I haven't abandoned my blog, honest!  It's just a busy time of year, especially with a 2 year old.  I hope to write something up soon about the winter events on Facebook.

As some filler, here's the list of games I've been playing:

Cityville - I really like this game.  It's not perfect, but it's the best city builder on Facebook.  I reviewed it recently, and it still holds up.

Mousehunt - Still a fun skinner box.  The winter event is entertaining, too.  It's an optional play space in the game with fun content and a good prize.

Frontierville - I'm a bit tired of this game, but the winter event is keeping me interested enough for the moment.

Monster Galaxy - it's Pokemon on Facebook.  Really.

Restaurant City - This one is on the down side of my interest.  I will probably quit soon.

Fallout 3 - I grabbed this while it's on sale on Steam and I'm really enjoying it.  The only bad part is that I'm such a complete-ist on these games that it will take me forever.  But I'll enjoy every minute.

Dominion - the game of choice for work lunches, and probably still my favorite board/card game at the moment.  We play at least a couple games a week.

Cityville is the newest of the "city sims" that are currently popular on Facebook.  It is also the latest Zynga game, so there's a lot of force behind its design and marketing.

Like most city sims, Cityville sets you up as the leader of a small town destined for greatness.  Many of these games are set in historic periods such as ancient Rome, but Cityville chooses something that looks like small town America, which I like.

At its roots the game play is fairly standard for this type of game.  You buy structures and place them on the map.  Each structure has a timer associated with it.  After the timer is finished you can click on it to collect some money.  Spend your money on bigger and better structures; rinse and repeat.

However, Cityville has some very interesting twists and additions to this standard formula.  Let's explore the good and bad, shall we.

First, the good.  Cityville has an interesting modification of the standard money loop.  It does have the standard structures (in this case residences) which simply spit out money at regular intervals, but it also has a more complex money loop for businesses.  They are not really generators, they are transformers.  The player acquires "goods" from multiple sources and puts them into a business.  That business then converts the goods into money with varying degrees of efficiency (and time) depending on the building.

Goods are primarily gained through a simple farming mechanic.  There are a limited number of crops with varying grow cycles.  It costs money to plant them, then they produce goods, which you run through the business to make more money.  Rinse and repeat.

So why not just load up on residences, which don't require the goods step?  Two reasons.  First, there is a hard cap on residences.  Each one provides population for the city, and you have a cap on that based on how many Community buildings you've built, and they aren't easy to build so the cap doesn't go up very quickly.  Second, the residences are sure money, but not very fast money.  Using the goods/money loop is far more efficient.  It's really the primary economy driver, with residences just being a good way to pick up some spare cash.

Good mechanic #2:  Quests!  Zynga took a page from their Frontierville game and loaded the game with quests.  I've been playing a few days now and I've never run out of little goals to shoot for.  The quest system is fairly simplistic compared to Frontierville.  It really just guides you toward doing what you should be doing anyway or setting minor goals for you.  It doesn't have any of the crazy "ask your friends" items, etc.  I find it to be a fun little addition that makes me feel like I always know what I should be doing at any time.

Good mechanic #3: Boosters.  Zynga clearly did their research and checked out what their competition was doing.  This mechanic is lifted straight out of Millionaire City.  Decorations in the game are functional and position matters.  When you place a flowerbed or stop sign or what-have-you, it has a radius associated with it.  All residences and businesses in that radius get a percentage bonus to their output based on the particular decoration.  It really encourages you to set up your city in certain ways.  City blocks are very important because it allows the maximum number of buildings to surround a set of decorations and all get the stacking and overlapping bonuses.  As an aside, though, I think a hardcore look at this mechanic might show you that the rewards for careful placement are not really that great when you stack them against the amount of time it takes to get everything just right, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Good mechanic #4: Streets.  This part is not really about how streets function as a mechanic, but about how they make the game feel. In most of these games, streets are purely decorative.  Any powergamer worth the name quickly discards them and packs his buildings in as tightly as possible to get maximum gain from their limited space.  That is NOT true for Cityville.  All buildings must have at least one side on a street in order to function.  Well, the community buildings and storage buildings don't for some reason, but the residences and businesses do.  Like the Boosters above, this helps make sure that your city actually looks like a city and not a storage area for old buildings.

