Friday, December 29, 2006

Scrabble from MacGameStore.com

I recently bought Scrabble for OS X on the MacGameStore.com site. I have to say that I disrecommend both the Scrabble game itself and the MacGameStore company that sold it to me. The game crashes randomly and frequently and there's no Save so you lose the whole game. I'm posting this here in the hopes it will help somebody before a purchase, as you won't see this on their review site (see below).


I bought Scrabble on Christmas Eve for my daughter and by Christmas night I had counted a half a dozen crashes or so. Emails to MacGameStore went unanswered for a few days, which is understandable during the holiday season, but what I think is bogus is that they didn't post my Review of the game which was negative because my experience was negative. How are other potential customers supposed to get a fair set of reviews if they censor the negative ones? It was balanced and fair, I think, and intended to help future potential buyers. In fact when I went back to look at reviews they had actually removed several of the ones that were there, and somewhat negative (mostly criticizing the game for lack of network support).


I won't be buying anything else from them, and I'd stop short of recommending them to anyone else. I know good customer service when I encounter it, and they simply did not provide it.


Below is the text exactly as I posted it to the Review page (I had the foresight to copy/paste it because I could tell from their policy statement that they were unlikely to post it on their site). Bear in mind that I had already paid and created an account just so I could post the review, and I had already emailed their support team and waited a couple of days for a reply.



To: reviews at MacGameStore.com
From: Glenn Reid, paying customer

I bought this game on Christmas eve and although it's kind of fun to play, it has crashed a half a dozen times and lacks some basic features that would make it a much better game.

For example, if you could Save a game in progress, or even better, if it auto-saved every time you made a move, then the crashes would be a bit more tolerable because you could continue on. But there are other scenarios where Save would be a welcome feature.

It's basicaly unusable for multi-player, though it offers that feature. It needs to support network play for that to be viable. Though you can play by "not looking", this is unrealistic, and not a good playing experience because you need to study the board while the other person is thinking to truly play Scrabble.

All in all it was not worth the $20 and I didn't hear anything back from the company via tech support on the crashing issue, so I'm posting this review. I see there is an "approval" process. Hopefully that doesn't mean "screen out bad ones". I'll post this on my blog if that's the case.

Here is the less-than-helpful response I got from their tech support team after waiting 3 days; my email to GameHouse.com so far hasn't received a human response (though it's only been half a day).


> I just bought a copy of Scrabble and though I am somewhat enjoying
> it, it has CRASHED 4 times on me in the space of 1 day; I just bought
> it last night! I saved the crash log from the last time if anybody
> there wants to see it.
>
> Given that the multi-player mechanism isn't very good (it should play
> over a network) I would like to return the game for my money back,
> since it is not working properly. Please let me know how to proceed.

Please contact Gamehouse, the creator of this product for technical support
issues regarding Scrabble.

http://www.gamehouse.com/support/

Thanks,

The MGS Staff

------------------------
Macgamestore.com
1404 Laguna Cove
Hutto, TX 78634

If this is helpful to you, leave a comment on this blog posting.

Monday, December 11, 2006

Back to Blogger

I've moved my blog back to Blogger from Bubbler. Sigh.

Not there are any of you readers left, but I have mapped the URL "blog.glennreid.com" here and that will let me move the blog again some day without a huge disruption. So depending on how you got here, click that link and then bookmark it (or RSS it, or delete it, or whatever).