Wordplay is a tactical word game for two, three or four players, published on CD-i by BEPL in 1993. Wordplay is a pretty rare CD-i title, I don't see it often. So for your collection, it's a nice addition. But to actually play it... It's nicely developed, but in the end it is a simple scramble clone, made in the early years of CD-i. At least here in The netherlands it was never released, perhaps it was UK only. This game was originally published in 1977 in an early issue of Personal Computer World, under the name of "Scramble". The basic game strategy, which remains the same, was wholly an original idea by Graham Trott, owing nothing to any other word game past or present.
From the disc: Compete with up to three other players in this game of word skill and tactics to make a word and register a score. “Bob”, the game’s own character, will calculate the score based on the length of the word and the value of its letters. Ultimately the game is a race to score 200 points, but back-markers can quickly become race-leaders due to the random way that “Bob” presents new letters.
Contains English and American vocabulary.
Alan about Wordplay: "backs electronic publishing limited i my mind made some really good titles for the cdi. wordplay is a challenging word game with nice music while the food of france has excellent production values and the wipe clean booklet shows signs of quality, overall the companies product show a understanding for the strengths of the cdi, it would be nice to get an interview with anyone who worked with the company at the time."
Let's have a look at some screens of Wordplay:
Robin Back and Johnny Byrne started the company BEPL in 1989 to make interactive stories for television initially hosted on CD-i. BEPL is short for Backs Electronic Publishing Limited. Their first published CD-i title was "Anne Willan presents the Food of France". When it was first released in 1992 in the USA, it broke new ground with animated DYUV sequences, attract-mode programming, and interactive credits.
BEPL was credited with its first EMMA award in recognition of these achievements. The prograaming on Wordplay was done using Balboa, on top of which lies a proprietary scripting language similar to HyperTalk. This compiles to efficient code that is interpreted at run-time. Graphical objects such as the buttons, letters and numbers are processed by a separate "object" compiler, which generates a list of named objects for use at run-time, each having information about size and position.
The title and credits animations are RL7 movies; other animations were generated by a proprietary sprite compiler as tables of frame differences. The dictionary is Huffman coded and memory resident. It occupies about 100k bytes. The project took about a year of intermittent effort by one designer and one programmer.
[Thanks, Alan & Petsasjim1]