Good mechanic #5: Bonus bar.  This works just like in Frontierville.  Whenever you collect anything in the game, an icon pops out and you can click on it.  If you don't, you'll still get the reward after a couple seconds, but if you do a bonus bar starts to fill up.  The more things you collect in a period of time, the higher the bonus.  It fades out after a few seconds to further encourage you to get as much done in a short time as possible.  It makes you feel clever for waiting to do as much as possible in a short time, which is really just a nice bonus for logging in at farther intervals.

Good mechanic #6: Train!  There's a train which functions as sort of a trading post.  You can choose to either send goods around to some number of your friends asking if they would like to purchase them, or send money around to them to ask if they want to sell any goods.  All the amounts are set in stone, and there's a timer involved, but I think it's a fairly clever way to put trading into a game.

Good mechanic #7: Franchises.  Basically, players can put down plots in their city which their friends can use to build businesses on.  The player who owns the town treats it as a normal business for the most part (transmuting their goods into money,) and the player who places it gets bonuses from it in exchange for having put it down and supplying it with goods once per day.  It's one of the more clever social mechanics I've seen.

Good mechanic #8: Collections!  This is very similar to Frontierville.  Most buildings and crops occasionally spit out "items" which go into collections.  These items are organized into sets, and when all the items in a set have been found they can be turned in for a bonus.  It just adds another level of interest to everything in the game, although see below for the flip side.

OK, now the bad.  #1 Bugs!  OK, this isn't a mechanic, but it's the single most frustrating thing about the game at the moment.  There have been some fairly serious bugs that have lessened my enjoyment of the game.  For one the game forces random refreshes after you've just collected all your buildings and farms, forcing you to do it all again.  Then there was one that prevented me from asking people for resources I needed to complete a building.  I know the game says "beta" on it, but really, all Facebook games say that and you shouldn't be driving traffic to your game with these kinds of problems.

Bad mechanic #2: Economic holes.  There are a lot of minor glitches and flaws in the game economy.  For one thing, the balance curve for goods production is off.  The general shape is correct with fast crops being more efficient because you have to manage them better, but the long term crops are just terrible in comparison.  The longest term crop I plant is 8 hours, and that's usually only because I'll get slightly more while I'm sleeping.  The only time I've planted longer crops is for quests.  This also creates a problem for collections in that if you want to do the corn collection you need to plant corn, which is a terrible crop.  Now, you don't have to do the corn collection for anything, but it's still annoying.

Also, there's no 2 hour crops (at least not yet.)  It jumps from 1 hour to 4 hours, which is a considerable difference.  It would be a nice middle ground, and see below.

Bad mechanic #3: Energy.  In general I don't really mind energy in games.  However, in Cityville it ties directly and strongly into the economy.  It's the primary reason that the fast goods can be so efficient.  You really can't sit there and gather high efficiency crops because each one takes an energy and you will burn it much faster than it regenerates.  Since collecting from buildings also takes energy it puts a lot of pressure on balancing collecting goods and collecting money versus energy regeneration.

Bad mechanic #4:Storage.  The concept is easy.  You have a limit on the amount of goods you can hold at any one time.  You can increase the maximum by building special buildings.  As a money sink it's not bad, but in practice the entire system is just annoying.  Also, the buildings that increase your cap take up valuable real estate.

These three bad mechanics all come together in a perfect storm to make the economic cycle very frustrating at times.  If you plant fast crops you run out of energy.  So you plant slower crops.  While you're waiting for them to mature you run through all of your goods and have empty businesses sitting around.  Ah, but you could just grow more of the slow crops!  Not really, because you have a storage cap, so it's very difficult to gather a large amount of crops at one time.  So you increase the storage cap by spending money and space on storage buildings.

Ideally, there's a balance in there somewhere.  There's some amount of storage space that allows you to grow the perfect number of crops with the correct cycle, and the exact right businesses to use up those goods and make sure that your energy is recharged when the next crops mature.  Honestly, I kind of like that challenge, and some of the mechanics like the train help correct errors, but I can image that it might get very frustrating for casual players.

Overall, though, I really enjoy Cityville.  It's easily the most fun of any of the city sims I've played, including City of Wonder (which I also quite like.)  Once again Zynga has taken all the best elements from other games on Facebook and added some clever touches of their own to create a "best in breed" game.

