coming soon/rumors

Seven of the eight badges that had been created earlier for Scrabble (eight being the five game award badges, two special badges, and the NSA badge) have been updated, from just the Scrabble logo and a number and/or words to some pretty nice graphical scenes. The NSA badge remains the same and still looks similar to the NSA logo itself. The Play Now graphic has also been created and the help pages have been written.

We’re going to venture that Scrabble is pretty close to release (although last time we hazarded a guess at this type of thing we were, well, off by a few months…oops).

The badges for Operation Deluxe: Quest for the Funny Bone have been created. There are six in total (possibly seven, because the last one has been duplicated as a placeholder) and they feature a rather gruff-looking, mad-scientist type doctor; two nurses; and a red cross symbol. Our favorite from the set shows the doctor being chased by a polar bear across frozen terrain, past an igloo. This game promises to be lots of laughs!

Thanks to our friend BadgeHunter, we have been given a sneak peek at a game called “Trump”, which may be a new version of Bridge, or a Bridge-style game. It’s definitely a card game, played with 3 players. If you know Bridge very well, please let us know — we’d be glad to pick your brain about this one. As you rank up in the game, your progress is represented by a different building icon near your player name.

As you can see, the Play Now graphic has already been created (something that isn’t usually done in a game’s development cycle until nearly the end), so this is probably the “Fighting Landlord” game that was created for Pogo China in 2006. It looks as if we may be getting it on the US/Canada and UK sites soon because the framework has been set up for the help pages and this Trump tour page is already on the Pogo servers (although with incorrect title information and text). It look as if the webmaster copied the Pogo Addiction Solitaire tour page to use as a template for the new Trump tour page but didn’t finish their edits before it was pushed to the live server. We’ll keep you posted as we get more information!

Okay folks, those of you who are anxiously awaiting Mini Pets, they’ve been created. There are animated pets which will be 16 gems, and non-animated pets which will be 10,000 tokens. So far, the only non-animated pets are a parakeet and three cats; white, grey, and black.

This is subject to change before release, but right now the dog breeds set for the first batch are: Pug, Beagle, Labrador Retriever (black and yellow), Mutt (black and brown), Boxer, German Shepherd, and a Yorkshire Terrier. Here’s a cute little puppy:

The cats aren’t breeds per se, just domestic long-haired cats (”fluffy”) in grey, white, and black; a white kitten; a tri-colored cat which looks like a Maine Coon; and a grey and a brown striped cat. There are also kittens upon kittens!

The parakeet mentioned above also has an animated counterpart, “A Bird” which is a parrot. There’s also a turtle, goldfish in an aquarium, a frog, a hamster (in a ball), a rabbit, and a snake.

Scrabble is currently being tested in beta and will be available to both Club and non-Club Pogo members when it’s released. It will have 50 ranks and 5 badges. The badges are awarded at ranks 5, 10, 20, 35, and 50. There will also be a few ’special’ badges: 100+ Points, 8 8-Letter, and 500 bingos.

Players will rank up by playing letter tiles. As far as the rules are concerned, the Pogo version of Scrabble will be played just like the traditional board game from Hasbro.

In one of our earlier posts about Pogo Minis, we mentioned an upcoming homepage redesign. Pogo’s posted a little blurb about it in their news section; they’ve listed the improvements and gave us a few screenshots to check out.

Looking at the screenshots, one shows a 4th of July mini background — we expect this is because Pogo plans to make the changes live around that time, barring unforeseen technical problems, of course!

The UK Editor Oli (who is filling in for the vacationing US Editor) has thrown us quite a bone regarding Mini Pets. Publishing a letter on each Letters to the Editor (US and UK) from members who want pets to go with their Minis, he’s not committed to saying that Pogo is working on Mini Pets (although we know they are), but he says if they were to, this is what one might look like. Clever, clever.

In addition to the five badges we’ve seen for the upcoming Scrabble, Pogo has also created a few special badges. They are “8 8-Letter”, “100+ Points”, and “NSA Member” which will be a special badge available only to National Scrabble Association members.

Here are a few things of note that we haven’t had time to cover in a single post this week:

The mini pets are on their way! Pogo’s artists have created two new backgrounds — a pet shop and a dog park.

The Flawless Victory badge in Golf Solitaire is now being awarded.

There were a lot of problems with this week’s patch for Word Riot Deluxe (especially for Windows Vista users). Some Vista users have had luck by running it as administrator, but others have not been so lucky. If you are having problems playing Word Riot after the latest update patch this week, we suggest you contact Oberon directly (support at Pogo will just tell you to contact Oberon, anyway).

The badge is now being properly awarded for the 8th Mix-n-Match album completion. It’s called “Jumpin’ for Joy”. It shows up in your Special Edition album and you will be credited 5,000 tokens. WTG Pogo.

Those of you who wanted to know what it was, Poker Pop is now available for online play.

If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, we added a new token offer for 3,000 tokens to our free Pogo tokens page. Yay for free tokens!

Pogo is starting to work on the upcoming Hasbro releases Operation and Pictureka. Operation Deluxe will be a downloadable game with badges, ranks, and probably mini items. Pictureka may be called Pictureka Museum and if you’ve never played this fun game, you can check out a game demo off this page.