Facebook Games: My Current Favorites

Gameplay on Facebook goes in cycles for me. I latch on to a game and play it until I get stuck or until it becomes overwhelming. For instance, Pioneer Trail is an example of a game that literally became too much for most of the computers to which I have access. There are so many items on my homestead that the game can take 15 minutes to load, if it bothers to load at all. Other games, like Wild West Town, are not widely accepted by my group of Facebook friends so I barely get past the tutorial and then my progress stalls. I know that the idea of Facebook games is being social, but I think game creators should add some balance for the players who don't know many people who want to play games.

Anyway, despite these issues, I still visit Facebook daily for a quick hit of fun and these are the games I'm playing:

Ravenwood Fair -- This is a city-building game where you are trying to build a fair to entertain a bunch of woodland creatures. There are far too many quests to keep up with, but you can delete the seasonal ones once the holiday has passed (unlike in Zynga games). Even though I can't make a dent in the quests at this point, I find it calming to click on the trees and make them disappear.

Ravenskye City -- This is another city-building game that is related to Ravenwood Fair. I like it because I can continue to progress without too much help from my Facebook friends. Even on the quests that require help, you can go on the game's forums, help random players who aren't on your friend list, and they usually return the favor. The storyline seems less random in this game than in other ones.

Astro Garden/Big Farm Theory -- These are both the same game, so which one you pick really depends on which one your friends are playing. This farming game is filled with vibrant colors and it is another game where you don't have to have many friends to progress. I've been playing for over a month with only three neighbors and have yet to run into a quest that I couldn't complete. The bulk of the gameplay involves growing vegetables that can be used as components in creating more outlandish vegetables. Unlike Farmville, nothing you grow and none of the money you earn seems irrelevant. I can see myself playing this for a while.

Sushido -- This is a recent addition to my daily list of diversions. It is a match-3 game combined with a Diner Dash sort of game. You match sushi ingredients to provide the ingredients needed for the dish that the customer wants. If you don't do it quickly enough, the customer becomes angry and leaves. This is a simple game to understand but tough to play. It took me a while to realize that I have to match unrelated things to try to make other ingredients appear. It never fails that the customer is looking for cucumber slices but there is nothing but fish and rice on the screen. Still I keep playing; a timer will bring me back to a game time and again.

Bejeweled Blitz -- Speaking of games with timers, I play this one a lot. Ever since PopCap Games created a version for the iPhone that connects to Facebook, I've been playing whenever I am stuck waiting somewhere. The version on Facebook itself slows down after playing a few games; it is a condition that a lot of Facebook games suffer from called memory leak, I believe. I don't have that problem with the phone version. This means I get the speedy game play wherever I happen to be and it still shows up on the leaderboard with my Facebook friends.

Although I still enjoy this daily rotation of games, I feel like I need to branch out and try some new ones. I read Gamezebo regularly and there seems to be at least one new Facebook game released every week. Now that I have shaken off the mental funk caused by my broken foot, I'm ready to do some sampling of the new Facebook wares.

Temple Run is now on Android

When I pulled up my Twitter feed this morning, the first tweet to catch my eye was the news that Temple Run is on Android. I already have the game on my iPhone and it plays pretty well, but I made the mistake of pulling it up on an iPad in Best Buy and that diminished my enjoyment of the smaller version somewhat. Also my daughter C2, who opted for an Android tablet rather than an iOS device like her siblings, keeps grabbing my iPhone to play the game. I'm sure she will be excited to learn that she can finally have the game on her own device.

For those not in the know, Temple Run is part of a genre called "endless run". I've never seen this style of game on desktop PC but it is pretty popular on tablets and phones right now. In an endless run game, you don't control your character's forward motion. He is constantly running and you move him out of the way of obstacles. You are trying to keep him running for as long as possible. In the case of Temple Run, you are being chased by monsters so you try to pick up as many coins as you can along the way to buy power-ups like invisibility or extra speed. I'm not very good at games that require quick reflexes, but every time I crash into a wall on this game I immediately want to try again. It is easy for me to see how this game drew people's attention away from Angry Birds.