I've wanted a Kinect since I saw the first trailers for "Project Natal."  The potential for this thing blew me away.  And I'm not just talking about waving your arms around to knock back dodgeballs, either.  Having facial and voice recognition hardware in everyone's living room is staggering.  Using TV's for video chat, voice commanding the console, it's all so amazing.

However, let's get back to what's happening in my living room now.  (Caveat: this is all first impressions after a day of playing with it.  I may be downright wrong about some features of the games that I haven't run into yet.)

I saw that Walmart was having a special deal on the 4GB Xbox 360 with a Kinect that started at 6am on Saturday.  I have a 360, but it's a first gen and I've been thinking about upgrading anyway.  I didn't really want to get up that early so I browsed around and found that most places were already sold out, so I had almost set my mind to getting up and fighting crowds at Walmart when I found that while Bestbuy.com didn't have any of the bundles for direct sale, they did have them available (at Walmart's price, no less) for pickup at my local store.  So I quickly bought one, got a reasonable amount of sleep, and walked right in and picked it up the next day.  I also picked up an extra controller, a cable to transfer my old hard drive to the new one, and two extra games.

I set up the new system in short order and got down to business with the Kinect.  First up was the game that comes with the bundle, Kinect Adventures.  It's basically a set of minigames using the Kinect with a weak metagame wrapper.  You collect badges and trophies by doing a series of minigames.  This unlocks other badges and trophies. You can also do "Free Play" of the minigames.

Overall, the minigames are pretty fun.  You bat balls around a room, you ride a raft down rapids trying to slalom between poles, you plug leaks in a glass box you're standing in, you float around popping bubbles.  They're quick and fun and have you jumping, leaning, ducking, and waving all over the place.  It reminds me of Wii Play, really.  It's just fun stuff there to show off the basic capabilities of the Kinect.

The second game I tried was Kinectimals.  It's kind of like Nintendogs but on a much bigger scale.  You get a pet feline (tiger, panther, cheetah, leopard, or lion) and then you play with it.  Playing with it gives you points which unlocks new ways to play with it, new toys, new minigames, etc..  There's also an exploration mechanic for the island you're on which can unlock new pets for you, etc.  The game is beautiful!  Really amazing.  All the pics and videos you see don't really do it justice.  They've captured some really nice stuff in there mechanically as well.  The pet comes up and breathes on the TV screen, making it fog up.  It bounces around looking at stuff.  If you want the world's biggest virtual pet game, look no further.

The Kinect part is nice, but the controls are a little wonky.  It's great for petting the cat or brushing it, but throwing a ball takes a bit of getting used to and aiming your throws is difficult.  Steering a toy car also takes a bit of practice.  Luckily, everything's pretty easy to do.

The last game is Dance Central.  Of the three, it's easily my favorite by a large margin.  It's sort of the Rock Band or Guitar Hero of the Kinect.  Basically, you're given a choice of songs to dance to, and each one has a set of moves associated with it.  You must perform those moves as the song plays.  The closer you are to matching the computer, the higher your score.  Each song has three difficulty levels and a practice mode that goes over the moves you need to learn one at a time.

This game is a lot of fun.  You may feel ridiculous, and there might be some laughing, especially when the screen shows photos of you doing the dance, but it's pure fun.  The Kinect controls are really good, too.  It's not just about putting your hand in the right place, it reads your body outline and matches it with a "perfect" computer.  It outlines the parts of your body that are incorrect in red so you can improve them.  Genius!  I also like the control scheme for UI functions which involves moving icons on the screen with your hands.

I have to say I'm very impressed with my Kinect so far.  It does a good job of reading your position and actions.  The only problems I've really had were things like stepping on the correct spot on the floor in a Kinect Adventure minigame or it not reading a jump correctly on occasion.  Those are really minor compared to how much fun I'm having, though.  I also feel like I'm getting a pretty good workout at some games that I find to be quite fun.  It really beats watching a Dancersize video or playing Wii Fit.

I'm sure I'll have much more to say on the subject as I continue to play with it.  I especially want to get the fighting game I saw.

I'm a big fan of Telltale Games and have been since I started playing their revival of Sam & Max a few years back.  They've continued to impress me with continually making games based on well loved IPs such as Strong Bad, Wallace and Gromit, and Back to the Future.  Their games are entertaining and clever, they have good puzzle design and amazing story writing, and they are fun!

