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. ...
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. ...