Category : Windows 3.X Files
Archive   : WWIZ0792.ZIP
Filename : ART4

Commercial Product Review
with permission from INTERACTION
written by Kurt Busch

"A Nine-Letter Word for Fun with Windows..."

Until last Thursday, I was an almost-reformed crossword junkie, many
moons down the road to recovery. Now I'm slipping dangerously back into the
black-and-white squares.
Crossword puzzles are sort of like intellectual engineering projects for
us liberal arts majors. They let us give our word prowess a workout while we
stack esoteric terms into neat little interconnecting columns like so many
precisely fit bricks in a Mayan temple. On those occasions when we actually
"finish" a crossword puzzle, we walk away all warm and smug like we just
pulled off some kind of miracle in spatial lexicography.
For seven years, I made a point of getting to the office an hour or so
early so I could settle down at my desk with a buttered roll, a pint of
chocalate milk, and The New York Times crossword puzzle. Over the years, the
combination managed impressively to fill out my vocabulary (and my waistline).
When I left New York, I gradually lost interest in these little word
games. Most newspapers featured disappointingly easy crossword puzzles
("Three letter abbreviation for United States Of America") and the whole
business had taken on a sort of sameness. The thrill was gone.
With this kind of personal disenchantment afoot, I greeted the announce-
ment of a Windows-based crossword package with less than earthshaking
enthusiasm. What, I asked myself, could some piece of crossword software do
that its newpaper namesake hadn't done before ? Why play a word game that runs
on an extravagantly expensive computer when the original requires nothing more
than a pencil (or pen for you show-offs out there).
As it turns out, I had a real change of heart on that 'last Thursday'
mentioned earlier. Thats the day I got got my first taste of TAKE-A-BREAK!
CROSSWORDS.
The new package features hundreds of crossword puzzles from Dell
Publishing, the people who put out all those paperback collections for the
truly hard-core wordfitters of the world. You can select from three different
levels of play difficulty and customize screen colors throughout the game.
And - a critical point for real crossword junkies - the entire puzzle is
visible onscreen at all times.
And it overcomes all those niggling little shortcomings I'd always
tolerated in conventional crosswords.
I mean, does anybody besides me come down with directional dyslexia while
trying to fit a clue to the appropriate letter blocks ? You're looking for
43 DOWN, but you read the clue for 43 ACROSS and you spend half-an-hour or so
trying to squeeze the answer to "Father of Russian nihilism" into a three
letter space.
With the new TAKE-A-BREAK! CROSSWORDS, this sort of frustration is replaced
with an amusing and efficient little mouse interface. Click on any group of
spaces, across or down, and the appropriate clue is highlighted on the
convenient scrolling menus. Conversely, click on any clue, and the appropriate
group of spaces is highlighted.
Oh, you know what else bugs me about conventional crossword puzzles ? When
you've filled out 85% of the thing and you've got one little block of 12 words
or so, all four or five letters long, and you just can't figure it out. You
know if you could just get one word, you could jump start your verbal virility
and all those other words would fall into place in great crossword epiphany.
But you can't get that one word, and you have to wait until tomorrow for the
answer. By then, you've lost interest.
TAKE-A-BREAK! CROSSWORDS actually has a hint feature that lets you buy a
vowel, as if Pat and Vanna were standing over your shoulder, looking at the
screen with you. Of course, getting a hint lowers your final score, but- hey-
it's not like we're into competition or anything (Yeah, right).
And, hey, you want to know what really burns me about those pencil-&-paper
puzzles ? I hate it when you put the wrong answer down early on and then you're
stuck building a bunch of improbable words around the wrong letters. You know,
the puzzle asks for "A major eastern religon" and your put in "Buddhism"
instead of "Hinduism" and you wind up torturing interconnecting spaces with
words like "gdiff" and "snucker" and "balf". Then you try erasing some of them,
but you don't know which ones are wrong, and all the cheesy newsprint gets all
smudged and ripped, and everybody walks by your desk and looks at it, thinking
"Gee, what a lame-o...."
Anyway, with TAKE-A-BREAK! CROSSWORDS, you have an option that makes your
answers bonehead-proof. If you type the wrong word, it politely vanishes. If
you type in the right ones, it stays, glowing proudly from your screen, a
symbol of your intellectual triumph over this forbidding feat of word-smithing.
Come to think of it, I'm not sure how I tolerated crossword puzzles before
TAKE-A-BREAK! CROSSWORDS.