So when I saw that they were doing a poker game staring Max, Strong Bad, The Heavy (from Team Fortress) and Tycho (from Penny Arcade,) I thought that it would be a no brainer, especially at $4.49 on Steam.  Let's see what I got.

There's a nice intro showing you "The Inventory."  A back room speakeasy with a poker table.  There are a few NPCs wandering about the place during the intro including Sam.  It's a movie, though, and you go on rails, following the narrator down to the poker table as he explains some backstory about the place.

Then you get to the table and start playing immediately.  The NPCs are always the same (so far, anyways.) Max, Strong Bad, The Heavy, and Tycho.  You start with a stake which you throw down ($10k.)  The game is Texas Hold-em.  Blinds start at $100/$200 and go up at regular intervals.  Play continues until you knock everyone out or are knocked out yourself (although you have the option of watching the rest of the match if you get bumped.)  Once you fold a hand you can press a button to jump to the end of the hand.

Let's talk about the good parts.  Telltale did an amazing job with the dialog.  The NPCs are constantly prattling on about this and that.  They each have an OK number of one liners to deliver as they bet, raise, fold, or check.  They do get repetitive, though, after a few games, but you can't really fault them for that.  They'd need a large number of them for that not to happen.  The gems, though, are the character interactions.  Entire conversations happen between the characters.  These usually happen in pairs with some back and forth banter, but can sometimes include everyone at the table.  The pairs thing is obvious, though, since the number of players is always decreasing and you want to make sure that they still have something to say.

These conversations are hilarious and appropriate to the characters.  They often contain in-jokes that are funny even if you don't know the reference (which is tough to do.)  Strong Bad taunts Tycho about how many hits his site gets.  Max asks the Heavy about whether he can get him some new weapons.  It's all clever and entertaining and well worth the price of the game.  There are also enough of them that it takes a while before you get repeats and even after 10 or more tournaments, I am still hearing new ones.

There is a decoration mechanic as well.  You "win" new table tops and decks of cards.  The cards come every 3 tournaments you win, and the tables are triggered by specific events like the identity of the last player you knock out.  There is also a collection mechanic.  Sometimes a character wont have the $10k to join the game, so they'll put up an item instead, and if you win the hand that knocks them out, you get the item.  I have three of the four items, so I don't know yet if anything happens when you get them all.

Also, there're apparently some Team Fortress unlockables associated with the game.  I haven't played that game, so I couldn't really say if they're good or not, but if you're into that kind of thing, this game is probably worth getting for those alone.

Now the bad.  This is not a very good poker sim.  There are problems both with the UI and the AI. The UI is minor things like the fact that you have to wait until it's your turn to act.  Most poker sims I've played give you the chance to at least fold a bad hand before it's your turn, and the really good ones let you pre-assign your action and automatically undo it if something changes before your turn comes around.  It's just something I've gotten used to and miss here.

Another minor UI concern is that the controls are all hard to find.  I finally had to hit Esc during a game to locate the ability to change the deck and table designs, and to see what collectibles I had.  That should be a lot easier to find.

As for the AI...  I guess "frustrating" is the best way I can describe it.  The AI feels somewhat stupid and random, but this makes it very tough to play against.  It stays in with bad hands all the time, which is nice when you catch them, but makes it very difficult to bluff.  Also, the various characters all seem to play with the same AI.  I would have much preferred for one of them to be a rock, and one to be super aggressive, than for them all to play the same way.  I'm not 100% sure this is true, but I haven't detected any differences if they are there.

So overall, this is a fun little game and well worth the $5 price tag for the entertaining dialog alone.  There's a bit of metagame there as well.  However, if you're looking for a good poker sim or you don't care about these characters, keep looking.

There are many mechanics for advancement in Facebook gamest.  I am defining advancement as any persistent change in your game experience which makes some or all game areas easier.  In this post, though, I'm only going to address a particular kind of advancement mechanic because I've been thinking about it a lot.  That is the cooperative "building" mechanics that are often used in simulation games where you need to get your friends who are playing the game as well to help you finish a task or build an object in the game.  In general I like these mechanics because they encourage the social aspects of the game, but some games do them better than others.

I'm going to examine a bunch of games and how they handle these mechanics and what I like and don't like about each of them.  Then at the end I hope I can draw at least a couple of conclusions about them in general.

