Inside Social Games

As many of you know, the realm of iPhone games has been growing substantially for the past few months. SGN alone has gone a long way alone in stimulating the evolution with its iGolf, iBowl, and other Wii-like sports titles, but beyond that there have been many other games to come about as well. One of the more popular games has been Aurora Feint: The Beginning, and has, in fact, remained popular with 4 out of 5 star review that averages over 2000 reviews in total, putting it well above your average title.

Seeing that the original went over so well, the developers sought to make use of the game’s popularity and produced Aurora Feint II: The Arena, and with it, did away with the traditional single player campaign of the first game and steers towards an asynchronous multiplayer element, reminiscent of many of the Facebook titles seen today. According to the developers, Jason Citron and Danielle Cassley, they wanted to create, what they dub an “asynchronous massively multiplayer world.”

Since the game is asynchronous, none of the competition is in real-time like in most online games. Instead, the game uses a “challenge” methodology most Facebook social gamers will be familiar with. The design works simple enough, having one person play a level (which consists of puzzles) and upon completion, sends it off to the game servers to be recorded. The recording contains not only the score, but all of the moves the player utilized to acquire it. Then when the time comes around a would-be competitor can download this data and challenge it to start a competition. A blog post on VentureBeat describes the downloaded data as “a ‘ghost’ competitor.”

While an interesting feature, it is more than just for looks. The player can actually manipulate said “ghost competitor’s” score by timing their moves at the proper moments. Using various features, you can actually alter their game in order to win, and as with many Facebook apps any user can search for any other user and create games against them, thus leaving the number of challenges out there substantial enough to satiate even the most competitive of players.

Of course, the game looks and sound great too, but unfortunately, all of these new shiny toys come at a price. Sadly, Aurora Feint II is not free to download like its predecessor, and costs about $10 at the Apple App Store. It is the hope of the developers that the prior success of Aurora Feint I and the fan base it developed will be enough to drive the sales for the sequel. Cassely states, “we’ve got to find a way to pay our bills [somehow].” Well, here’s hoping Aurora Feint II: The Arena is able to do just that.

[via VentureBeat]

Remember the times when you would bug your mom for quarters so you could visit the arcade? It was one of the premiere money vacuums of its time (next to candy, of course). However, now arcades are rather few and far between. They feel outdated and tired, and what was once something that could be seen in any mall across America is now something only occasionally noticed in passing.

Of course this isn’t to say that arcades are dead. No, they just have evolved into a different form. An arcade in present time is more virtual and is a compilation of multiple smaller games. Social Arcade is one such example, as it comes with pages of various mini-games.

When you first visit, you are presented with pages of different games with the two primary games dubbed Bird Hunt (sound familiar?). As you may expect, you shoot birds… and apparently flying pigs in order to score the highest possible amount of points. The other games, however, are more platformer in nature.

There is a logical reason behind the similarities of the other mini-games: The majority of them are user-generated. That is the unique feature behind Social Arcade. Any player can utilize their level building tools to create a platformer game, in which the user is granted two options. If the person isn’t so design oriented, the app has the ability to walk you through a simple step by step process to create a game for you. All you have to do is select the choices of genre, theme, enemies, and so on. Once you’ve made your key choices, the game does the hard parts for you and generates a level.

Of course, if you are feeling creative, you can always use the builder tool and manually place everything in your game. It is a little hard to get used to, and isn’t exactly user friendly, so you probably shouldn’t mess with it unless you’re really into level design. There isn’t a way to simply set the level size, there are no scroll bars where there should be some, you can’t seem to zoom in and out, and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, the builder does have enemies that you can place, traps, platforms, and characters that are all programmed to do their jobs. There is no scripting required. Once you get used to the builder, it is actually possible to build some fairly decent levels.

Social Arcade definitely needs some work, but it does have a lot of promise. Based on the greyed out options in the level builder, it looks like users can expect to see many different types of games, such as RPGs, shooters, racing, and more. Once those are available for construction, the app will certainly improve, but right now there is just very little variety in the games and the builder tool really could use some tweaks. All in all, it works well for what it is; it just can be a bit annoying to use sometimes. Also, as with any platform, games will improve as the would be developers learn more and, well, get practice. As such, the overall level of quality from this app would be expected to rise as well in the near future.

