Kill your productivity with casual gaming on Facebook
Our latest round-up of the world’s most popular gaming platform includes the most recent release from the legendary PopCap Games
Facebook gaming continues to be massively popular, despite attempts by major players such as Zynga – the company behind Mafia Wars and Farmville – to roll out their own platforms. As Facebook’s core purpose is to help us kill time, casual gaming is a natural bolt on, and demand for these simple titles shows no sign of waning. While Farmville and its relations still dominate the lists of most-played Facebook games, we’ve taken a look at some of their more intriguing rivals.
We’ve concentrated on those which are slightly less ruthless in their attempts to get you to shell out real cash; send constant and irritating requests to your friends; or encourage you to befriend random strangers simply to get in-game benefits.
Solitaire is the uber-game when it comes to computer-assisted procrastination – we’ve been wasting time on it since Windows 3.0 and even Wikipedia acknowledges that “lost business productivity by employees playing Solitaire has become a common concern since it became standard on Microsoft Windows.”
Bearing that in mind, the only surprise is that PopCap, maker of hits including Bejewelled Blitz and Plants vs. Zombies, has taken so long to release its own version of the card sorting classic. The basic game works just like every other version of solitaire – you remove cards from piles by stacking them on top of foundation cards. However, PopCap has added extra features to make it fast and high-scoring games, including wild jokers, bonuses for consecutive wins, extras such as time bonuses, bombs to detonate cards from your stack and score multipliers. You can buy these using coins won by completing games or purchased for actual money.
Like every version of solitaire ever, Solitaire Blitz is surprisingly addictive – winning multiple games in a row is particularly satisfying as you watch the bonuses rack up – while still leaving you with a lingering feeling that you really should be doing something useful with your life. Perfect for the tail-end of Friday afternoon, in other words.
We’re rather taken by the nautical theme, although the dancing worm is mildly disturbing for some reason
Remember Puzzle Bobble? The bubble-matching game featuring the cute little ensorcelled dragons from Bubble Bobble has been cloned more times than we can count, but it never seems to get old. Bubble Witch Saga adds a slightly more thoughtful element to the standard gameplay by giving you a fixed field of bubbles which must be eliminated, but only a limited number of randomly chosen bubbles to do it with. The experience is slick and the levels are cunningly designed, making this our favourite bubble-oriented game of the moment. A weekly leaderboard encourages you to compete against your friends, too.
Bubble popping: still fun after all these years
You know a platform’s made it big when the movie tie-ins start rolling out. If you’ve not encountered it, The Hunger Games is an extremely dark series of young adult speculative fiction novels, now adapted into a hugely successful film. Twenty-four teenagers are sent every year as ‘tributes’ from enslaved districts to fight in a brutal battle to the death.
Despite the inherent gaming potential of the concept, The Hunger Games Adventures doesn’t start entirely promisingly. Neither the brightly-coloured environments nor the cutsey artwork of your sandal-wearing paper-doll avatar really bring across the grim dystopian future state of Panem.
You control an orphan from District 12, who’s trained to hunt, fight and trap in the local woods by the books’ protagonist, Katniss, before being sent off on a variety of fetch-quests which have you setting traps, cutting wood, trading meat and other goods for money. Like many Facebook games, you only get a limited amount of energy. Each action consumes some energy, and you have to wait for it to recharge. Once again, there’s plenty of opportunity to spend real money to recharge your energy if you lack patience. As the game progresses, you get access to more areas, with the promise of the full world of Panem becoming accessible in the future.
The game’s mechanics aren’t appalling and the folky violin music is actually rather good, but we had a hard time getting past the graphics. The gameplay is also simplistic – think World of Warcraft style grinding in a Farmville universe – and lacks any real challenge, but we could forgive that more easily if The Hunger Games Adventures looked the part.
Incidentally, if you’re after a bit more quality in your film adaptations, check out our top ten games that were better than the films that inspired them.
We prefer our dystopias to actually be… you know… dystopian
Hidden object puzzles are surprisingly popular even on “real” gaming platforms such as Steam, as they provide a gentle pace of play which can easily be used to kill idle minutes while you’re waiting for your code to compile.
Gardens of Time casts you as a time-traveller collecting artefacts from various time periods and preserving them in your garden, all while going about your duties as a Time Agent. Although this sounds suspiciously like the quasi-colonial theft of priceless cultural treasures, we’re assured that the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Fortunately, although a sense of atmosphere is pleasing, we don’t really need much plot to keep us engaged in clicking on objects concealed in a cluttered frame. We were also rather taken by the game’s full-screen mode, which makes it easy to see the hidden objects and appreciate the graphics, which reminded us of a ‘90s adventure game.
Gardens of Time, although a somewhat egregious offender when it comes to encouraging players to send requests to their friends, at least limits its attempts to extract your cash to subscription offers which unlock extra levels. So far, we’ve been fairly satisfied by the free ones.
Travel through time! See the world! Steal priceless artefacts for Queen and Empire! Click on stuff!
Like film adaptations, tower defence games are usually a pretty good indication that a gaming platform is reaching some kind of maturity. Pixeljunk Monsters Online is our favourite – you control a tiki-faced being which is trying to prevent its children from being devoured by other, equally strange-looking, creatures. To do this, you have to turn trees along their path into defence turrets such as canon and catapult towers. It’s fast-paced and has plenty of extra levels to open up.
We’re also quite taken by Galaxy Life, a tower defence gaming involving distressingly cute space monsters. It has a broader scope, allowing for both offensive and defensive play, as well as some resource management, but we were ultimately irritated by the way it encouraged us to rely on our friends to gain attack bonuses.
Tiki tower defence
