Petville is another facebook game by Zynga, who are also the makers of the previously-reviewed Cafe World and Farmville. In Petville, you create a humanoid furry creature and control them as they live their life, in a vaguely Sim-like way. The graphics are actually pretty impressive in this game. The number of appearance options you have when making your pet is pretty massive, and the resulting pets are generally really cute. I’ve played some other pet-type games on Facebook, and none of them come anywhere near Petville’s level of detail. As an added bonus, the (Flash-based) game runs at a respectable speed as well, just about the only Zynga-made game that does (though it frequently suffers from slow loading in the evening.)

By far the funnest part of Petville is the decorating options. You can decorate your house from a nearly overwhelming number of items that are available to purchase.  There’s dozens of carpeting options, dozens more paint/wallpaper options, a huge variety of windows, furniture and electronics,  kitchen appliances and even cars. Clothing options are similarly massive with just an overwhelming number of shirt, pant, dress and shoe options. There’s even a lot of costumes available, so you can dress your pet up as anything from an astronaut to Santa Claus.

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Farmville is a game that’s gotten some attention lately, though, not really the positive kind. Apparently even Dr. Phil had an episode about it, dealing with people ‘addicted’ to Farmville (I know about that only from what I’ve heard. Trust me, I don’t watch Dr. Phil.)  Apparently there’s 60 times more people playing Farmville than there are actual farmers in the US. So its a pretty popular game.

Without a doubt, its a pretty casual game.  You plant some crops, come back later and harvest them.  That’s about 90% of the game there.  Like the best of casual games, ‘playing’ it doesn’t require much time investment, which is why it often winds up eating up so much time.  When you play a game like World of Warcraft, you always have to ‘plan’ your playtime – you know that if you’ve anything else that needs to be done in the next hour or so, its really not worth starting the game up at all.  There’s always a fairly hefty minimum time investment to get anything done. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of games over on Facebook. There’s an amazing amount of games available over there. Some of them are pretty good. Some of them are amazingly bad.   I’ll start by reviewing one of the first games that I started playing on Facebook, Cafe World.

I’m a big fan of cooking shows. I’ve been watching FoodTV for years, and am a fan of Top Chef Read the rest of this entry »