Actually, this says it way better than I ever could.
Oh, definitely. I love Popcap. I bought the complete collection on Steam years ago and I’ve kept up ever since. I own them all except those silly hidden object games. But their last “real” game was Zuma’s Revenge which is almost a year old. I want new games and now I know Facebook is to blame!
First, I love those silly hidden object games!
Second, isn’t there going to be some announcement soon that has something to do with Plants vs. Zombies? Perhaps it’s a sequel. Then again, it might be a Facebook version of said game. :(
More is coming!
This thread has had the beneficial side effect of causing me to spend another 20 minutes playing Bejeweled Blitz. That makes it the thread of the week!
They are supposed to announce PvZ2 like aug. something.
This thread resulted in me trying my first game on Facebook: Bejeweled Blitz. I don’t like any match 3 games, so obviously I didn’t enjoy it, but it was still an interesting experience. It’s very polished looking (and sounding, perhaps? I had the speakers off, so I don’t know). After playing a few rounds, I clicked on the “Done Practicing” button, and got taken to a screen saying the game wanted access to all my private information like my list of friends and all that. When I clicked “Don’t Allow”, Facebook took me back to my own Facebook page. Interesting. So in order to keep playing, I have to give them all my personal info? Wow. Are all Facebook games like that?
Well, sorta, yeah. Though “all your personal info” isn’t really accurate. There’s nothing nefarious going on with it. We use access to your friends list to populate your friend leaderboard for you, which is sort of the point of the game. We get your and your friends’ pictures to show them to you. It’s all a (small) subset of what a random stranger would see on your profile. And we’re only showing it to you.
I think the one exception now might be email – facebook killed on-site notifications and other direct-to-user messaging. They now encourage developers to ask for email addresses to communicate directly with customers. It’s a giant pain in the ass, and we’d like the old method back.
Other than that new email thing, it’s basically like an XBLA game with strong leaderboard or multiplayer functionality. And the email thing is very easily turned off, if we even use it. I’m not sure.
LOL - yeah, any board that would take you and me … well, let’s just agree that “noteworthy” might have been a better word choice than “respected” ;)
This is the most respected board on the internet, by far.
You could also just play it on the iPhone, or on their own website, and not have it tied into anything. You don’t HAVE to play it on FaceBook. I don’t even think of it as a “FaceBook game” myself.
This post saved this thread for me. But if it isn’t true I’m coming to your house Marcus to unleash my fury! (I’m a relatively passive dork, so “unleashing my fury” mostly consists of a rather mean look when you aren’t looking, or maybe not saying hi when I pass you on the sidewalk).
Kael, actually, that looks somewhat likely. Popcap sent out a email to the press lately with the PvZ hand holding a card that says “Save the Date - August 2”
There’s a certain misconception that needs to be addressed. Gamers are not social. We sit in our black t-shirts, unshaven and unwashed, hating people in general and facebook dorks in particular.
Oh god I hope so. PVZ has my wife addicted. She’s beaten the game 4 times, has plants I’ve never seen, and has purchased the mobile version as well as the mac version. She’s really jonesing for another PVZ (or PVZ-like) game, so one can’t come too soon. I blame popcap for taking a non-gamer and making them into a junkie.
Thank you for rending BobJustBob’s soul :-)
I already knew about that and it doesn’t bother me. It might even be fun, because Zuma is always timed, more or less. But Bejeweled is a turn-based game with optional timed modes that no one (meaning me) ever plays. Bejeweled Blitz is just a test of your ability to recognize colors and click really fast.
Huh? I prefer the Action and Blitz modes of Bejeweled. Judging from the number of my Facebook friends who have registered scores on Bejeweled Blitz, I don’t think I’m in the minority.
In fact, I just don’t get the “casual games are killing gaiming” meme. I’d argue cookie-cutter FPS, RTS, and open-world games are killing (well, damaging) gaming. Good casual games are often better games then most of the AAA genre titles, in the sense that they have interesting systems and mechanics. Casual games also remind me of gaming on the C64 in the mid 80s–games usually played differently from one to the next, instead of being a rehash of the same core gameplay with different art and a different story (and I could probably count the number of FPS and RTS games with good stories on one hand). Yeah, there’s a glut of match-3 and tower defense games, but there are also plenty of casual games that innovate.
I just hope PVZ2 includes one-eyed alien unicorns shooting rainbow pebbles from their mouths into a conga line of zombies and I get points pachinko style for how many color matches I hit along the way. Oh, that an a really cool voice booming “AWESOME” after each level.
My only fear about casual gaming is of course that companies just remove most if not all funding for the big games we like and just concentrate on relatively simple casual games. We need to really have both. The other side of that coin is that our favorite devs leave companies and basically do the same thing, which leaves us with … what exactly? The industry is in a bit of flux.
Still… maybe it’s a kick that it needed. After all, the industry we grew up with is one that sprung from the wellspring of simplistic games. Maybe the cycle is beginning anew.
Anyway, just a thought.
— Alan