Facebook Games

There’s really no way advertising a BitTorrent site urging people to almost certainly illegally download music and movies could EVER get anyone into trouble…

I read today that Zynga’s CityVille now has over 100 million monthly active users, making it the most popular game on Facebook, outstripping all the other Zynga games and, of course, every other game in the world. Eat THAT, World of Warcraft. Among my own CityVille neighbors are players from Thailand, Japan, China, India and all across Europe. A lot of South America. Its clicky nature is also its biggest strength. Deciding to break the Zynga stranglehold on SimCity variants, I logged on to Steam and bought SimCity 4 and its expansion that lets you go on driving missions in your cities. ...

I was pretty darn excited when I read that SOE was starting up Fortune League, a Facebook game based on EverQuest 2, with rewards that would transfer back to your EQ2 characters. You could make just exactly the party you wanted, participate in raids and generally the best parts of your EQ2 experience would seamlessly translate to the social media. Blogfriend Eliot Lefebvre at Massively wrote that Fortune League was: ...

It’s been a few months since the last significant content update to Namco-Bandai’s “Treasure Abyss”, when they added the Samurai class and the associated “Tower of the Samurai”, wherein lay the components for creating the Samurai class weapons. Since then, there’s been precious little to do on the TA front. Namco-Bandai released some appearance armor for players who recruit more people to the game, but the low stats gear was inappropriate for dungeon crawling, and I haven’t seen any of my friends, not even the low level ones, wearing even one piece. ...

A big “thank you” goes out to the kind folks at Namco Bandai, who sent me this very cool Treasure Abyss wallpaper this morning. It features the characters who pop up now and then on their Facebook Wall to introduce new features or dungeons. Namco Bandai has kindly offered to let me post this up on the blog. The folks up on the upper left are clearly mages. To the right, a warrior meets a thief. On the upper right, a class we haven’t yet seen romances the bartender. A healer class? We can hope. Note the brace of turkey legs hanging above the bar. Mmm. ...

Namco Bandai’s social RPG Treasure Abyss may have started off slowly, but the Japanese gaming giant has kept expanding the game, in some good and some not-so-good ways. Good stuff first. Two new high level dungeons – The Catacombs (for players level 30 and up) and Tower of the Samurai (for players level 40 and up) – provide some challenge and the chance of new gear for high level groups. The Catacombs allow for the crafting of the Ifrit Staff for mages. The AE-casting weapon finally makes mages not only viable, but a necessity to any group. The Catacombs also introduced Great Swords for warriors, a weapon with incredible hate gain, and the Cursed Dagger for thieves, which does nothing, unfortunately, for their role in a group. ...

When a Japanese friend I’d met in Treasure Abyss invited me to try A Bit Lucky’s “Lucky Train”, I thought immediately of the legendary train sim “Densha de GO!”. The description sure sounded like it. Build trains and send them from your town to those of your friends, past country scenes you design. I was absolutely there. Well, I was close. You do build trains, and you do send them from your town, but you don’t go with them. Lucky Train is a fairly simplistic city sim, except instead of built around a town hall or castle, it’s built around a train station. As you progress, you raise a town and later a city around that train station. In your city, the only thing anyone wants to do is leave – by train. ...

I’ve been wanting to write more blog posts, but every time I sit down to write about Minecraft, I end up playing Minecraft, and then it’s suddenly midnight. If you’ve managed to avoid all the Minecraft hype over the past few weeks, I hope it’s warm and cozy under your rock. The basic premise is, you’re plopped with nothing into the middle of a world that is fully moldable and destructible. At night, The Monsters Come. You must first build some sort of shelter and hide before the sun goes down. ...

I figured when I finally got the chance to bomb my neighbor’s yard from orbit, that that would be the turning point. But, I guess not. Apparently twigs just don’t do that much damage. I have a plan. Next time: I drop pebbles. Right onto the Tesla coil. Bzzzzzzt, indeed. Backyard Monsters, a whimsical tower defense game from Desktop Tower Defense creators Casual Collective, is about as cruel with its goo-formed monsters as any sadistic game of Lemmings. You can zap them, shoot them, bomb them, mine them, shoot them, trick them… ...

Quick Edit: Namco Bandai just added “Adventurer’s Flags” to the Treasure Abyss cash shop. These allow you to plant a flag in the dungeon so you can return to that point later. Pretty handy for farming Dragon’s Nest, especially the first couple encounters on floor 8 which drop pretty much everything you need for the Giant Sword. Also, the slot machines are a lot faster, and candles now show how much candle power they will restore. Dungeons are markes “CONQUERED” on the map after you have cleared them. ...