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Commentary Ticker
- Irony In Stone: Ancient Greek Statues Dressed as Modern Hipsters
June 19, 2013 | 9:40 amAfter a day spent wandering around the Louvre in Paris, France, studying the idyllic nude bodies of ancient Greek statues, photographer Léo Caillard got to wondering about the nature of clothing. Each of the statues represented the maximization of human perfection—the human body taken to the extreme. But most people don’t have the ideal Greek [...]
- When in Rome… Make Better Concrete: How An Ancient Mix Beats Today’s Best
June 18, 2013 | 10:40 pmFrom the Hoover Dam and the Burj Khalifa to the Panama Canal, concrete underlies the greatest of modern architectural achievements. But modern concrete, it seems, doesn’t hold a candle to Ancient Rome’s. A little history for you: the Romans were the first to engineer concrete in mass, and it was upon this concrete that they [...]
- Google Wants Balloon Internet for Everybody
June 15, 2013 | 11:06 am“Balloons. That’s right. Balloons,” says the voice of a young girl in a video for Google’s latest endeavor: bringing the world online with massive balloons. The initiative, called Project Loon, comes from Google X, the experimental lab within the company whose sole purpose is to dream up big, borderline insane, ideas. Google X created self-driving [...]
- Watch Researchers Discover a Sunken Egyptian City
June 13, 2013 | 9:36 pmThonis, the legendary port city that served as an entryway to the Egyptian empire, was long considered to be a myth. The tales of its immense power and vast riches conflicted with the evidence of its existence—mainly that there was none. Cities of such grandeur do not typically disappear off the face of the earth. [...]
- “I Am The Nucleus” and Other Bizarre Quotes By Kanye West
June 12, 2013 | 10:06 amKanye West says the darndest things. On his unrelenting quest to become his own species of hip-hop artist, he has established a reputation as irreverent, controversial, and unapologetic. Though he makes time for public grandstanding by claiming a US President “doesn’t care about black people” or interrupting the VMAs, he remains mostly quiet when it [...]
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Play: Letterpress, the New Addicting iOS Word Game
Words with Friends made Scrabble sexy again. Now Loren Brichter, the iOS developer who designed the pull-to-refresh and swipe-for-menu mechanisms, is getting into addicting word games. A year after leaving his job at Twitter to work on the next innovation in app design he has now released Letterpress, a game that combines elements of Words with Friends, and SpellTower.
“I was also hooked on Words With Friends back when it came out, but then I got tired of it,” Brichter told The Verge. “I tried similar games but conceptually they were derivative, and at some point all my friends were better than me so it got tedious.”
In it’s current state, Letterpress is neither tedious nor completely derivative. Each player is presented with a five by five grid of letters which they use to build words. Any time a player uses a tile, it changes to blue on their screen, any time their opponent uses a tile, it turns red. The players can steal tiles from their opponents unless they are blocked in by adjacent red tiles. Once all the tiles have been used, the person with the most wins. Games go quickly (depending on how responsive your opponent is) and are relatively addictive.
The design of the game is clean and minimalist featuring square geometry and a simple color palette. Letterpress is free to play but has the option of a 99 cent in-app upgrade that includes new themes, the ability to see past words, and allows the player to have multiple games at once.
Letterpress’s power lies in its simplicity and balance. The rules make sense and are fair, but the tide of the game can change quickly. It’s not uncommon to be ahead in the beginning of the game and still lose—there’s a fair chance that if you strategize enough and pick the best words, anyone can win.
Download Letterpress on the App Store
Attribution
The Verge