Thoughts on Township

Last week I spent some time playing Township, a city-building game from 6waves. It is playable on Google+ and Facebook. I decided to try it out because 6waves has created some other games that I enjoy a lot, like Astro Garden and Ravenskye City. Unfortunately, this game doesn't look like one I will be playing for long.

There are some positive aspects to the game, like the energy system. With Township you can perform actions in your city as long as you want; no waiting for an energy bar to refill. You may have to wait for a crop to grow but that's it. Also, the graphics are attractive, which makes a difference when the tasks are somewhat mundane.

That is the downfall of Township -- the tasks are mundane and repetitive. There isn't even much of a story to go along with the quests. As a player, you are adding to an existing city but for what reason? Most other games in this genre give you at least a basic reason like a hurricane destroyed the town or an evil prince cast a spell over the town.  All I've been doing in the game is planting wheat, then making flour, then making bread, then planting wheat again. Without a story, it is more apparent that I am doing the same thing over and over.

The company 6waves has created some games that I go back to again and again, but Township is one I will skip.

My Thoughts on the Raven games

Yesterday I finally got around to playing Ravenshire Castle. It is the third installment in 6waves' group of "Raven" games for Facebook. I've been playing Ravenwood Fair and Ravenskye City for a while, so I figured I would give this one a try. All three games are of the city-building variety. That makes it sound as if all the games are pretty much the same, but there are some key differences and I like different aspects of each game.

Ravenshire Castle is similar to Zynga's Castleville in theme. Your character shows up at the castle and is mistaken for a royal by Prince Patrick. The kingdom has been ruined by an opposing force so there are a lot of diseased trees to chop down and structures to be rebuilt.What makes this game different is that there is more of a sense that you are competing against other players (PvP, the gamer types call it). You have to sneak into other people's castles and search for the trinkets you need to rebuild things without getting caught by the guards who are constantly moving through the corridors. It isn't terribly challenging to avoid them, but it does give more of a feeling that you are actually playing a game rather than just clicking on items.


Gamezebo did a review of Ravenshire Castle about a month ago. I agree with most of the criticisms. Although the graphics are the most advanced of the series, I can't appreciate them if my computer can't render them. The game was glitchy even on the speedy work computer. I honestly prefer the graphics and animation in Ravenskye City. They are prettier than Ravenwood Fair but they don't slow my laptop down. It is strangely relaxing to pull up Ravenskye City and just chop down vines at the end of a stressful day.

All three of the games suffer from one of the most common problems in Facebook games: lack of friends who play. Luckily the fans of these games have found a workaround for this. On the game forums you can post a link for an item you need, and another player can click that link and give it to you without being your friend on Facebook. It is still time-consuming to seek out and click all those links, so I only do it for Ravenskye City.

That leads me to which game I find more compelling. Although I still go back to Ravenwood Fair just to cut down trees (again, it is strangely relaxing), I find that the story for Ravenskye City is more fully realized. Reading the history and the feuds between the NPCs gives you more of a reason for the quests you are completing. The PvP twist of Ravenshire Castle doesn't make me want to stick with it. If I was to recommend only one of the three, it would be Ravenskye City.

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!