In the past six months, Microsoft’s Xbox Live has had 14 million subscribers connect to the service. By comparison, HBO and Cinemax packages net around 40 million, XM radio around 19 million, and services like Netflix approximately 9 million. What does all this mean? Well, all of these services play into the digital age and the shift in how entertainment is acquired in the world. The Xbox, embraces such digital convergence far better than the other consoles, and has produced well over $1 billion in gross revenue with Xbox Live alone since 2001 and intends to make use of this new age.

Currently, Xbox Live has really only snared the hardcore gamers. Microsoft executive, Shane Kim, wants to expand this market as he talks about the “New Xbox Experience.” Its purpose: to shift Xbox Live from a mere multiplayer matchmaking tool to a much more engrossing entertainment based social network, and with the digital attunement of the console, it is not a far step from where it currently is and the update will be launching on November 19^th.

The new Xbox Live will allow users to not only play games, but to actually communicate with one another through the use of cute avatars (sort of a Microsoft version of Nintendo’s Mii avatars). When in the network, people will not only be able to socialize, but also find new entertainment methods beyond games such as music, videos, and more. Furthermore, the interface has been made simple and easy and allows users to easily make new friends, and discover all sorts of new media (it will even be integrated into Netflix next week).

Considering that Nintendo’s Wii, with its much broader audience, has been the biggest competition for Microsoft in the console wars, it is not surprising that they would attempt to do this. According to Kim, it never pays to bash Nintendo, because while they have been producing things that some might say “aren’t games,” there are those that are making them that say “I don’t care, I’m selling a whole bunch of that stuff.”

Just look at the sales for the Wii: Unlike the Xbox or the Playstation III, Nintendo has pulled in the much broader casual crowd as well as a number of the hardcore players. With titles such as Wii Fit, the console has begun evolving beyond just games and is becoming a vessel of interactive entertainment, which is something that the industry needs to grow, and something Kim wants for Xbox. The variety of fun and interactive elements seen in the recent wave of game titles has bridged a great gap between the gamer and the non-gamer and has been led by Nintendo for some time. Kim and Microsoft hope to follow suit and trump this with the new Xbox Live.

In this day in age, nothing is immune from the effects of the economy; not even games, and as such, companies must expand beyond what they know in order to forge a lucrative path forward. “I believe to be the leader in interactive entertainment, we have to expand well beyond gaming,” says Kim. Of course, this doesn’t mean that games will start playing second fiddle. The industry is a billion dollar a year industry, but with the expansion of Xbox Live’s capabilities, Microsoft feels comfortable with where their console is, and where it is going.

[via VentureBeat]

So you aren’t the Geo Challenge wiz you hoped you would be? One wonders how some people get those super high scores in these sort of games, but the fact of the matter is, most of them are not super geniuses. The sad truth is there are a number of people that do actually cheat using “bots” that automatically recognize items and basically play the game for them.

No, you’re not going to find that out here. Playfish, in fact, looks for this sort of thing and if caught… well, let’s just say you won’t be playing too much anymore. Nevertheless, there are some useful tips you can use to get better at the game.

Seeing as how the game is, technically, educational, you could always study. Ah, but where is the fun in that? In this sort of game, you sometimes need to be patient and other times quick. There is absolutely no trick that you could learn to get that high score right off the bat. Sorry, but that’s impossible (unless you have a PhD in geography).

The first game is Suitcase Shuffle, in which you’re looking to find the corresponding flag for its country. Here’s the deal: If you don’t know, just wait and be patient. Yes, you will loose time, and in turn possible points. However, as time passes the choices are narrowed down. Doing this will allow you to focus on a more limited number of images and your brain will be able to process it better. Don’t rush. If you do so, you won’t give yourself any time to fully recognize the name and flag, and next time you play, you’ll get it wrong again. This is one of the easier challenges, so make sure you focus the patterns so later on you can get as many points as possible.

The next challenge is Map Mayhem, and suffice to say, most people struggle with this one over all the others. Being patient and waiting for the map to zoom out sometimes helps, but it’s not always worth it. You are only presented with one image at a time, and since it is essentially a silhouette (which is the fastest recognizable feature to the human eye), you don’t need to focus on it for as long as you would a flag that has multiple features. Also, if you don’t know that part of the world, seeing more of the map isn’t going to help you very much, and will only succeed in wasting time. Furthermore, even if it does help you, when you’re going for the high score, you can’t wait to see that anyways… Your best bet is to scan the choices and try and take in that shape. The game has a tendency to repeat missed answers and you will slowly begin to draw that correlation between shape and name. Of course if you want to take it slow and study the shapes, go ahead, it really just comes down to preference.

