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Scrabble is a board game that as a goal has increasing of one's vocabulary. In short the player is forming words on a wooden board with the letters that he has in his inventory, each letter has a number of points that are awarded to the player that puts it on the board, while the most rarely met letters give the most points (Z for example). For each properly placed word on the board he gets a number of points, corresponding to the total score that he gets for placing his letters on the board, multiplying by the board's bonus squares that he manages to put his letters on. This computer game from Infogrames remains true to the board version, but it offers a lot of improvements over the original board version - read on to find out why.
Graphics:
The graphics are nicely done, the boards actually do look wooden and the in-game interface is very well organized. There are different types of boards to choose from, both 2D and 3D. There are nice backgrounds as well... And what else would you want from a Scrabble game? If you're looking for Quake 4, you've got the wrong game.
Sound:
The in-game music is pretty nice (and you could turn it off of course, if it's not to your liking), and there are good sound effects for the board movement. And what else would you want from a Scrabble game?
The game features a hints system that will help you form words and show where you could put them in case you've come to a dead still (or just want to cheat against the computer opponent :P). And in case you think that cheating is unethical, there's yet another option that allows you to see all the words that you could make from your letter inventory, without letting you know if you can actually put them or not on the board. And after you're done playing a game, if you wish it will even analyze the played game and tell you hints and suggestions for future use. So after you're all happy and excited about winning the latest game, and select turn-by-turn analysis of your last played game, it'll show you have you could've gotten 2X of the points you had at the end of the game, and makes you feel ashamed of your lousy knowledge of English. There are also "mini-games" available, which let you select the mode of play, such as for example forming only 5 letter words or trying to get the maximum amount of points with a given board situation and letters inventory. And of course there's also an option to add your own words into the dictionary, so if you're Canadian like me you could add "Eh?" in there :-) .
Multiplayer:
You can play the game with your friends on the same computer, a local network or over Internet, since it supports Hot-seat, LAN and Internet modes of play. The multiplayer connection is very stable and there are no dropouts/bugs, as tested over the Internet with a friend of mine, so there is no chance that you'll get disconnected in the middle of the game.
Conclusion:
Scrabble Complete is the best and most detailed Scrabble game for the computer ever, and it truly deserves its name. Everything in the game is well done, and it deserves your hard earned cash (especially since you can get it for $19,95 in stores now). It's a MUST buy for every Scrabble enthusiast, casual gamer, school/college student that would like to improve his vocabulary or just any illiterate person like our dear Francesco... *Yelling to Francesco*: "Hey, I'm mailing you my copy of Scrabble Complete so you could finally learn English!"
