made a second attempt at catching lightning in the Web 2.0 bottle.

Of course, no one knew at that point what Tiny Speck was up to, beyond the fact that the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Stewart Butterfield and his business partner Cal Henderson stared at the MacBook Pro in front of them.

For nearly a year, they'd been struggling to figure out what to call the game their start-up was building. Any time a team member loaded a working version, they'd sit through a few seconds of a splash screen with nothing on it but a generic title featuring little more than the name and logo of their company.

But now, the group had finally given their baby an official moniker: Glitch. And this was one of the first times the two … Read more