Searching for Clues: Hidden Chronicles

Alice — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 03:13:15 +0000

Stately Ramsey Manor

Hidden Chronicles is almost exactly Gardens of Time, which I reviewed here.

To be honest, if I’d known that when I started playing I probably wouldn’t have started playing at all because how many hidden object games does any one person need?

But Hidden Chronicles resolves some of my issues with Gardens of Time, so that might give it a bit of an edge in terms of which hidden object game is better.

The concept is simple. You play hidden object games to get trophies, points, and coins. These games involve a large picture with dozens of objects and you have a small list of objects to find in that picture. You get bonuses for not needing a hint, for not clicking randomly, and for finishing quickly. The more points you get, the more trophies you’ll get.

The trophies are necessary because much like Castleville–which I also reviewed here–you’ll need to explore the area around the manor and in order to do that you’ll need trophies, coins, and clues. The clues are harder to come by.

The game’s back story is pretty simple. You inherited Ramsey Manor from your uncle, who was a Guardian. He–and you–can determine the history of items by seeing the past situations it has been involved in. Those situations form the basis of the hidden object scenes.

Like all these facebook games, there is a social component. You need to build items on your estate to gain estate points. You need increasing numbers of estate points to unlock more hidden object scenes. Many of these items cannot be built without the assistance of your friends. This is eerily similar to Castleville, where you need a certain number of various items to complete a building or an object.

Additionally, there are some quests that require you to play “fast find” challenge games with your friends. These are hidden object scenes but instead of requiring you to find all the objects on your list, you have to find as many objects as you can in 60 seconds.

The advantage Hidden Chronicles has over Gardens of Time is that getting the estate points you need to unlock the next scene is much easier and much less dependent on the kindness of your friends. The downside is that you are much more dependent on your friends to complete buildings. I find that I’m getting my estate points through items that require no outside assistance instead of through the many half completed buildings I have waiting for items.

It’s a good game. If you like the play mechanics of Castleville, and you have friends that are playing this game regularly, you’ll probably really enjoy this game. Try it out and let us know what you think in the Facebook Games Forum.

Fighting for Freedom: World War

Alice — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 17:20:59 +0000

Mission Home

World War is a Facebook game in the same family as Mafia Wars and Vampire Wars. You use energy points to do missions, and as you complete the levels of missions you move up in levels and get new missions.

Additionally, you can battle other players for bonus cash. Fake cash, obviously. What makes this game more interesting to me than some of the other games in this style is the additional effort you can put into your military units. You can recruit military units of various types (tanks, infantry, and so on) and then you can upgrade the units to make them more powerful.

As you level up, you get points you can use to improve your overall stats. This helps you win in battles with other players.

As with all games in this style, there are advantages to encouraging your friends to join and play with you. And if you have friends that enjoy this kind of game, they’ll love this one. World War is the most enjoyable game of this style that I have ever played, which is significant because I’m not a fan of war games in general.

This isn’t the kind of game you sit down and play for hours, like Dungeons and Dragons. This is more the kind of game you play for a few minutes at the beginning of a Facebook gaming session, then come back to later. Accordingly, it’s easy to enjoy without feeling like it’s taking over your life. Sometimes you want a game that you just pop into and pop out of.

As far as game tips, I’d advise keeping your army fully equipped. Spend your money on more units, and keep them upgraded. Without a strong army, you cannot win the battles, which is essential to getting additional money and experience.

Keep an eye on your honor points. You get honor points for completing specific missions, which you can trade in order to make changes to your account. For example, with enough honor points, you can change your name and country. This adds the ability to make the game more interesting, because you can effectively restart the game when you feel like you’ve reached the limit of what you can do with your starting game settings.

I really enjoyed this game. It was fun and varied and not too time consuming. Have you played World War? Tell us what you thought about it in the Facebook Games Forum.

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Living the YO Life: YoVille

Alice — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:50:55 +0000

My awesome treehouse in YoVille!

YoVille is a great little game for people who like to build their own characters and create a more realistic fantasy life. Not unlike the Sims, YoVille is a game where you design your character and decorate their house. You then take your character through their world, performing activities and shopping and interacting with your friends.

In that way, YoVille is not unlike the Sims. Unlike the Sims, YoVille was designed for Facebook, and you can feel the intuitiveness of that when you play. Like many of Zynga’s games, you start each session with a gift screen and the invitation to send gifts to your friends. In this game, the gift screen is tied to various different kinds of gifts. There are gifts for crafting materials, gifts for decoration, gifts for your friend’s home, or gifts for special collections that are time-sensitive.

This brings us to the way you make in-game money. There is, of course, always the option of paying REAL money to the nice folks at Zynga, but for those of us that prefer to save our real money for our real lives, there are lots of way to earn money in game.