Last up is City Blitz, and this is your money maker. Logically, one would think cities are harder than, say, flags, but you can often discern where a city is from by how it sounds. Of course, this method eats up a lot of time, so it’s all right to use it the first couple of tries, but when you start working for that high score, it’s better to guess immediately (react, don’t think) - just click anywhere if you don’t immediately know the answer. The game pauses when the correct pins come down, and that visualization of where the pin is actually going leaves an impression in your mind whether you notice it or not. You’ll begin seeing the patterns through this method and eventually see the pin, in your mind’s eye, move to the location when you see the name.

That’s really all this game comes down to. Don’t look for specific names or flags. Look for patterns. Your brain is able to recognize a pattern or shape ten times faster than pulling up a name or location. These tips will help you develop those pattern recognition skills, but it will be up to you to perfect them. The better those skills get, the faster you will become, and you’ll be racking up speed bonus points and adding more time to the clock in no time. While it does sort of come down to “practice makes perfect,” you need to remember, that if you don’t practice right, perfection won’t come. Regardless, at least the practice is fun.

Anyone who spends any significant amount of time on the web has probably been a victim of it. It spreads like a virus and feeds on the productivity of the world. It is the bane the world loves to hate, or perhaps… hates to love. It is the casual game, and two men involved with sucking up over 10 million hours of time, Paul Preece and David Scott, have just created their own company, Casual Collective.

The two are the creators of two well known and successful Flash based games by the names of Desktop Tower Defense and Flash Element TD, and between the two of them, have tallied over 210 million game plays thus far. With the numbers in their favor, these developers have received a cool $1 million in seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners (who has also funded Amy Jo Kim and Scott Kim’s Shufflebrain as well as Friends for Sale creators Serious Business), and are already releasing four casual titles for their site that will soon be licensed out to other game portals.

For those that may not know, Preece is a former programmer and Scott a web developer who produced, in their spare time, Desktop Tower Defense and Flash Element TD respectively. The success of the two games was staggering as they spread through word of mouth and logged millions of hours of game play. In fact, Tower Defense alone has roughly 10 million hours of playing time and is ranked third amongst Kongregate.com and its 8000+ games. TD, on the other hand, has spread to over 12,000 different web sites, and both games have earned a pretty penny through advertising.

Sure enough, the success was enough to coax them into making casual games full time as they decided, last year, to take the challenge and create their own social gaming site. Now with Lightspeed’s support, Casual Collective will be banking on free-to-play games supported by various ads that will focus on casual, social gamers.

Currently, the site is made up of Minions (a real time strategy game), Desktop Tower Defense 1.9, Buggle Stars (a collection game), and Farragomate (a play on word games, but instead of forming words from letters, you form sentences from words). Also, according to a posting on VentureBeat, users can expect to soon see new games added by the names of Buggle Connect, Attack of the Buggles, Flash Element TD 2.0, and Desktop Armada I; all of which will appear on Kongregate, Addicting Games, Hall Pass, Newgrounds, and I-Am-Bored.com.

Even though the competition is thick, the past success of Preece and Scott shows that they are capable of getting the job done. Considering that their first major games were done in their spare time, the new games are expected to be even better.

In an earlier article, I discussed the idea that social games will have difficult retaining users because the users will run out of reasons to return to the application. Developers need to constantly unveil new content, but eventually there will need to be an end-game - a goal to achieve.

Common computer games have a player versus computer endgame where the player eventually defeats the computer and “wins.” In literal terms, this means saving the princess, solving the puzzle, or collecting the golden coins.

Social games don’t usually have this type of end-game. Some, like PackRat effectively end when you’ve collected everything (a near-impossible goal). Others - like Armies or Vampires - never really end. You can always acquire more land/money/troops/victories. Features like ranking boards keep the most competitive users coming back again and again.

But creating compelling end-games is a problem not limited to Facebook games. Popular massive multiplayer online games (MMOs) like World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot have experienced similar problems with retaining users. By understanding these juggernauts, perhaps we can better understand how developers can create end-games for social games.

