we review facebook games, because someone has to
We covered Scrabble for Facebook in a previous review and recently a Scrabble alternative has shown its face on iPhone and iPad. The game is called Words with Friends and its a slightly different take on Scrabble. How does this game fare in a Scrabble dominated world?
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Sony is the first of the Big 3 (Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony) to bring a MMO game to everyone’s favourite social network, Facebook. Sony’s offering called “The Agency: Covert Ops” puts you in the shoes of your secret agent avatar who is tasked with saving the world ! (Aren’t they all?) Does this game meet the high standards of 007 or does it fade out like a bad remake of Inspector Gadget?
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According to the people at TechCrunch, the fine folks at Zynga have a new game in the works called FrontierVille. The seems to follow the FarmVille model of “click and wait” gameplay and have the player raise a family and build buildings in addition to maintaining crops and livestock. The frontier theme and gameplay have some reporters comparing the game to the beloved Oregon Trail.
There has been a substantial buzz about the social networking application foursquare and on quite a few occasions, the application has been referred to as a game. We at Social Games Reviews found this interesting (as a few of the editors are religious foursquare users) and have decided to analyse foursquare and assess its potential to be more than just a social networking app and whether its current form could be categorized as a game.
If you are rich and well connected then Café World on Facebook is for you. Why do I say that you ask read on to find out more about it. The idea behind the game is good if you like running a simulated restaurant, which surprisingly I did, but once you start playing the game very soon you start feeling like a stuck wheel. The only way to get unstuck is to either spend money on buying things within the game or go on a recruiting your friends to becomes your neighbors in this world of restaurants.
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Spore Islands is the stand-alone Facebook cousin of Will Wright’s 2008 game franchise, Spore. Your role in Spore Islands is to create creatures aptly named Spores and unleash them on your own island or the islands of Facebook friends’. After deploying your Spore, you can run “observations” and watch your Spore in action competing with other Spores for resources. At the end of each observation, the winning Spore is granted an experience bonus. If this brief synopsis of Spore Islands sounds very mechanical, it is because Spore Islands is more of a simulation than it is a game. This level of simulation may be appealing to the thick-glass-wearing-number-crunching-math-geniuses amongst us but may not be enough to entice the typical Facebook gamer.
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I am a word nerd. I love vocabulary, and the manipulation of letters to form meaning. This being the case, Scrabble is my favorite game of all time from the feel of the tiles between my fingers to the challenges I issue to friends that their word is completely invalid and requiring perusal of Webster’s Dictionary.
Every single one of you has seen the alerts at least a dozen times. The alerts that [insert friend here] has mastered a vegetable, or earned a ribbon for whatever, or found some awkward-ass animal. The thing is, there are two Facebook games that could be annoying the uninitiated while compelling the faithful to plant that next round of crops, Farm Town (by Slashkey) and FarmVille (by Zynga). Here I’ll attempt to explain the differences between the two, while reaffirming why you and all of your friends are already playing one while the other sits alone, barren, and withered.
There has been a recent craze and increase in the awareness of playing poker (I think it’s safe to assume it’s synonymous with Texas Hold’em) especially since the televised version of the game has made every couch loving TV addict a self professed expert on poker. What better to test your mettle than play the game online with your friends and challenge each other? Zynga Poker on Facebook gives you a chance to do just that and a little more. Read More >>
Capitalizing on the success of their casual puzzle game Bejeweled, Popcap Games released Bejeweled Blitz onto the Facebook masses allowing players to test their twitch gaming prowess: players are challenged to amass high scores within a minute by destroying those jewels that we have grown to love. Fans of Bejeweled and Facebook are well served by this iteration of the puzzle game as the core gameplay and simple yet striking visuals remain and allows the player to enjoy the game in short bursts while infusing it with social networked connectivity. Don’t be fooled though! One one-minute session leads to another and half-an-hour later you’re trying to beat the score of your second-cousin’s wife’s pet frog (whose high score is one of fifty that is shown on a sidebar along side the main game window). Read More >>