First, you can work at the widget factory. You can do a job there, but it costs a lot of energy points. The amount of money you earn for doing this job depends on the number of friends you have that are playing YoVille. This provides you with incentive to encourage your friends to play YoVille as well, to help both of you make more at the widget factory.

Second, you can do “jobs.” These are more random. One, for example, involves catching bats. If you catch enough bats, you’ve mastered the job and you get money. There are many of these jobs that you can master to get money for your character.

You can also “craft collectibles” which requires gathering the materials for said collectibles, then crafting them. Once they are crafted you can sell them for money or use them to decorate your home.

Once you’ve gotten money, you can take your time and buy things. You can upgrade your house, like I did. You can decorate and re-decorate your house, buy new clothes, new hairstyles and new items to play with, or visit your friends.

I like this game. It’s a fun little game that you can drop into and out of without too much of an issue.

Tell us what you think about YoVille at The Facebook Games Forum.

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Become a Secret Celebrity!

Matt FaceGamers — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:28:31 +0000

Facebook games don't come more "social" than this!

Two entrepreneurs, Brian Fudge and Michael Mikikian, co-founders of Gickup, are hoping to bring the thrill back in social gaming this time with REAL social games. They have developed a platform that facilitates the creation of multi-player video chat games where people could play OR watch. It’s similar to Google Hangouts + Youtube Live Stream.

Their partner, Propulsion Games, co-founded by TV game show producers Michael Agbabian and Dwight Smith, is launching their first game, Secret Celeb, on Facebook. Secret Celeb is a wildly addictive four player game where player’s knowledge of famous people is tested. The goal of the game is to guess as many celebrities correctly in the allotted time with your partner. The most celebrities named by a team in the allotted time wins the match. Losers get bumped off and a new team of challengers gives it a shot. The games are also broadcast where fans of the players can cheer them on or jump in the queue and challenge.

Gickup and Propulsion Games saw a gap emerging in social video broadcasting and social games. Social video broadcasters like Justin.TV, TinyChat, Ustream are great at facilitating a broadcast of user generated content but generally lack structure that would more naturally facilitate interactions with strangers. Current social games from Zynga and others, on the other hand, are a paradox because the games are not actually “social”. By adding game mechanics to video broadcasting Gickup hopes to connect people in a fun, new way, reminiscent of party games at home or classic games shows on TV.

With Gickup’s platform the production and distribution of game shows and talent based competitions is dramatically reduced. Watching streaming video online no longer needs to be a dichotomy of choice where on one end of the spectrum, there is highly produced content and on the other is unstructured, user generated content. Gickup’s new platform provides a third choice, where user generated content is produced within the confines of a game where you can be the star or just a watcher.

What’s next? Propulsion Games will be launching more games from their pipeline in the coming weeks. Meanwhile Gickup will be making its private beta SDK available soon to make it easy for any game developer to build games on Facebook, iOS and Android.

Cooking for Fun and Profit: Cafe World

Alice — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 00:28:50 +0000

Cookin' up a storm!

True story about me and Cafe World: I used to play this game SO much that my friends collectively begged me to take a break. I had a streak of almost 200 days where I cooked something each day.

It’s safe to say that I love this game.

It has all my favorite Facebook game features. I am a huge fan of the multi-step complex quest lines. There’s always at least five separate quests ongoing at any time, which you can choose to complete or not, of course. You can decorate the cafe to suit your tastes and change the decor at any time. The food itself requires a little bit of thought. You start items cooking on your stove and when the items finish cooking, there is only a set amount of time to serve the dishes before they spoil.

There are spices you can get that can speed the cooking time of dishes, or unspoil dishes once they have spoiled. Another option is to have neighbors come and unspoil your dishes. But generally, it’s important to remember to check on your food frequently and not start a dish that will finish at a time you will be able to return to the game.

Each dish has mastery levels. You have to cook it a certain number of times to reach the first mastery level, after which it cooks more quickly and produces more servings. Each mastery level you reach after that also increases the the speed and amount of food produced. Each dish has three mastery levels.

You also have a cookbook that lists the dishes you have available to cook, which is sorted by the type of cuisine. You need to reach certain levels to unlock more dishes, and you can try to unlock all the dishes in specific cuisine types.

There are also special stoves that allow you to cook specific things. For example, the pizza oven is for pizzas, obviously. There’s also a coffee stand and a bar, which allow you to serve drinks to your customers.

I don’t know why I can’t resist the urge to complete, in a nearly obsessive manner, all the goals in games, but this game kept me playing, daily, for almost an entire year without getting bored.

If you haven’t tried Cafe World, consider giving it a go. And let us know what you like and dislike about it in The Facebook Games Forum.