Farmville - Farmville has a couple of different building mechanics, but one is used overwhelmingly.  The building will require some number of several different resources, such as boards, nails, and bricks.  These resources are only available from other players as gifts.  Each player has a limited selection of these to give out, with the basic idea being that you should be asking for the items you need and each of your friends who can send you that item does until you have everything you need.  However, Farmville lets players get around that limitation very easily in two ways.  First, if you send an item you need to someone else, they are allowed to send you that same item even if it's not in their gift list.  Second, many times you can send out a call for a specific item and get it from people whether they have access or not.  So they've made it relatively easy for people to build items, and the primary restriction is that anyone can only send you one item at a time so it can take a while to build up what you need.

Review - It's mostly very basic and easy to grok, which should be expected from such a widely used app.  There's nothing clever, but with some effort anyone can make anything.

Frontierville - Very similar to Farmville at it's base.  A building takes some number of a few different resources.  Each player has access to two of those basic resources.  When a call goes out that you need resources for a building, you can choose which of your two resources to send to the asker.  There are many resources beyond those basic ones, though, and this is where it moves away from Farmville.  There are two mechanics for gaining non-basic resources.  The first is to have the player put out a general call for the resource and anyone can answer that call.  The answerer generally gets one of the asked for resource as well.  The second mechanic is to force the player to send individual requests for a resource to people in their friend's list.  Anyone who responds generates one of the resource for the player. These two mechanics are never for the same resource.

Review -  I love the general call where both players get the resource, although often there is a limit on how many people can replay.  Also, Frontierville has done a fairly good job of reusing some of those resources in multiple buildings so that you still want to answer the call even after the building is completed because you will get one that might be useful later.  I *hate* having to ask individual people for a resource, though.  It feels very "spammy" to me.

City of Wonders (old) - CoW has two mechanics for this; an old one which they are phasing out and a new one.  The way the old one worked was that the player would have to put up a post asking for people to help build a wonder.  Any player could click on that post and would get a decent cash bonus for helping to build it.  When enough friends had helped, the building would complete.

Review - There were two problems with this mechanic which compounded to hurt it.  The first was that any particular player could only help one on each wonder.  The second was that it often took 25 friends to build a wonder.  What this usually meant was that you would put up a new post for the wonder each day and try to cajole your friends into helping, nagging more and more as the number you needed got lower. Ugg.  Now, there was a loophole, however, which was that actually anyone on facebook could help construct the wonder, whether they were playing or not.  So in the forums a practice arose of posting the URL to your wonder and then everyone would click on each other's links to rapidly complete them.  The fact that this exists helps a lot, but only if you know about it.

City of Wonders (new) - All of the new wonders break the building task into pieces.  Each piece requires 4 people to help.  People can't help twice on the same piece, but can help on multiple pieces.  So even though it takes 12 or 16 helps to finish, they can all come from 4 people.

Review - This is much more friendly, but does require you to post the wonder multiple times to complete it.

Island God - There are two ways to build socially.  The first is by collecting resources from your friends.  Each player can send any of the three resources as gifts (one per player per day.)  And the player can make a post asking for a specific resource, and each friend that clicks the post gives the player one of that resource.  A friend can only click on a post once.  However, they can click once on each post you generate.  So if you are willing to send out the spam and have a friend who's willing to click on them all, you could get all the resources you need very rapidly.  The second method is similar to CoW (old).  A certain number of friends need to respond to a post you put up about the building.  Each can only respond once per building, but the number required is much smaller (the only one I've seen so far requires 5.)

Review - I kind of like the way resource collection works here.  In theory you just post each day about what you need and your friends respond.  Now, the fact that you can put out ten calls for nails and if a friend is willing to click them all gets you quick resources is kind of fun, but very spammy.  Still it means you need only one dedicated friend to help out.  The second method is much friendlier than CoW (old,) but is frustrating for me because not many of my friends are playing.  It would work well if the game gets more popular, though.  (I like it quite a bit.  Check it out!)

Summary - Cooperative building is one of the most fun elements of a social game.  You help out someone and you get a reward, and next time they'll probably help you out when you need it.  It builds community and helps your viral spread.  I do not believe, however, that it should be a friction point in your game.  There should obviously be some amount of challenge to it or it's not going to be as much fun, but making it take tremendous effort to achieve just makes people look for loopholes or avoid it altogether.  Save the serious friction for mechanics that aren't helping increase your DAUs.

