@mwoody:
I dislike you. You seem to make that this is the first guy to ever do this? hello have you seen the amount of cars on our roads that look exactly the same just with different logos and ect on? how many lawsuits should we have over all of that?

....

Anyway....whos up for Dingbats?

danieldrago

Yeah really... they should be wasting their time on a gaming news blog! The fools! ;)

fuchikoma

@jpneiswi: Soylent Green is People!!!

Vergobret

@mwoody: Fine words

SmokeFemur

Good. Rather than copying an old game we've seen for decades, he was forced to actually innovate in graphics and game mechanics. I'm baffled by the people who were moving to defend this moron's lack of inventiveness before; in an industry too often plagued by cookie-cutter reimplementations of old concepts, we should be applauding any legal precedent to wipe out verbatim plagiarism.

mwoody

Lmfao!

This is what I was talking about.

I asked if they could be "Word Tilez" legally.

Looks like they can just change the name.

Awesome stuff.

karasu is my homeboy

"Theeeeeeeeey're FOOD!"

jpneiswi

@BlackMage66652:
THIS.

ZinkO: Beat Incursion

They shoulda taken the $10* million.

PlasmaMachine

@Fnor: Depends on how the lawsuit was written, but in many cases you are spot on. I hope the Scrabulous guys are ready for some fun!

Omnimon

@Fnor: Thing is, it's not the gameplay that's copyrighted. In fact, gameplay *can't* be copyrighted, or trademarked, or patented. (Otherwise there'd only ever be one of any game in a genre. You guys would have no Halo, no Splinter Cell, no nothing that wasn't absolutely the first game in its genre.) That's not the reason they made these changes.

Only the name was changed for trademark reasons. In fact, that's what the lawsuit was all about.

The gameplay changes were probably to satisfy Facebook and get the thing back up there. Facebook doesn't want to be caught in the middle of this.

But it's really got no legal point to it, so it's not going to hurt their case at all.

badasscat

@MajinMexican:

Or just get a good balance, fit it into your day.

Communist_Gamer

I'd much rather spend my time refreshing Kotaku all day long. It's way more productive...

MajinMexican

I better tell my aunt her crack is back.

ComradeStalin86

"Why the hell are so many people wasting their entire day playing games on a social networking site?"

Shhh shh shh shh...they aren't...they are networking business deals.......with words.

s0nlxaftrsh0ck

@Fnor: Game mechanics are not copyrightable/trademarkable. Visual design is. So the graphics design changes are pretty understandable. The game mechanics, not so much? Can anyone out there actually tell us in detail what they changed?

Jazhuis

"given the game some graphics and mechanics tweaking to help differentiate it from the Hasbro original."

That usually doesn't help. In fact, tweaking things to avoid the copyright while staying as similar as possible only hurts.

Fnor

I just don't get it, why are people spending so much time on crappy Facebook games and why the hell do they care so damn much.

BlackMage66652

the real question is, why is anyone on Facebook? it's so violent, after all.

geekgrrl

"Why the hell are so many people wasting their entire day playing games on a social networking site?"

I dunno, That tetris application is pretty fun, plus friend/global leaderboards. IT'S HARD TO IGNORE OK?

PAULINK

Games. They should be played on console or PC. On Facebook? Oh please give Kotaku a break.

Communist_Gamer

My wife has been quite unhappy with the official Scrabble game by EA. There are a bunch of annoying animations and it takes longer to take her turn. She just wants to go into the games she has going, quickly take her turn, and go back to what she is supposed to be doing.

I find it a little funny that my nongamer wife hates EA.

Vroshnak

I don't know, I might have to make a facebook account to try it out. I dig the real Scrabble, so I'd like to try this out.

Wolfers

I can totally see angst teens saying FU to Hasbro/EA; or previous employees.

