Spellwinder
Midway takes you on a word safari with its touch-screen controlled iPhone game.
In a weak attempt to cash in on the iPhone craze, Midway took its TouchMaster 2 game for Nintendo DS and broke it into individual apps. First up is Spellwinder, a decent word finding game where you spell out provided words across a 7X7 grid. While semi enjoyable, it's much too easy to warrant a purchase.
Whereas Word Scramble and WordFu force you to locate the words yourself, Spellwinder gives them to you. It's your job to locate them within the jumbled letters on screen before time runs out.
To form words, all you need to do is touch the corresponding letters. As you play, words appear forwards, diagonally and a zigzag pattern, and unlike the competition, you can spell words out of sequence; if you accidentally select the wrong letter, press it again to deselect it.
Unfortunately, we breezed through most of the puzzles. Locating words takes little effort, since Midway did a horrible job concealing them. Even worse, the game lacks additional modes (including multiplayer), so you'll see everything Spellwinder has to offer in 20 minutes or less.
That's the game's biggest flaw. Midway has a neat concept, but in order to grab us, it needed to up the difficulty. Spellwinder is fun for a few minutes, but doesn't have enough content to keep us playing.
What's Hot: Fun for several minutes, you can spell words by touching letters out of sequence, costs .99.
What's Not: Small letters, easy puzzles, no additional modes, no multiplayer, basic graphics.
2/5