What to Take from MMOs

1) Make Winning Rules. People love to win. When players compete against each other, some will lose (n00bs, the pwned) and some will win (the pwners, omg ze best!). Competition is the lifeblood of gaming. IGN has an interesting article on Player Versus Player (PvP) end-games, and makes the case that the game has to be compelling to players of all ability levels and experience, but that one team (or player) needs to “win” and the others “lose,” so the game can be played again. In effect, anything that ends an interaction and splits your players into winners and losers is an end-game of sorts.

2) Bring Closure. So you’ve gotten people to play your game for days, months, hell, even years. They’ve invested hours and hours on collecting your diamonds or conquering your countries. Now what? Essentially, the end-game should be a culmination of the game play, creating a balance of skill, luck, experience, and fun that will keep the player coming back again and again.

3) Allow More Interaction. High-end MMOs feature incredible graphics and complex ways to interact with fellow players, but many Facebook social games do not have these technological abilities. Many depend on text to convey story, and images to convey places and characters. Social games like Armies, Vampires, etc require very little skill, but mainly time and under-the-hood dice rolling to reveal the outcomes of battles. Games like these are handicapped because without players interacting with fellow players in a more elaborate and defined way, it’s hard to build a connectivity needed to retain use.

To put it another way, high-end MMOs address the end-game by ratcheting up the interaction between players so the players know exactly what constitutes a victory and what constitutes a defeat. They have something to aspire to. Social games need that connectivity too, that something tangible to lord over the defeated opponent or aspire to achieve. Text that reads “you win” doesn’t do it. Another level, a secret realm, a medallion or achievement, needs to be offered for people who have reached the “end-game.” Simply, even in the context of social games and despite their perceived handicaps, there are ways to create end-games.

How To End Social Games

Let’s look at some “end-game” scenarios for popular social games. Granted, I haven’t achieved the higher levels of most of these games. The life of a social game reviewer means you spend enough time to familiarize yourself with a game but rarely enough time to “beat” it. Since most of these games can never be truly “beaten” the feat is even more enormous. So if my suggestions seem off (as in these games already have something similar in the higher levels) please appreciate it’s because I haven’t spent the hours of game time or hundreds of invites necessary to get that far.

1) Create an Elite Class. For a game like Vampires, Werewolves, and the ilk, you’re confronted with a text/jpg RPG that relies heavily on invites, battles, and upgrades. An end-game, or a way to convey to users that they’ve maxed out, is either to arbitrarily set a certain level (lets say 60) where these players are awarded with a special class, a special icon on their page, and/or new abilities unavailable to other players.

2) Look Back and Reflect. Gamers like to know they’ve accomplished something, and sometimes showing them how much they’ve progressed gives them a sense of accomplishment. A way to end your social game could be to show a screen that explains how they player progressed through the game, charting their successes over time and asks them if they would A) like to play again (and start over) B) keep playing (and prove your superiority over the other players. Algorithms displaying player progress shouldn’t be hard to write because much of that information is retained by developers anyway. Seeing how you played and what worked might also entice them to play again.

3) Well all else fails, give them something shiny. Games that rely on collections, obviously, are easier to have an endgame. If you collect all of the items (or reach a certain level) you’re rewarded with a special item, badge, and title. It’s an extension of the game play elements while at the same time rewards the player with something special. It’s like a merit badge, only nerdier.

Obviously, social games are more than just RPG and collection applications, but you can take some elements of these proposed end-games (special item, badge, exclusive forum to interact with similar game-beaters) and place them in other games. As games develop better graphics and better ways to interact with peers, you’ll get more elaborate ways to congratulate the player and reward him/her for the experience.

In the meantime, check out some really bad game endings to understand what not to do here. There’s nothing worse than spending hours devoted to a tough game to be rewarded with another “Thanks Mario, but the princess is in yet another castle.”

Part The Sims, part Lego, pure awesomeness: This is the simplest description for the social application Citypixel Spaces. With 400,000 users already on Citypixel.com, this new Facebook app is slowly growing strength, and with good reason.

The primary premise of the game is to build your own virtual life inside a virtual world, quite literally, one pixel at a time. The game utilizes an isometric view, and allows you to create your own apartment, car, and avatar (with more coming soon) using a provided set of furniture, colors, and other neat little toys.