I didn't have an iPad handy when I wrote this post, so I compared the Android version to the one on my iPhone. The gameplay was exactly the same in both versions. The only difference I noticed was in the graphics. The colors in the Android version weren't as bright and the edges weren't as crisp. I'm not sure if this is due to the display capabilities of my tablet or the differences in programming for Android versus iOS. However, this is a minor difference and in my opinion it shouldn't keep anyone from enjoying the game. I know it isn't going to stop C2!

OMGPOP and Draw Something

My daughter C1 introduced me to the gaming site OMGPOP several months ago. C1 and her siblings all signed up and played for a couple weeks but eventually abandoned it. Although there were a few fun games, none of their friends were playing. When I played, it almost seemed as if the other users of the site were NPCs rather than real people so I didn't stick around long, either.  Imagine my surprise when I found that the game C1 has been playing obsessively on her iPod Touch these days is Draw Something, a game from OMGPOP that has been ported to iOS, Android, and Facebook.  It has caught so much attention that Zynga is now interested in buying OMGPOP. This news prompted me to give the site another look.

I spent about an hour poking around the OMGPOP site and found that I still don't like it much. While the graphics are engaging, most of the games are brightly colored takes on game concepts like match-3 and solitaire with no new twists added. None of my online friends play on this site and playing with strangers wasn't much fun. Since the last time I played, OMGPOP has added an option where you can post a link on Twitter or Facebook to get your friends to play. I tried that but didn't get any takers from my feeds, just random OMGPOP players. The only way I see myself revisiting this site is if Zynga buys it. Many of my Facebook friends are Zynga-loyal, so I imagine I could find others to play with me once Zynga puts their PR machine to work.

My experience with Draw Something was more pleasant. The game is basically like Pictionary between two people. You can invite one of your friends or let the game match you with a random opponent. When it is your turn to draw, you get a choice between three words and each word has a coin value. You draw the word with your finger on the touchscreen and send it to your friend. If your friend guesses it, you get the coins for that word. You are given a basic palette of colors but you can spend the coins you earn to buy more colors. I didn't have any trouble finding people to play with and it is fun to see the word picture being drawn rather than being presented with the completed picture all at once.  Although I couldn't get the Facebook version of the game to load, the Android and iOS versions worked fine for me. If you log in with your Facebook info, then your games follow you from device to device. I prefer playing the game on my Android tablet just because it gives me a bigger screen to draw on. This game almost makes me wish I had my old Palm back with its stylus so my drawings would be more accurate.

I would definitely recommend skipping the site and downloading Draw Something to one of your devices instead. It is the best of the OMGPOP bunch.

About to Say Goodbye to Zombie Island

Zombie Island is a Facebook game by 6wave LOLapps. There isn't a lot of explanation at the beginning of the game, but as far as I can tell you play a zombie who is trying to become human. If you have played games like Farmville and Pioneer Trail, then you are halfway towards knowing how to play this game. Gameplay revolves around planting crops, erecting buildings, and collecting items needed to complete missions.

The biggest twist that Zombie Island has to offer is in its energy mechanic. In most city building games, you have a certain number of energy units and each action you perform burns one unit. Once you burn up your units, you can either buy more, get more from your friends, or wait until the energy meter refills on its own. With Zombie Island you are the leader of the tribe and other zombies do the work like cutting down trees. As long as you have a brain available, then your zombie will work. This is great for me because I often want to play for longer than five minutes at a time.

Despite the cute graphics and fun animations, I am on the verge of dropping Zombie Island from my daily game list. There are a lot of good games on Facebook that become unplayable shortly after you get through the tutorial levels if you don't either put in real-world money or have a lot of Facebook friends who are also playing that game. Zombie Island falls into this category. I only have three active neighbors in Zombie Island and two of them have already reached the level in the game where your zombie becomes human. From what I've read in the FAQ, there isn't much reason to play the game once you get to that point. It has become a frustrating experience to log in every morning and not be able to do much, and there are so many other games to try that I may not continue with this one.