Cooperative building can be a good place to monetize as well, but you want it to be a convenience purchase, not a necessary one.  You want a player to get 90% of the materials from friends and then have to decide if they want to wait another day or two to get the rest or just pay a minimal fee to get them now.  Frontierville does an excellent job of this.  The resources primarily cost a horseshoe or two each.  If you need 10 of them, you are unlikely to buy them, but when you've gotten 9 from friends and you can complete the building for just one horseshoe, that seems like an easy spend.  You could buy your way through in CoW (old) as well, but the cost was not per friend you were missing, it was a flat rate no matter how much was left to do.  That's much more painful.

A few weeks ago I found a game called Fair Exchange on Facebook.  I think I found it on insidesocialgames.com.  It was described as a game where buy and sell resources to build your town.  That intrigued me.  I've been a fan of such games since back in the day with games like M.U.L.E., Elite, Escape Velocity, etc.  I love that kind of thing.

When I joined the game it started in a very promising way.  It asked me if I wanted to be a goblin, elf, dwarf, or troll.  Each specializes in a different type of resource and lives in a different area of the realm.  My head spun with the possibilities this choice could mean for my gameplay!

Well, it turns out that that choice is meaningless.  It does determine which resource you can harvest, but as it turns out the only thing you do with resources is sell them.  Wheeeee....

The game basically consists of harvesting resources (which happens automatically.  You just have to log in and collect them.)  You sell those resources at a market for gold.  Then you go to your town and upgrade your buildings using the gold which leads to increasing the resources you can collect.  Wheeee...

There are five buildings in your town (although one of them is just a mailbox and can't be upgraded.)  The first is your resource center.  You collect resources here by building mines.  This takes gold and "rumors" (see below.)  Upgrading it lets you build more mines.

Then there is the town hall.  This is where your achievements are stored (90% of which give you money.)  Upgrading unlocks more achievements (like "Upgrade your Inn to level 5" and "Build another mine!")

There's the inn where you come every day to collect rumors. The only purpose of rumors is as a resource to build mines.  It also holds your energy (more later) that you can spend on adventures (more later.)

Last there is the magic tower which says "Coming soon."  You can upgrade it, though.

The only other significant mechanic is adventures.  As explained above, the elves, dwarves, trolls, and goblins each have a section of the world and produce resources there.  You can spend your energy to go on adventures (I've never gotten anywhere close to spending it all.)  You get rewarded with resources from the region you adventure in.  There are several problems, however.  First, all you can do with those resources is sell them.  Second, and more importantly, the adventures require a number of people to go on them.  These people are drawn from your friends who are playing the game, however each friend can only go on one adventure with you per day.  So as you do adventures your friends get used up and you soon find you can't do adventures that require people other than yourself.  In addition each realm only offers one adventure at a time and if you can't do it, too bad.  You quickly use up your friends and then have nothing to do.  The only solution is to have a ton of friends playing this game.  Hahahahahaha.

OK, the point of all of this is the game is disappointing, but really it's that there is so much potential here that is being wasted!  This could be a great game.  Here are the changes I would make to it.

* First and foremost, make the resources useful!  Require them to build your town.  Make players trade them.  Make them want to adventure to get resources their realm doesn't provide.
* Give players a persona.  Technically there is a leveling system, and everything you do gives you XP, but it's really just a score of how much time you've put in.  Make it important.  Require levels to unlock things.  Make your race important.  Make goblins good at fighting and elves good at bartering for goods in the market.
* Make a crafting system.  Take resources and make stuff.  Make your town as I say above.  Make stuff for your character.
* Expand the adventure system.  Make them feel more like quests.  Add some story.  Add some rewards other than resources.  Make sure the player always has something to do.

The may be working on all of this, but I just hate to see all that potential wasted in a game I would enjoy otehrwise.

You might ask why I've been playing it at all.  Calling it a fairly repetitive slog with little in the way of choice or even variety wouldn't be entirely wrong.  Well I play it for three reasons: A friend of mine is the lead designer on the project and continually makes interesting changes to it, it has 3.6 million Daily Active Users, and honestly I like the feeling I get when I accomplish  goals in a game and that happens pretty often in Mafia Wars.

So why am I quitting?  Partially because I feel I've explored the different mechanics in the game sufficiently for now, but mostly because I ran into a mechanic that has ruined the little joy I get from the game.

