by Carol Bruml

Super TextTwist by Game House Software is a word-scramble or anagram game. You can opt to get six, seven or a mixture of the two, letters to work with in each game. The goal is to make as many words as possible from the letters you are given. Super TextTwist gives you a series of blank spaces for three-letter, four-letter, five-letter and larger words, all of which you can supposedly fill with genuine words from your assortment of letters. You can advance to the next level without completing all of the words, but only if you guess the longest one correctly. When you either give up or click "advance," the words you have not completed are filled in for you. I found that helped me learn to have a better eye for the words I was missing.

The neat thing is that there is a "Twist" button that shuffles all of the letters when you press it, without penalizing your score. It appears that you can Twist or shuffle as many times as you like. I found that twisting often made me look at the letter assortment differently, so I could find more words than I could have, had I not been able to shuffle the letters.

You have the option of playing full screen or with a smaller screen, of being timed or playing without a time limit, of tracking your scores or not doing so. You can type in the words you find and press "Enter" to see if they match the words TextTwist is looking for, or you can click the correct succession of letters with your mouse, and then press enter. The screen is quite attractively drawn.

I did not find TextTwist relaxing, even when I played without the timer, and am not sure why. Reassorting letters, similarly to playing Scrabble, is usually a pleasant pastime for me. I did find it irritating that TextTwist accepted some words that were not in my Webster's Collegiate (this is not the be-all and end-all of dictionaries), such as "oast," and that it failed to accept some words that were in the dictionary, such as "thee," and "spurge." I'll admit that the dictionary I referenced is not the most complete, but I feel that with the electronic scrabble players and such that will make words for you these days, all non-proper-noun English words should have made it into the TextTwist word lists.

Super TextTwist is very well executed. If you can tolerate the frustration of KNOWING that there are real words it won't accept in its list, and you like anagram-type games, I would recommend it. I'd give it four apples, out of five, because I think it ought to be able to recognize all real English words available.

You can play lots of other games on line at http://www.gamehouse.com/games/.

Super TextTwist requires Mac OS X, version 10.1 or better. It is shareware; a single license costs US $19.95. A free trial version, that allows you to play 10 games (you can play each game as long as you want, but can only open the game 10 times before you need to purchase the license), is available. http://www.gamehouse.com/texttwist/

Reviewed by Carol Bruml, editor of Mouse Tales, the monthly newsletter of the North Coast Macintosh Users Group of Ohio, December 2003 MouseTales@NCMUGohio.org NCMUG Home Page: http://homepage.mac.com/ncmug_oh/

MACinations February 04