Facebook Games

If you’ve ever played the Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic: the Gathering card games, you’re already pretty familiar with the game behind Zynga’s Warstorm: collectible card battle games where you build a deck and then draw monsters from it with which to attack your opponent’s health. First to lose all their health (called ‘morale’ in this game) or run out of cards, wins. You obtain cards in the now-familiar metaphor of the booster pack, bought for in-game silver or real world cash. Each card – all of which are beautifully illustrated – represents a unit. Units have a draw time – the number of turns a card must wait after it is drawn before it can be played. This can be as much as ten turns for the most powerful cards, or as little as one for cheap, expendable infantry. Cards also have an attack power, health, and an optional special ability. ...

Bandai Namco’s co-operative dungeon crawling game Treasure Abyss dropped a much-needed expansion on a treasure-starved world Wednesday; along with it came a lot of changes, major and minor. Treasure Abyss is, to rewind a little, is a (shudder) Facebook game. You form an adventuring party from you and your friends, and battle monsters in a variety of dungeons of increasing difficulty. I wrote a little about it a couple of weeks ago. Since then, it’s been subject to continual balancing and has become a fair bit harder. ...

I thought I would never find a game on Facebook that tied together social gaming and RPGs. This whole experiment with Facebook games has typically been one spam-filled sim game after another. Frontierville, City of Wonder, My Empire, Virtual Villagers – all share the same half-hearted copying of better single player games combined with a financial urge to turn the player into a whining beggar who is a burden on their friends. ...

I quit Frontierville tonight. No big deal. I ended up playing it a lot longer than I thought I would, actually. I got to a point in FV where I’d just log in once in the morning and once again at night, harvest stuff, visit neighbors, see what folks were up to. Some people arranged their homesteads so that they just had mass herds of animals that they’d tend to; otherwise made gigantic farms; some folks just tried to make their homestead a pleasant looking place. There clearly could be a lot of creativity in the way the farms were laid out, and Zynga holds frequent contests to find the most innovative designs. ...

Okay, seriously? I get this ad on my adbar when I load up Facebook. Looks like some me-too Bejeweled clone, so already it gets a negative one zillion on the Tipa Cool Game Scale. BUT! WAIT! You can also ad(d) to your pain enjoyment by installing the “mywebsearch toolbar”! OMG! I was HOPING someone would let me install MORE SPYWARE ON MY COMPUTER! Last company I worked as an IT admin. It was part of my job to go around and remove all the viruses and spyware that people would blithely install on their computers. That weather toolbar scam of a few years back? The COO had that on her computer. Spyware-laden screen savers which displayed ads as their save image? Head of sales for our most popular line had that on hers. Made me sick. But I wasn’t allowed to lock down those computers so that nobody could install anything not approved by IT. ...

If you’re going to waste time playing social games, you might as well play a game that elevates wasting time to a paying activity. In Astroape Studios’ Office Heroes, out now for the Apple iPhone and soon for Facebook, you’ll spend your day tweeting, drinking coffee, updating Facebook, surfing the web and trying to look busy when your boss is around while moving up the corporate ladder. Heck, I think I LIVE this game. ...

In these social town/farm/empire/chocolate shop building games on Facebook, it’s hard to see your entire place all at once. Even zoomed out in Frontierville, you can only see a fraction of your homestead – and that, blurredly. Enter Autostitch. I took 46 individual pictures of my homestead, cut out the UI cruft, loaded them into Autostitch’s demo and… it gave me this gorgeous overview of the whole thing. Click on it to see it super-sized.

While yesterday’s look at Playfish’ “My Empire” showed a game that at least reminds us of an actual game – a city simulator in the vein of the popular Caesar series – the core gamer saves their real scorn for the ubiquitous clicking games that made Zynga into the gaming powerhouse it is today. Make no mistake about it – Acti-Blizzard, Electronic Arts, SOE and every other game development studio is taking a hard look at these games. ...

“Facebook Games” as a genre have gotten a bad rep from core gamers, and it’s not hard to see why. Take any Flash game, figure out how to add a cash shop to it and add in plenty of spam for those unfortunate enough to be your friends, et voila, you have now contributed to the glut of hundreds or perhaps thousands of time-hungry games clamoring for your clicks. ...