GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Enterprising gamers are formatting vintage text-based adventure games — at the time of this writing, the legendary Zork I-III and 1988’s less-legendary Mini-Zork — for the Kindle and other dedicated e-readers.

“Many people cut their teeth on the imagination-fueled text adventure games released by Infocom back in the eighties,” PortableQuest’s edman writes at MetaFilter. “Whispernet combined with the handy keyboard and the limiting browser made the Kindle perfect for text-based adventures.”

Everyone agrees that E Ink screens render text beautifully. E-readers’ slightly older but tech-inclined demographic definitely includes lovers of vintage games. And the ability to save and reload games using Amazon’s Whispernet is a nice feature.

Are the Zork games at times frustrating? Yes — maybe even more so on the Kindle, where text entry isn’t as fluid as on a full keyboard. (You occasionally have to enter in numbers, and the alt+Q=1 shortcut is a lifesaver there.) Are they immersive and addicting? Yes. And I’m not even very old; these games and I are about the same age.

Could text adventure games on the Kindle benefit from including a few images here and there and introducing slightly more intuitive gameplay while staying within the text-based-adventure genre? I think they could. There’s no reason why mid-to-late-80s RPGs, like my beloved Ultima and Wizardry series, couldn’t be made to work on the Kindle. And that, my friends, is the future of Kindle gaming — just twenty-odd years too late.

Screenshot by Tim Carmody. H/T: Oliver Hulland

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Image by Charlie Sorrel and Tim Carmody

There’s a lot of gadget news about Amazon today, so we’re going to take these items one at a time, in increasing order of uncertainty:

1. Amazon launches Beta version of Kindle for the Web. Think YouTube for books. You can preview short selections of books in your browser, embed them on web sites with a little bit of JavaScript, and customize the size (it won’t automatically keep the aspect ratio) or even add your Amazon Associate tag to the embed. Click through and it takes you to the book’s entry on the Amazon Kindle store. Level of certainty: This you can actually use right now.

   KindleReader.LoadSample({containerID: ‘kindleReaderDiv’, asin: ‘B003X28734′, width: ’640′, height: ’346′});

2. Amazon announces Kindle app for forthcoming RIM Playbook tablet. Makes perfect sense given yesterday’s Playbook announcement, natural extension of the Kindle app for Blackberry, iPad, and other platforms. Level of certainty: Actual press release from Amazon after high-profile announcement from RIM. I suppose a bolt of lightning could strike one or both companies tomorrow. But you can’t see it today.
3. Amazon to Launch Android App Store, which my pal Charlie Sorrel already let you know about. Level of certainty: Well-reported rumor. But it makes sense — Amazon sells a lot of stuff, and there are a lot of Android app stores — and it’s confirmed by multiple developer sources. Don’t be surprised if you hear details soon.
4. Amazon to Build Own Branded Android Tablet. Okay, so, a source comes to you with what seem like two wild, fan-fiction stories about Amazon and Android. You ask around, and one of them — an Amazon App Store — turns out to probably be in the works. Is the other story true?
   
   On the one hand, again — Amazon sells a lot of digital products online, not just e-books: movies, games, music. And it’s not hard to make an Android tablet. In fact, at this point, Amazon has more hardware-production experience with the Kindle than some of the companies that are coming forward with pretty solid products. Add an App Store and it starts to look pretty appealing.

   On the other hand, Amazon’s built up good brand identification with the Kindle, e-books, and E Ink. Will they turn around and say, “oh yeah, multimedia tablets are really awesome, but not, um, more awesome than a Kindle, I mean, um, why not buy both?” Just seems a little surprising. Level of certainty: Pretty cloudy. The source was right about an app store, but as they say, a stopped clock can be right twice a day. If Amazon releases some kind of other media hardware, whether using Android or anything else, it’s equally likely to be a TV box or a smartphone or something else that equally plays to their strength while being a little more differentiated from a dedicated reading machine than a tablet.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Screenshot of My Kindle, Getting Beat By the Computer – Image: Tim Carmody

This might be the happiest chapter in Scrabble’s short digital history: Electronic Arts has released an official version of Scrabble for Kindle. This is the first paid game — or application of any kind — available for the e-reader.

Scrabble fits in well with Amazon’s existing game offerings, as it’s a word-based game that requires simple, five-directional navigation. It shows up in a Kindle user’s home screen, right next to existing games and books. (It’s easy to make a “Games” collection/folder if you like to keep your entertainment media organized/segregated.)

The game is, if I may say so, well put together; you use the controller to navigate to particular spaces, and once you’ve chosen a direction, you can just type out words. There are also smartly-chosen menu options, including a very useful list of two-letter words.

It’s fast and responsive, and I predict it will be a big hit. Scrabble has a huge built-in fan base that overlaps well with book- and word-loving Kindle owners, and Scrabulous (later rechristened Lexulous) has been a tremendous casual gaming hit on Facebook. In fact, Scrabble-makers Hasbro and Mattel had to fight with Facebook and Scrabulous when the game broke out faster than they were ready with an official version. Words With Friends is the similar unbranded iOS application.