PsycheE

@j00s: I was going to say the same thing but i wasnt sure if his post was serious or not

SmokeFemur

@badasscat: I really hate the parroting "mechanics aren't copyrightable!" that erupts whenever something like this happens. No, mechanics are not copyrightable. However, things like organization, such as the way the board is laid out, is, so long as it is creative (which the scrabble board probably is). Aping that organization combined with a small change in mechanical play shows that they're trying to make facial changes to avoid copyright law.

I could go on for ages about taking reductive, internet-fueled views of copyright law to heart, but I think I'd rather go do something productive.

Fnor

@danieldrago: You're kidding, right? I know this is going to blow your mind, but all those cars you think look exactly the same are actually different! Because, in reality, they don't look exactly the same; they've all been designed individually from the bottom up. Sure, the designers often take inspiration from what's worked with other cars, but there are no carbon-copy designs like what happened with Scrabbulous and Scrabble.

j00s

It was a great game to get through lectures at school. You could play along with a bunch of similarly bored folks.

stchoo

I played this scrabulous thing once. Against the computer, mind you. The computer kept playing lots and lots of two-letter words, that mostly weren't really words. And there was no way to disable two-letter words. It was infuriating.

MadMinstrel

@BlackMage66652: You've obviously never super poked before. You can shank people on there!

Kanik

@Communist_Gamer: But...facebook can be accessed from a PC. :(

I know a handful of people who play this. They're either stingy and refuse to buy games, are too poor to buy games or grew up on games and simply don't own a console and are 20+ years old.

Granted, whenever I get an invite to play on Facebook I reply with "sorry, I'm playing games where they are meant to be played", and I go off and play Sega Swirl on my Dreamcast.

Kanik

@AuraHACK: To be fair, the main reason some cars are so similar is because [...]

I hate forgetting... entire sentences >>

AuraHACK

@danieldrago:

To be fair, they're part of the same enterprise or built at the same factory. It's why the Saturn Astra is exactly the same as the Opel Astra (GM owns both) and why the Chevrolet Aveo and Suzuki Swift are the same (Built at the same plant in Korea).

Sorry, had to point that out.

AuraHACK

It's hard to believe these board game people roll out shitty Star Wars and Simpson knock off versions of their games every year, but it's impossible to find a decent online version of any of them.

Take Risk, awesome game, but Risk 2 (last one I played) was fucking brutal, crashed a lot, the computer cheated on dice rolls (proven true, not bitching about losing) and the online was brutal with horrible interface, bad net code and the whole thing looked like it was put together over a weekend. Why isn't there a decent online / computer based Risk game?

Even chess is shitty online and its sad that Chess Titans for Vista ist he best chess game I've ever played and I've tried shitty Chessmasters, Fritz, etc.

This Scrabble nonsense is another in a long list of shitty online representation by the actual board game producers. Scrabble should have been online with a decent version long ago. The fact a free version made for freaking Facebook has gotten this much attention only proves that point. Instead, they dick around making cheap knock off versions with celebrities or cartoon properties on the box.

It's pretty obvious why people are playing this on Facebook, of all things - there are no good versions available anywhere else.

KirbyMorph

@KirbyMorph: This was exactly what I thought. Why the hell hadn't Hasbro done this on their own way BEFORE Scrabulous was even invented? Their app should have been FIRST. What are they doing all day? It's not like they're hard at work innovating on new... Scrabbles. Come on! They should be all over the internet, looking for new ways to get people to play their games, and the fact that two brothers from nowheresville put up a robust application that drew millions of users before a large game corporation could even get out of the gate is extremely pathetic.

Why aren't there free official versions of online/facebook app Monopoly, Risk, Clue, Trivial Pursuit, etc? With tiny text ads, they could make a killing.

Obstinate fools.

AlexDitto

@Kanik:

I guess, then again I have a strong belief that Myspace and Facebook will be the source of the apocalypse so the sooner they crash and burn the better. :)

BlackMage66652

"How is anything getting done, anywhere?"

Haven't you seen Wall-E yet? Nothing is getting done. Planet Earth is doomed, and there's nothing we can do.

Protector one