One of the things I like about the game is that (in general) you can choose to participate in the PvP aspect of the game or not.  Now, no matter what you do you can get attacked and lose some money, but it's generally fairly minor and if you're clever you can even make sure that you don't lose any money that you care about.

I chose from the beginning to not participate in PvP and to focus on the standard Energy slog and it's done me in very good stead so far.  Zynga has so far been very good about making sure that my choice is fine, and has in fact allowed me to progress very quickly through many areas of the game.  I've completed almost all of the cities so far.  Recently, though, there's been more emphasis on the stats that help PvP.  Las Vegas required you to do missions that spent your PvP "energy" but as long as you had any amount of it you could still progress.. just more slowly.  It also had bosses that you had to defeat, and that took PvP energy, but with some amount of effort every single one of them could be defeated.  Until now...

I finally hit one boss that I can't seem to defeat.  The encounters are timed, you can ask people to help (and I have,) but it's just not possible with my stats to get past them.  (Well, I imagine I could probably spend enough money to do it.)  In any case, I'm stuck.  My game cannot progress anymore and so I'm leaving the game.

The lesson here for game designers is:  Always make sure that players can progress no matter what choices they've made.  It's alright to make the game harder if they take certain paths, just not impossible.  If you do, though, you should ALWAYS make sure that the player knows what the choices they make will mean for their gameplay.

I'll just lay this out:  Dead Rising 2 is awesome.  How's that for an unbiased and informative review?
* Combo Weapons - I can't overstate how fun these are.  From putting knives into boxing gloves to combining gems and flashlights to make lightsabers they are just awesome.  Many do unique things.  Add a machete to a toy helicopter and you can set it to hover with a blaring siren that attracts zombies into its whirling blades.  Drills + bucket gives you a one use instant kill for a huge XP bonus.  Whenever you enter an area it completely respawns, so you soon learn where the parts for your favorite items can be found.  You can experiment to find all the combos (it would take a LONG time) or they are revealed as you level, complete missions, or by examining objects in the environment.

* Killing Zombies - Really, this is obvious.  It's just plain fun no matter how many times you do it.

* The Clock is Ticking - The game takes place over 72 game hours (about 6 hours in real time not counting reloads.)  The story unfolds through events that take place at specific times.  When an event begins, Chuck has a certain amount of time to complete the event. Once completed, there's usually a period of time till the next story event.

* Weaving Stories - In addition to the main storyline, Chuck must find a dose of medicine for his daughter each day and give it to her within a one hour window.  Also, there are side missions popping up constantly, and each has a time attached before it will disappear.  You don't have to do any of them, but they give you a lot of XP and unlock new Combo Weapons or items.

* Little Touches - There are so many cool little things about this game.  You can actually play the slot machines. There's an entire crafting system around mixing different drinks together for effects.  The characters you run into are cool, funny, and sometimes complex.  The zombies have a wide range of appearances based on where they you find them.  If you throw the giant dice in the mall and they come up a 7 you win some XP. The list goes on and on.

* Co-op - you and your friend can play in each other's games to help out or just have fun.  Wow.

* Failing on purpose - This is a big one, and what I love most about the game, and what others may hate most about it.  The game is not just designed for replay value, it's designed specifically to be replayed.  You can start a brand new game and play through your 72 hours, muddling your way through, and hopefully complete the story and keep your daughter alive, but it would be pretty hard.  It's pretty likely that you would fail somewhere along the way.

Here's the thing, though.  If you fail to get your daughter the medicine or if you fail a story mission you are given a choice.  You can go back to the beginning of the timeline or you can keep playing.  Why would you keep playing after you've failed to protect your daughter or when you can no longer get new story missions?  Well, you get a different ending to the game, but that's minor.  Mostly because you can continue to gain levels and unlock things in the game, and this is important because when you eventually do reset to the beginning you get to KEEP EVERYTHING.  That's right.  If you are level 10 when decide to reset the game you start at the beginning, on the first mission, at level 10.  If you had $2 million dollars, you still have $2 million dollars.  You still have the key to the SUV parked in the outdoor mall that you can drive over hundreds of zombies at a time.  It's great!  So even if you fail you might want to keep playing to the end to do a bunch of side missions and rack up some levels.