Like in The Sims, players can create an apartment to their specifications using walls, carpets, electronics, and most other common place items you would find in a home. There’s even a nice little extra that allows you to connect one of your televisions to your favorite YouTube video. Once you’re done here, you can go ahead and pimp your ride, making some of the strangest vehicles you can imagine, and bringing with it a nostalgic feeling of old-school Legos.

As cool as all this creativity is, the game doesn’t stop at just this. Once created, a player’s apartment is placed into the Citypixel virtual world in which they can interact with other player’s avatars, rate apartments, and put their own on showcase. The game also utilizes a currency system, which to no surprise, is pixels.

Pixels are used to buy new furniture, gifts for friends, cars, and any number of cool stuff. How do you buy new stuff? Why take a trip around town of course. Yes, there is, in fact, a city… of, well, pixels. Within the city are stores, other apartments, and dozens of other player avatars walking around with fun personal messages that appear when you mouse-over them.

It is also very cool to see some of the creative avatars people come up with. When you build your avatar, it’s sort of like a grid based Microsoft Paint. While it may seem rather limited, some people do find some creative ways to express themselves, thus most of the limitations are your own imagination.

Citypixel is definitely aimed at a casual audience, but anyone that liked games such as The Sims, or plain old Legos as a kid, will get a kick out of this title. The game is very easy to use with its simple drag and drop interface and allows even the most artistically challenged players to create some nice apartments. The game also falls in nicely between similar virtual life games, meaning it isn’t as simple as something like Gaia virtual lounge, but not as complex as something like MyMiniLife. Regardless, if ever there was a virtual world worth checking out, Citypixel is at the top of that list.

There are a lot of applications on Facebook that it’s “questionable” whether or not they’re really games. Sure, many of them have some familiar features, but they just don’t feel like a fully featured game. One of the more recent, and popular, applications to be added to this list is Kidnap, created by Context Optional for the Travel Channel.

In Kidnap, you start out in your “hideout” city and use various methods of kidnapping your friends and whisking them away to wherever this city is in the world. The more friends you kidnap, the higher “level” you become, but the thing is, you don’t really get much from leveling up.

There are ten levels to reach, and each one grants you another four ways to kidnap people. However, the different methods of kidnapping is purely cosmetic and has no actual bearing on game play. Basically, no matter which buttons you click, the result is the same.

The only actual game play occurs when someone is actually kidnapped and it’s time to escape and earn some points. In order to escape, a kidnapped player must answer multiple choice questions about the city in which they are being held (i.e. questions about Athens, Montreal, Moscow, etc). Answer enough and you go free, or if you so choose, you can use a “body double” and avoid the questions all together (like a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card that you receive every time you level up).

If you answer a question right the first try, you earn 100% of the points from that question, 50% on the 2^nd try, and 0% on the 3^rd. As for the kidnapper, they receive points in the reverse order when you answer a question incorrectly. The points are a tool meant to track a player’s ranking.

Overall, Kidnap is not “bad,” it’s just unclear whether this is an actual game or just a glorified quiz. Regardless, it does have a fun idea that is very reminiscent of the old Carmen San Diego games, but now it’s a friend who is being stolen and not the Statue of Liberty. Kidnap could benefit a great deal from looking at these old titles and if it were to emulate them, if even a little, this application could turn into a great mystery game. For a sponsored game, it’s one of the better directions we’ve seen.

AppData for Kidnap:

Considering that election time has just passed, it seems suiting to have game that has the player as a mayor. The game is Metropolis by Kramaley Games, and as the name suggests, you are building a virtual city, and of course, you are its mayor.

The game has the look and feel of your typical Facebook RPG, but while it dances precariously on that slippery slope, it doesn’t quite fall down it. It’s really more of a sandbox SimCity meets Facebook RPG. The game comes down to resource management as you build structures within your city in attempts to raise your culture, mitigate your upkeep costs, earn revenue, and keep your residents happy.

You start the game with a rather hefty chunk of change, a decent population, and you get to choose what type of city you will run (basically this determines if you want to get money, culture, or happiness faster). In typical Facebook RPG fashion, you purchase various items in order to grow your city, however in this game many have prerequisites (sort of like a tech-tree). For example, you have to buy an empty lot of land before you can buy, say, a grocery store.

