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The "bored" file
Thu, Oct. 25th, 2007 17:16(... in which I do some free advertising, and some free ... antisponsoring? Hunh. My vocabulary has a headache today. )
Dearly Beloved has been known to write small computer games, and consider selling them on the Internets. When he first entered this pursuit, I got into the habit of checking some online game portals regularly, to find out what's already been done, what's the hot trend, and what totally stinks as a game I'd even consider beta-testing. The deal's usually straightforward: user downloads a demo of a $20 game, user tries it for up to an hour, user decides it's not worth the price of a lunch date, user uninstalls and checks for anything more likely. Alas, several of the portals have gone beyond rebranding games and adopted the "you must install our Console" approach, which all too often includes some variety of spying software. Big Fish Games particularly annoyed me when they jumped onto this boat. I'd been pretty fond of their service, even bought a few games from them, but I won't give them a real email address just so I can find out whether I'm interested in giving them money. They aren't paying *me* to test-market, after all. I don't have to give out my contact info to sit down on a couch at a furniture store, or try on clothes at a department store...
That's a separate rant. Anyhow, iWin seemed to me to have the most useful, most reliable setup among all the "install our Console" game portals, and we had a mostly-contented relationship for several months. That was destroyed the first time I ran into an (admittedly dimwitted) problem: I forgot my password, and couldn't persuade the system to recover it automatically because I'd apparently ended my registration email address in dotcom when it was actually dotnet, or something boneheaded along those lines. Totally my fault, and I would've been completely comfortable taking the blame for a week of no access to a service for which I paid a monthly subscription.
Even though their automatic response from Customer Service said I'd probably hear from them in three days or less.
I shouldn't have to notify them, over a month later, that I'd be contesting the subscription charges with my bank on Monday morning because I'd followed their procedure to cancel subscription entirely a week beforehand, all because I couldn't get a reaction out of them that in any way suggested my problem might SOMEday be solved.
So, basically, if a user has a single email address and a single password for all Internet business transactions and community accounts and logins and everything else, iWin is awesome and I heartily recommend it. For the price of about ten bucks a month, there's a bunch of free games, not demoes but whole games to download and install, and each month one can pick out a new game to get for no additional cash. They've got a few of the Nancy Drew games which are awesome for those who like point-and-click mysteries (and yes, you will probably need lots of scratch paper and a pencil, maybe a box of colored pencils if you're not sketching big on certain clues); most games BFG or Reflexive Entertainment or Shockwave gets, iWin will get eventually.
But I'm now devoting my first click of the Bored Hour to Reflexive. Flex hasn't asked me to install his Console, at least not yet, and doesn't even insist on getting my address before he'll show me his potential. I like that in a source of entertainment. Plus, hey, he's a Superhero! No online games or HER Interactive demoes here, but that's okay -- I'll get my Nancy from the source, in the future.
Meanwhile! If you like Tetris and LEGOs, you might like Puzzle City. It made my blood pressure shoot through the roof, but I might give it to Darling #1 Husband for Christmas -- he's a Tetris addict, and this is certainly different.
Dearly Beloved has been known to write small computer games, and consider selling them on the Internets. When he first entered this pursuit, I got into the habit of checking some online game portals regularly, to find out what's already been done, what's the hot trend, and what totally stinks as a game I'd even consider beta-testing. The deal's usually straightforward: user downloads a demo of a $20 game, user tries it for up to an hour, user decides it's not worth the price of a lunch date, user uninstalls and checks for anything more likely. Alas, several of the portals have gone beyond rebranding games and adopted the "you must install our Console" approach, which all too often includes some variety of spying software. Big Fish Games particularly annoyed me when they jumped onto this boat. I'd been pretty fond of their service, even bought a few games from them, but I won't give them a real email address just so I can find out whether I'm interested in giving them money. They aren't paying *me* to test-market, after all. I don't have to give out my contact info to sit down on a couch at a furniture store, or try on clothes at a department store...
That's a separate rant. Anyhow, iWin seemed to me to have the most useful, most reliable setup among all the "install our Console" game portals, and we had a mostly-contented relationship for several months. That was destroyed the first time I ran into an (admittedly dimwitted) problem: I forgot my password, and couldn't persuade the system to recover it automatically because I'd apparently ended my registration email address in dotcom when it was actually dotnet, or something boneheaded along those lines. Totally my fault, and I would've been completely comfortable taking the blame for a week of no access to a service for which I paid a monthly subscription.
Even though their automatic response from Customer Service said I'd probably hear from them in three days or less.
I shouldn't have to notify them, over a month later, that I'd be contesting the subscription charges with my bank on Monday morning because I'd followed their procedure to cancel subscription entirely a week beforehand, all because I couldn't get a reaction out of them that in any way suggested my problem might SOMEday be solved.
So, basically, if a user has a single email address and a single password for all Internet business transactions and community accounts and logins and everything else, iWin is awesome and I heartily recommend it. For the price of about ten bucks a month, there's a bunch of free games, not demoes but whole games to download and install, and each month one can pick out a new game to get for no additional cash. They've got a few of the Nancy Drew games which are awesome for those who like point-and-click mysteries (and yes, you will probably need lots of scratch paper and a pencil, maybe a box of colored pencils if you're not sketching big on certain clues); most games BFG or Reflexive Entertainment or Shockwave gets, iWin will get eventually.
But I'm now devoting my first click of the Bored Hour to Reflexive. Flex hasn't asked me to install his Console, at least not yet, and doesn't even insist on getting my address before he'll show me his potential. I like that in a source of entertainment. Plus, hey, he's a Superhero! No online games or HER Interactive demoes here, but that's okay -- I'll get my Nancy from the source, in the future.
Meanwhile! If you like Tetris and LEGOs, you might like Puzzle City. It made my blood pressure shoot through the roof, but I might give it to Darling #1 Husband for Christmas -- he's a Tetris addict, and this is certainly different.