This isn't as broken as it seems, though.  Leveling isn't as powerful as in other games.  Any particular level can give you another hit point or an inventory slot, which are very good but not godlike.  You might get an occasional increase in damage, but even that just means it might take a couple less hits to kill a boss.  Overall a level 20will have a much easier time at the game than a level 1, but will still have fun doing it and will still find plenty of challenges, especially in the boss fights.

The REALLY brilliant thing about this mechanic though is that if you want to be particularly clever you can lose on purpose to get a big advantage in the game overall.  Normally while playing the game you spend a good chunk of time working on the story missions.  Some of them just take a lot of time and some of them require a lot of preparation. It takes even more time if you're low level and you're constantly worried about getting taken out by zombies on the way to a story mission.  However, if you decide to dedicate a playthrough of the game to leveling and unlocking things, not only can you do so at a much more leisurely pace, but when you finish you can start all over again but from a much more advanced place not only in terms of character advancement but also of player knowledge.  You'll already know where you can get a leafblower or where the hidden Zombrex is.  You don't have to search for them.

If you're really dedicated you can do what I did, which was to get some items that increased my luck at gambling and then go play the slots to roll up a really big bank roll first thing in the game.  It's a surprising amount of work.  You have to go get the items (tough at low level) then clear out all the zombies near the highest paying slots and defend them against occasional newcomers all the while pulling the handle over and over and over and over.  Your weapons wear out eventually and you have to go get new ones.  If you leave the building, though, all the zombies respawn and you have to clear them again.  It took a while, but by the end I had enough to pretty much buy everything I will ever need in the game and a surprising number of levels under my belt.  I had long since lost the story missions, but had given Chuck's daughter the medicine so I played through the rest of the days doing side mission and unlocking things, saw my horrible ending, and restarted with a huge advantage the second time around.

The downside, of course, is that you have to be prepared to sink the time into the game to do this.  But the cool thing is you don't have to!  Play it however you want.  It's still going to be fun!

The bad things about the game:

* Surprises - some of the missions can surprise you and leave you unprepared to face them.  Then you have to reload a saved game and spend some time getting stuff together for them.  This can be really tough if your already under time pressure for that mission and now you have to go prep for it.  This isn't only for surprise fights.  Some missions are to fetch items and if you start them too late you'll never get them in time.

* Zombies - for 90% of the game the zombies are just fine.  But sometimes they can be annoying.  When I was at the slot machine, I cleared out every zombie in the area but regular as the seasons zombies would shamble over from the farthest reaches of the casino to attack me.

* Friendly Fire - Many weapons swing in wide arcs and they all damage NPC humans if they hit them.  This makes it really hard to kill a zombie that's latched onto the NPC you are supposed to be protecting, and is basically unnecessary.

That's about it.  This game is one of my all time favorites, just like Dead Rising was back in the day.  I highly recommend it to anyone who even thinks they might enjoy something like what I've described here.

Let's start things off by my giving you a list of the games I've played within the last week.  This should give you some idea of what I mean when I say I like games.  This was a pretty busy week, though, so results may not be typical.

Facebook: Fantasy University, Secret Plant Society, UNO Boost, Restaurant City, Frontierville, Mafia Wars, Mousehunt, City of Wonder, Treasure Abyss, Tyrant, Card Rivals (there are more but these are the ones I played daily)

Console: Lego Harry Potter

DSi: Super Scribblenaut

PC: Dead Rising 2, Civilization 5

IPhone: Cut the Rope, Moviecat, Scramble CE, Carcassonne, Qrank, Cookie Bonus Solitaire, Game Developer Story

Board Games: Dominion, Magic the Gathering, 7 Wonders, Word on the Street, and a couple games I'm designing

Whew.. busy week.

Hello!

This is my brand new blog!  As I am a professional game designer, it will be largely about game design.  I am planning to go on and on about this game or that game and about how I like the way this mechanic works and why I don't think this other one does.  I'll certainly do full reviews of some games, but for others I'll just focus on parts I find interesting.

My current day job is making Facebook games so there is bound to be a certain leaning of the content toward those games, but I play all kinds of games; board games, card games, console games, handheld games, IPhone games, PC games, MMOs... You name it, I'll probably talk about it.

I hope to entertain as well as expound, to be clever as well as categorical, and to be humorous as well as honest.

May you enjoy this as much as I will!