Do You Play With Sound?

One aspect of video games that I haven't mentioned very much in my blog posts is the sound. That is because I rarely play my games with the sound on. As a matter of fact, the first thing I do when I try a new game is look for the options menu so I can press Mute. There are games that I've played for months and then read reviews commenting on how wonderful the music and sound effects are, and then it hits me that I have never even heard the music.

Why do I mute the sound on games? I do it for a variety of reasons. Ever since the release of the original Sim City, the prime time for me to play games is late at night while my husband and kids are sleeping. I don't want to disturb the quiet of a sleeping house with a bunch of bleeps and bloops. When I play games during the day, it is usually while I am talking to someone or watching TV, so the game sounds would be distracting. What about when I'm playing alone? Well, I could listen to the game soundtrack then, but I am so accustomed to playing without it that the music becomes monotonous to me after a few minutes.

I am making more of an effort to play with the sound on these days because I feel like I am missing part of the game experience. It never bothered me before, but as games become more complex the sounds become more sophisticated. I don't want to miss anything!

Same Game, Different Titles -- Why?

Facebook and the casual game market are filled with look-alike or copycat games. I just wrote about an example of that in my last post. This week, however, I discovered two versions of the same exact game on Facebook and I can't figure out the reasoning behind that.

Astro Garden is a farming game run by 6waves. There isn't much that sets it apart from Frontierville or Farmville, but I'm a sucker for pretty graphics so I started playing it. Somehow I got distracted during the opening of the game and I missed what the story was and why I was growing vegetables that looked like they were from outer space. When I did a search on Facebook for the game's page, I found another game called The Big Game Theory and an entry on the wall from 06 Feb 2012 saying that they were starting a common project with 6waves called Astro Garden. As I said, I like the graphics in Astro Garden so I thought I would go ahead and try The Big Game Theory. Both games are identical!

I don't understand what the advantage is of having two copies of the same game on Facebook. What incentive is there to choose one over the other? Why would a person play both? It seems like the fan base would be split.

Tiny Tower vs. Dream Heights

One perennial topic of discussion in the casual gaming press is companies copying each other's games. A company that has been accused of this more than once is Zynga, and they have come under fire again for the similarity of their new game Dream Heights to a game by NimbleBit called Tiny Tower. I have embedded two YouTube videos so you can see for yourself how much the games are alike.

I downloaded Tiny Tower for my iPhone before Dream Heights was even released. It was one of those games that I download because I've heard it mentioned in passing by several people as a fun game. I didn't really know what the game was about, but I figured I would suss it out as I played. Once I tried it, however, I had trouble understanding what to do. The 8-bit graphics that other players found charming were grainy to my poor old eyes and difficult for me to decipher. The pop-ups at the start of the game gave minimal instruction. Although I prefer my tutorial to be provided in-game, I would have welcomed a separate how-to page, but I couldn't find one in the game's menu. I ended up deleting Tiny Tower after a couple days.

Zynga has a pretty good cross-promotional strategy. If an ad for a new Zynga pops up while I'm playing Scramble with Friends, I will most likely download it and give it a try. That's how I ended up with Dream Heights, and like other Zynga titles, I had no trouble jumping right into the gameplay. The graphics were clear and the opening tutorial was easier for me to understand. Playing Dream Heights actually made me want to download Tiny Tower again. This time I was able to understand a lot of the stuff I couldn't figure out before, especially the ratings that help you match the right person to the right job.

As for Zynga copying NimbleBit's game, I have conflicting thoughts on that. I know that it isn't fair for a multimillion dollar company with over 2500 employees to steal the ideas of a little indie company that amount to three guys in the den. However, for me, Dream Heights is an improvement on the original concept and the one I would pick if I could only keep one. I still feel guilty about siding with the game world's robber baron, though.