As one might expect, the cost of everything scales up as you buy more, and resource management becomes more difficult as you unlock new and more expensive structures. Also, one can’t forget that there needs to be people to employ these new structures and plenty of jobs to go around, lest your city and its people end up in a predicament surprisingly close to the current reality.

For all intents and purposes, Metropolis is almost like a Facebook rendition of the well known, SimCity. Sadly, the game falls short of its predecessor not only because income and major changes are on a daily basis, but also because it lacks a distinct sense of style to it. You can’t see what your city looks like in anyway, and thus there is no way to really make it feel alive. Granted, the later would be rather difficult within the Facebook space, but it would be nice to actually see your efforts when you purchase that brand new park. Anything would be nicer to look at than the boring thumbnails of structures that exist now.

Of course, unlike the early SimCity titles, this game does directly include a social aspect. It’s nothing too extravagant, but you can connect your cities with those of your Facebook friends in order to help each other out. This is nothing special, as it seems like this is the default, cop-out social addition to any Facebook application.

However, there is an interesting “populate” feature that can put your city up for help from other players. Essentially, it advertises your need for new citizens encourages people whom you send a citizen to return the favor (or vice versa). This gives players a nice way to meet new people and work together with other players in the game that you may have not all ready known. Once combined with the previously stated “social” feature, the overall social outcome of this game is significantly greater: Not perfect, but better.

Despite the short-comings, Metropolis is a pretty well thought out SimCity-ish application. The resource balancing is done pretty well, and it is kind of fun to try and find those personal goals for your city (like trying to get the highest possible culture with the lowest possible upkeep costs). The social aspects are mediocre at best, but still better than the majority of Facebook games out there, and honestly the only real disappointment with this game is that you cannot see your city actually change and grow. Even if it were a static picture that changed from time to time, it would still invoke a significantly greater sense of accomplishment than the current collection of thumbnail images saying, “you have this.”

350,000 units sold on the launch day for Fable II. That is quite a hefty chunk, and there is no denying the success of the title thus far. For those that are not familiar with the Fable games, in a nut-shell, they are your 3^rd person, adventure type games, using a leveling type system to upgrade abilities and spells. However, the unique part of Fable, is the morality system in which every single action you take affects how good or evil your character is, and every single thing you do can also affect how your character looks as well.

In addition to the Fable II release, the developers have also released a miniaturized Facebook version of the title. While nowhere near as in depth as the actual game, this version creates a Facebook friendly rendition of the game’s well-known morality system. The game plays somewhat like your standard Facebook RPG: The player is granted daily gold and gold from performing quests. Furthermore, doing quests (and deeds) can increase your level.

Here is where the game gets a little different: Unlike other Facebook games, your gold is not used to buy new gear and equipment, but rather it is used to mess with your friends through the use of “deeds.” Deeds are the more effective means of changing your alignment to good or evil (quests do so as well, but are more limited in number). The deeper into good or evil you venture, the higher your level.

Regardless, be it deed or quest, the outcome is always amusing with some colorful flavor text. Sometimes you can perform a rather… vulgar and unsightly thrust to earn some gold, and then turn around and post your friend dressed in drag. What’s more, you are also presented with a quaint little mini-game to play in which your timing can increase the amount of gold you earn.

When you perform a deed on a friend, they have 24 hours to counter your deed with an increased wager. Should a deed be successfully countered the winner will gain an increase in the alignment (and in turn, their level) they have chosen and push the looser closer to a neutral alignment. As such, the game is all about being active and checking for those deeds.

Unfortunately, as interesting as all this is… it doesn’t seem to work too well. More often than not page errors seem to appear when performing deeds or attempting to invite friends. Whether or not this is merely coincidence is yet to be determined, but with no technical help, it is difficult to say for sure. As amusing as the “Oopsies” page is (some medieval looking guy dressed in drag), it does get old rather quick when you are trying to actually play the game.

Bottom line though, is that it is certainly a fun game to play, and the flavor text alone from quests and deeds is funny enough to really differentiate itself from other Facebook RPG titles. It really stands to say, that style, above all else, can really do wonders for a game. Unfortunately, as stylized and fun the game is (or rather is supposed to be), the fact that it doesn’t seem to work half the time does create a minor inconvenience (sarcasm). Nonetheless, assuming that the game does get fixed, it really is quite a cool game. Okay, not as cool as the Xbox version, but it is a nice addition to Facebook just the same.