Major drawback: unlike Facebook’s or other online iterations of the Scrabble game, there is no social dimension. You can’t play with another Kindle user online; the best you can do is set up a two-player game where you pass the Kindle back and forth.

Electronic Arts’ Scrabble costs $4.99 and is available for purchase and download today.

The First Kindle Paid App Is Out – It’s Scrabble [iReader Review]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Greyscale screenshot of A Bard’s Tale

Amazon’s Kindle reader isn’t going to get amenities like color, video capability, a camera, or an accelerometer in the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean we won’t see a rich variety of specialized applications for it. A recent high-profile hire at Amazon offers one possibility for the future of Kindle apps, while two Kindle-watchers have offered different forecasts.

Amazon recently hired away Andre Vrignaud, Microsoft’s Director of Game Platform Strategy. Now, Vrignaud worked on many different platforms at Microsoft, from XBox and XBox Live to PCs and mobile phones; presumably, he’ll do the same for Amazon, especially since Amazon already offers casual game downloads for Windows PCs. A revitalized, multiplatform game streaming or download service for Amazon is intriguing, but let’s set it aside for now to focus on gaming for Kindle.

Here, Vrignaud and Amazon face a challenge, as they have to chart a game platform strategy that works within the Kindle’s limitations. These aren’t just technical, but are circumscribed by the Kindle’s user base, few of whom are likely to use the Kindle for heavy gaming even if they’re interested in it.

The sweet spot seems to be black-and-white word games, like you might find in a book or newspaper. The Kindle already has two word-puzzle games available, Every Word and Shuffled Row. It’s easy to imagine crosswords, Sudoku, Scrabble, and the like for Kindle — it’s almost unfair to call this casual gaming, since its fans are so passionate. And I’d wager there might even be a market for vintage text-based computer games, many of which are terrific to play for a few minutes at a clip. Any five-hour airport delay would be a lot more interesting if I could bang out Zork or A Bard’s Tale or entertain my son with Oregon Trail on that terrific Kindle battery while I was waiting. (Note: I’m deliberately the pit of hell that is casual gaming for Facebook, but clearly those companies could clean up here too.)

But games are just the beginning of an ecosystem of Kindle apps. We’ve already looked at a few ways you can make Kindle 3’s much-improved browser work like a champ for news reading, but just like with smartphones, a dedicated RSS application could potentially suit some users even better.

At iReader Review, RSS readers are listed along with email clients, weather apps, finance apps, and chat as functions currently performed using the browser that would make natural apps for Kindle. The author makes a strong case for these apps as indicative of the kinds of apps that will do well on the Kindle — providing focused information in a client specifically tailored to the Kindle device and Kindle user.

Livescribe’s app store provides a potential model for the Kindle; an array of pencil-and-paper games, translation services, and reference applications, all perfectly suited for a simple text interface and black-and-white display.

Finally, there’s the one-in-a-million possibility. One of the biggest knocks on Amazon had been that its Kindle supports its own unique formats but not ePub, an e-book standard many other companies have rallied around. There’s no way Amazon would ever allow an application that duplicates its e-reader function, allowing you to read DRMed or cracked Amazon e-books. Amazon even has a clause in its terms of service forbidding generic readers.

Popular Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, though, recently claimed in a podcast that several app makers were working on building an ePub client for Kindle — and that Amazon had given them the go-ahead.

Now, some people think Ihnatko was confused or misinformed, and it’s quite possible that Amazon could allow a reader for open, non-DRMed ePub files while still barring all the books you bought from Barnes & Noble.

Still, it’s an intriguing possibility — and Amazon could certainly use an App marketplace to open the Kindle to becoming a general document viewer (and casual writer) of a wide range of files without writing a line of code themselves.

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews

Amazon continues its electronic march across the e-book world with Kindle for Android, which joins Kindle apps for iOS, BlackBerry, Mac and PC.

Like the other Kindle flavors, the Android version will keep your reading organized and synchronized across all your devices via Whispersync, let you make and view annotations and buy titles from the Kindle store. Also like the other version, the Android Kindle app is free to download (find it in the Android Market). What you don’t yet get are the audio and video extras announced for iOS devices yesterday.

The actual hardware Kindle certainly kick-started the mainstream e-book market, but it looks more and more like that was its main reason for existing. Amazon, as we know, makes its money on selling books, not selling Kindles, and the relentless push to make its e-book library available anywhere shows the business plan clearly. It doesn’t hurt that the Kindle’s catalog stands at around 600,000 titles, making it the one of the best-stocked stores around. Kindle for Android will work on any device running Android 1.6 or better.

Kindle for Android [Amazon. Thanks, Kinley!]

Source:wired.com

Posted under Gadget Reviews