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CastleVille

Alice — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 05:36:53 +0000

Lords and Ladies and castles, oh my!

Zynga’s new game, Castleville, is one of the hottest new Facebook games. If you’re an active face-gamer, you probably have friends that are playing this game already.

And for good reason. It’s a beautiful game, with simple and familiar gameplay. You build cottages, raise crops and livestock–do you get the feeling that Zynga can’t help but include Farmville aspects to all their games?–and dispel the gloom that covers the land.

Building royal buildings gets you castle points. Castle points are required for you to be able to explore into the gloom that surrounds your land. As you explore you discover new characters, who can give you new quests. The buildings you build can be taxed to give you additional revenue.

You can cut down the trees on your land, and mine the rocks as well. This gives you the raw materials you need to continue to build new buildings. Periodically “beasties” come and block access to your buildings. These beasties can be fought off and destroyed fairly easily.

The social gaming aspect of this game is high. For several quests you need multiple neighbors to complete the objectives. You also need neighbors to staff your royal buildings. There is more complex gameplay as well. You can use buildings to craft materials required for other buildings. For example, to build the kitchen you need wood planks, which you need to make in your workshop from pieces of wood you previously banked from chopping trees on your land.

To explore the gloom you need more than just the castle points mentioned earlier. You also need exploration crystals. The easiest way to get these is to have your friends give them to you, because the only other way is laborious. You can find shards of the crystals while performing various activities around your town. These shards can be used to create a crystal using your workshop. This is, by far, the most tedious part of the game, acquiring the crystals you need to finish exploring.

But don’t worry. The game has so many other tasks and options open to you that you can certainly keep yourself busy. One of the cutest features is the animals. You buy a baby chick, feed it, and over time it becomes an adult. The same is true for any animal.

I enjoyed this game. I’ll keep playing it. I want to finish building my castle and see what else the gloom holds for me.

I’m sure that some of you are already playing this game, too. Come on over to The Facebook Games Forum and tell us what you think.

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Enchanted Forest Living: Gnome Town

Alice — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 05:23:22 +0000

Gnome Town is quite possibly the most adorable game in the history of Facebook games.

You play a gnome, like the kind you see in a Travelocity ad or your grandma’s garden. You rescue cute little furry creatures from the Evil Gnome and attempt to restore the good king to power. As you rescue cute little furry creatures, they join your town. Together, you build buildings, run businesses, grow and tend crops, raise pets, and decorate the world you inhabit.

There are, apparently, endless quests and quest lines. They increase in difficulty as you level up, and as you complete them you gain rewards. You clear the forest to find and rescue critters, exploring through the use of machetes to clear the brambles surrounding your town. The machetes are in limited supply so use them cautiously. They are given as rewards for leveling up or sometimes for completing quests, but if you want more than you can get in those ways you can purchase more. However, purchasing more requires the use of in-game gold and once you exhaust your initial gold, you’ll have to use real money to buy more.

You gather wood and other materials necessary to complete the buildings as you clear the forest and pick up debris such as leaves and mushrooms. You earn cupcakes from completing tasks, and you can use the cupcakes to speed the progress of future tasks. Use your cupcakes wisely, as you will run out quickly if you use them regularly.

Cooperative play takes two forms. The first, the more common Facebook game cooperative play mechanism of sending and receiving gifts in-game. The second is a competition between you and other players. You can choose to challenge up to five people a day. A window will pop up and give you three areas of competition including things like “decorations.” If you have a higher score in any of the three areas than the person you have challenged, you win, and you get a reward.

This is, as I’ve said, an incredibly adorable game. It’s easy to get sucked in and just want to rescue more little critters and raise snails as pets all afternoon. Indulge your love of adorable woodland creatures and play some Gnome Town.

Visit The Facebook Games Forum to discuss your experience with Gnome Town.

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Search the World in the Quest for the Golden McRib

Jessica — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:32:34 +0000

This makes me hungry

If you enjoy encountering Viking accountants, searching for golden sandwiches or are a big fan of McDonald’s, you need to play the Quest for the Golden McRib game on Facebook. The company developed the Facebook game to promote their limited time release of the McRib sandwich, but even if you won’t be chowing down on fast food anytime soon you’ll still enjoy playing it. You’ll battle against unicorns that have an undying love for barbeque, Viking accountants, emo pilgrims, and bears wearing boxing gloves as you search for the 10 elusive Golden McRibs hidden around the world.

The game is unique in its integration with Google Maps. Players who visit the game through the McDonald’s Facebook page can use the provided clues to visit restaurant locations that they suspect are hiding the McRibs. When they find them, they’re encouraged to share their discovery with friends or compete with them for top points. The faster you find the sandwiches, the more points and badges you’ll earn. Unlike most Facebook games, the Quest for the Golden McRib isn’t a separate app, but is integrated into the existing page instead.

