I’m keeping my eye out to see who’s going to move the pet genre forward this year.

#8 Crazy Planets
I don’t think you’re right about Crazy Planets. I think it’s simpler than that: Crazy Planets is just not that much fun.

It has polish but the core gameplay is poorly conceived in a way that doesn’t encourage the player to come back and try again. It lacks decent physics, the individual game sessions don’t tend to have the cut-and-thrust that Worms did and the round planet structure makes it very difficult to aim.

Worms is one of those games that many people have tried to clone over the years and usually failed with because the balance of a game like that is crucial to its interestingness.

#6 Mafia Wars
Also, Zynga spent a large portion of the year continuously advertising Mafia Wars. That must have helped :)

#2 Cafe World
Actually I think the more significant game is Restaurant City because it was the first social game to take a stab at demanding some skill from the player (in terms of figuring out optimum layouts etc), the first to utilise Flash properly, and the first to use a long period of Beta to build customer loyalty rather than launch immediately.

Cafe World takes those things (in addition to look) and does a less interesting job with them. It’s clearly a more time-oriented game (with dishes that take days to prep, go rotten if left alone etc), which is inherently less interesting. Cafe World doesn’t really reward that because its pathfinding system for NPCs is less predictable than RC’s, with the result being that restaurant layout is very bland. There’s no incentive.

However it is important to place it in context with all of Zynga’s big push into Flash gaming this year, which is certainly the story of the year overall.

#1 Farm Ville

Yes, of course. It would be unfair not to mention Farm Town and the general explosion of farming in context though. While Zynga rushed away with the farming prize after they realised that Farm Town had struck gold, Slashkey managed to achieve something quite remarkable as a lone developer, building an audience of nearly 19m MAU at one point – all of it viral – and are still going strong.

Wonder what the next new trends will be?

Before they brought out tractors and seed planters and whatnot: Farm town was a better experience. It was graphically inferior and was slightly less robust but it’s use of the Flash Media Server made it the *in-game* social game that Farmville still isn’t. The social aspects of Farmville happen outside the game but they were very much in the game with Farm Town. So why is Farmville more popular? The interface is the same, it’s technically inferior in both programming and game mechanics. The only difference is as I said: It’s prettier and feels more solid.

It’s a shame really but the old saying stands true: The first bite is with the eye.