Greetings, All inPlayers,

We’re happy to announce that our fifth game, Loco Locution, is complete. Featuring elements similar to the television show Lingo, players guess four and five letter words using clues given after each guess. Several game varieties and speeds are available. You can sign up for a free trial at: http://allinplay.com/free_trial.html

Cheers,
The All inPlay Team

All inPlay Announces the Launch of Tag-The Anagram Game, Fourth Title Moves Beyond Card Genre

Shrewsbury, MA – Word wizards of the world rejoice. All inPlay has announced the launch of its fourth title, Tag-The Anagram Game. With Tag, All inPlay has broadened its appeal by cracking yet another genre in
accessible online multiplayer games.

“Over the years, we got a lot of requests to make some sort of word game that was also multiplayer,” remarked All inPlay co-Founder Paul Silva. “Tag is a great example of how you can take a simple game and transform it into an online experience that can be enjoyed by anyone, blind or sighted, whether you love word games or not.” Tag expands on the basic anagram game by allowing up to 8 players per table to compete in short rounds of play.

Unlike All inPlay’s prior titles, Tag is real-time, meaning players don’t take turns. Once the round begins, everyone at the table is frantically typing as many words as they can before time runs out and the winner is
announced. Then the process starts all over again with a new phrase, keeping things fresh and interesting.

On social tables, rounds last longer and players have more time to chat between rounds, while Fast tables offer shorter rounds with shorter breaks, making for a finger tapping experience that doesn’t let up. Three
difficulty levels let players of all types find a table that’s right for them. Multiple scoreboards allow for many avenues of competition beyond simple scoring.

“With the launch of Tag, we’re bringing the All inPlay experience to a group of people who aren’t interested in card games,” said All inPlay co-founder Jeremie Spitzer. “The reaction we’ve received has been outstanding, and we hope to explore this genre further in the future.”

Anyone can try All inPlay’s four games free for 15 days by visiting http://allinplay.com.

About All inPlay

All inPlay creates a fun, friendly environment that brings together blind and sighted friends from around the world to socialize and play a variety of games. Players can choose from Texas Hold’em, Draw Poker, Crazy Eights and now Tag. A subscription to All inPlay, which includes all four games, costs $7.95 per month, with discounted quarterly and yearly plans also available. All inPlay is committed to working with educational and rehabilitation institutions to offer their patrons access to the All inPlay community. A free trial is available at http://allinplay.com.

Or the accessibility of sound. There are many ways sound can be used to make a game playable by the blind. There are games that rely on sound for the entire user interface, usually having to do with the player lining up a sound in the stereo field and blasting away at it or using it to solve a puzzle. There are games with rich sonic backgrounds that integrate smoothly into the game and allow you to navigate obstacles and blow things up. My favorite example of this would be GMA Tank Commander. The sound in All inPlay’s games is a bit different.

We use sound to help communicate what’s happening in the game to the player, much as all games do. But our sounds need to tie in with the speech of the game to give the player a complete picture of the state of the game. This somewhat limits me as to how rich I can make the sound field of the game, because players need to be able to hear the speech output. Of course, our games to this point haven’t exactly lended temselves to lots of background sound. In fact, with All inPlay Poker I experimented with background sounds to go along with the game’s wild west theme. It’s a stereo sound field in which the usual shananagans of a wild west saloon occur with random frequency. As neat as it was, surveys said people got sick of it and turned it off more often than not. On the other hand, we don’t want sonicly boring games where the sound is just window dressing and is largely irellevant. My goal is to create sounds that tell you as much as possible about what’s going on without the need for speech, so that eventually players will be able to switch to the expert speech mode and still be completely cognicent of the state of the game. Who’s turn is it? How much time is left? How much money is in the pot? Who’s in the lead?

Another important design conwsideration not limited to accessible games is to create sounds that can be repeated on a regular basis without driving the player nuts. I don’t want people to shut off the sound the third time they play the game. Our nifty sound engine lets me vary the frequency of each sound, which helps aleviate this problem. We also use more than one sound for some of the events in the game, such as winning or losing in Poker and Crazy Eights.

All these things are going through my head as I design and integrate the sounds for our next game. We’ll be telling you exactly what that game is as we get closer and closer to releasing a public beta, as we always do. Stay tuned.