This isn’t the first social networking advertising campaign to involve a game, but it is one of the most appealing to gamers. Instead of just producing a boring, lifeless game stuffed with branding, McDonald’s made a real effort to build something that users would enjoy. Most Facebook games are full of in-game advertising anyway, even if the ads are just for the game you’re already playing. With a cast of special characters and game play that encourages critical thinking and map exploration, you’ll find the Quest a challenge even if you’re already the master of Farmville or Cafe World.

You’ll need to use your wits and searching capabilities if you want to find all 10 before the game disappears again. The characters you encounter will offer riddles or hints, but you’ll need to find each individual location on your own. The game ends on November 14th when McDonald’s stops the national distribution of the sandwich. Even if you don’t usually enjoy playing branded games, you may find the intriguing riddles and unique characters worth the advertising. Dedicated Facebook gamers will plow through the game to at least collect the badges, which won’t be available ever again after the game is removed from the company’s page.

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I Do: Wedding Street

Alice — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 03:30:33 +0000

I do..... like this game?

Fair warning, this is the most girly Facebook game I have ever seen. Sponsored by uber-wedding website “The Knot,” it gives you an outlet for all your secret wedding desires.

If you’re the kind of person who can’t wait to get engaged so you can plan your wedding, this is your game.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to play with colors and themes (think scrapbooking) this is probably also your game.

You act as wedding planner. You take clients, who have a color, a theme, a style, and a budget. You then design several elements of that wedding, staying within theme and budget. Above, you can see my bouquet for an informal Hollywood-themed wedding in blue.

There are lots of options within each element–for example, you have three cake shapes, two sizes, and then several pages of colors and designs before adding in decorative elements and toppers–which makes for a fun experience. Within your “client’s” guidelines, you can do almost anything you like and there are designs specific for most of the themes that you will encounter.

The downside is that most of those require unlocking with “honeys” which is the Wedding Street version of cash. As in, yes, you’ll need to replenish it with real money if you want to unlock very much at all. I’m not a huge fan of games that push you to use real money to get the full game experience.

You can only have one client at a time, unless you pay to hire an assistant, which can be frustrating if you want to play for a long time, because once you set the decorative elements, you have to wait an hour or longer for them to be completed and the wedding to start.

Also, in the category of exceedingly random, when you start the wedding, you have to play a mini-game. I have no issue with mini-games, but these are completely unlike the rest of the game. I’ve seen a wedding gift stacking game and a driving game that plays almost like frogger. It’s just a little disjointed to the rest of the game.

As for whether or not I liked the game…I’m a bit torn. There’s nothing wrong with the game. It’s perfectly charming. But it’s so overwhelmingly girly. I can’t handle it in more than just small bursts. If you are more into the intricacies of wedding planning than I am, you’ll love the game. Otherwise, probably not.

Thoughts on Wedding Street? Share them in The Facebook Games Forum.

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Gardens of Time

Alice — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 06:40:44 +0000

Can you spot the gnome?

Gardens of time is a gorgeous Facebook game, as the picture above shows.

You have been recruited to join a society of time-travelers who attempt to keep the threads of history correct and continuous. Your job is to find and remove things that are not part of the historical record for each time period. The search screens–such as the one above–are beautiful drawn, incredibly detailed pictures. Underneath the picture is a list of items to find. It’s a little like “Where’s Waldo” but immeasurably harder.

You receive points for each search screen you complete, based on how quickly you completed the search and how many times you asked for hints. If you get enough points, you get a star for that screen. There are quest lines that require to you to have multiple stars for certain screens, so be prepared to repeat the search, several times in all likelihood. The random items mixed into the pictures don’t move or change location, so the more you do each screen, the more quickly you’ll be able to find specific items, and the better your score will be.

Unlocking different levels–and each level has a set number of screens for you to search–requires you to have “reputation” points, which you get through building in your garden. Your garden is your home screen for the game, and you have a finite amount of space with which to work. Within that, you must build buildings and decorations to increase your reputation and open the next search screen. Some quests also require that you place specific items in your garden.

Getting a bigger garden requires that you either have specific numbers of friends, or that you be willing to pay in gold, which can only be replenished by purchasing Facebook credits. Your friends can visit your garden and you can visit theirs, which is another reason to encourage your friends to play this game. You also can see what your friends have scored on the individual search screens, which is fun.

I really love this game. It’s beautiful, it’s captivating, it’s difficult without being frustrating. This is one of my new favorite games. I’ll play till I run out of energy, then come back a few hours later and play again.

Come tell us what you think in The Facebook Games Forum.

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