The Social Gaming weekly roundup: Barn Buddy, FarmVille, Fishville and more
Round Six
Another week closer to Christmas, another week of social gaming news has been put in your stocking for you to enjoy – obviously by Santa himself.
This week, Christmas is very much here in most social games, as you would probably expect it to be.
However, there are other interesting goings-on of a non-festive nature while a newcomer to a certain gaming genre gets a mention…
Read on, curious social gamer.
FarmVilleJust when you thought FarmVille couldn’t get any more festive, it has. You can now decorate a selection of buildings with seasonal snow and lights, and that plain old grass can become a winter wonderland instead.
Zynga (named after the CEO’s dog, I found out recently) has added in two ornamental trees, a lamb, an igloo, a ‘Dancin SnowLady’, Luminary fencing, a Redwood Tree, Giant Snowflake and more. If you find Christmas irritating, perhaps ignore FarmVille until sometime well into January.
Let’s start with the bad. Zynga is allegedly working to sort out Mafia Wars, and as a result the game has speeded up nicely. Bye spinning revolver for the most part.
The downside of the performance boost is some people can no longer enter the game, and/or the scrambling of their name and stats occurs. A fix is on the way, so those affected should be happily murdering other mafia members in no time, though.
Aside from speeding up the game, the new changes are aimed at hurting the current offensive from hackers, cheaters and ‘botters’ (presumably people who use a computer program to do all the clicking for them). Hopefully a more even playfield will be the reward, but unfortunately there will always be hackers and cheaters no matter what a developer does.
From a content point of view, it’s Public Enemy week. This means you can run a unique mission every eight hours to gain experience and maybe some other interesting items. You can also now gift Blitzen, Santa’s Helpers (who look strangely like Hired Muscle – lazy effort), and a Snow Fort should you wish to help your friends get festive.
FishVille
For those who enjoy wet-nursing fish, rejoice: a fish-load of content has been added. If you haven’t played FishVille, it’s essentially a mix of Happy Aquarium and FarmVille. That doesn’t mean sheep in a fish tank; I’m referring to the way the game works.
Instead of planting seeds, you hatch fish and they grow in real-time. You then wait and sell the slippery customers for gold and experience. Rinse and repeat until a high level or the will to live has waned.
Anyway, back to the content. Environments have been added, including various coral designs including a winter one with snow (I know, how do the fish survive, or the snow not melt?). There’s also some coloured gravel, sand and, erm, luminous rocks.
Listing the decorations will take us to the New Year. Suffice to say a lot has been put in for you to jazz up your tanks. Pick of the bunch? Undoubtedly, the Aztec Pyramid and the Castle Ruins that cost a massive 1,000,000 coins and require you to be level 43 are the ‘coolest’ decorations that display your fish keeping prowess. Just don’t expect to get them any time soon.
It’s all going swimmingly for FishVille it would seem, and rounding things off nicely are even more fishy varieties to love and care for or, if like me, more varieties to see on their sides, floating at the surface of the tank.
Barn BuddyMore farming madness, only this time Barn Buddy has a bit more complexity to bring to the table. You can water plants, weed them, use bug spray, fertilise crops and more. Better still is the ability to sabotage other farms by stealing crops, adding bugs and weeds to their crops. This could be a lot of fun, and as far as I know a unique asset.
It also has more character than the very flat, square graphical world that is FarmVille and there is something more adult in how the game feels.
Barn Buddy’s nearest competitor is Playmesh’s iFarm, as it shares a couple of the same features such as personal messaging with friends – which is no bad thing.
Will it coax players over from other farm simulators? We shall see, but it definitely has a chance considering the quality witnessed so far, and it may just offer a slightly more adult approach to the farming genre. Slightly being the operative word, of course.
• Petville hasn’t been out long, but it’s already amassed six million users.
• Remember last week we mentioned the potential use for Facebook in promoting games? Well, EA has realised this resulting in Need for Speed Nitro landing on the social site.
• Like Sim City? Perhaps developer Paladin Studios’s EnerCities will interest you then as it’s a Facebook equivalent recently released.
• CrowdStar (another company we mentioned recently) is aiming to be the most profitable social gaming company. “Every time they [Zynga] enter a category where we have gotten big, we’ll launch an entirely new game within weeks,” Peter Relan, the chairman of CrowdStar told Inside Social Games.
