Search the Gardens of Time on Facebook

It’s spring… a perfect time to think about gardens. But these Gardens of Time are much more than your backyard variety gardens. These are extravagant gardens you can build using artifacts bought with money made by completing quests and finding lost objects throughout different scenes in time, helping the Time Society to solve mysteries and correct the course of history. “Gardens of Time redefines the previously solitary experience of downloadable hidden object games by adding a variety of social features so players can share the excitement and challenge with their friends,” said Playdom’s Senior Producer for Gardens of Time, John Hsu. “We want to give players the opportunity to collaborate, compete, and show off their achievements.” Gardens of Time allows Hidden Object lovers the opportunity to share and collaborate with their friends, or soon to be friends. The content is free to play (always a favorite), and, though the game

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Featured Facebook Game of the Week – Where in the World is…

Carmen Sandiego? (I can hear Rockapella singing it now!) This is a game that I used to play on the computer when I worked in after school care with school age kids and watched on TV even before that. So when I saw it as a Facebook game, I felt that childlike excitement and couldn’t wait to get my mouse on it. The sentiment is the same, players take an active role as detectives hunting Carmen’s henchmen (and henchwomen) all over the world, testing and expanding geographical and cultural knowledge while putting deductive reasoning and perfect timing to the test putting clues together to get a warrant before actually finding the bad guy. Starting at the ACME headquarters in San Fransisco, players talk to witnesses in order to get information on either the identity of the henchperson or where they are headed next, get a warrant for the right one,

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Featured Facebook Game of the Week

I got word of a new sort of match 3 game that is sort of a mix of Pogo.com’s Poppit and PopCap’s Blitz series with added “strategy elements” to reel in and challenge players. It’s called Poseidon’s Realm. I have just started playing it and I am intrigued. The basic mechanism of the game is to pop bubbles and form lines of three or more (odd shapes or groups don’t count unless it’s a square) scoring as many points as possible in one minute. There are gems exchangeable for power ups, experience points, and novel abilities that add levels of complexity to the game. For instance, as bubbles pop, the ones below them float up to fill in the gaps. Well, the grid is on a sort of wheel, so players have the ability to turn the game 1/4 turn in either direction in order to change the flow of

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How Cute Can You Breed ‘Em?

IncrediLand is a unique Facebook game which allows you and your friends get into the business of breeding sweet, playful creatures called Incredimals, such as the “goofy Gambi”, the “zany Zorg”, and the “bold Boon”. Collect them all, raise them from an egg as they mature through adulthood, feeding them, caring for them, teaching them, and training them. You’ll want to reach into the computer and play with the Incredimals yourself! Then comes the really interesting (and fun) part. You and your friends can put your Incredimals in the breeding rooms together and create all new Incredimals! Part science, part business, you can also buy and trade eggs with your friends to help round out your collections and make more unique Incredimals. And to help you out, the makers of Incrediland have given us a special link for our readers to start you off with 200 incredicoins instead of the

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Social Gaming for Charity

I am always impressed with opportunities for gamers to give back while doing what they love, which is why I am so excited about this one. Plus, I might be a little biased working in the health care field, but it’s time once again to play for a good cause. Hospitopia is a new social game created by CausePlay, which allows players to create and run their own virtu-hospital while helping Children’s Miracle Network raise real money for children’s hospitals across the country. How does this work? Simply put, CausePlay will donate 10% of all game revenue to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. The money raised is donated across the network, but players will have the option to select a specific Children’s Miracle Network hospital to benefit by way of prizes and incentives from their game play. “With nearly 27% of the US population playing social games, the time felt right

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Invite Your Facebook Friends to Cooking Mama Friends Cafe

Majesco has paired up with social game developer Arkadium to test the social gaming waters with its first free-to-play social game, Cooking Mama Friends’ Cafe, for Facebook. In this latest incarnation of the popular franchise, Cooking Mama Friends’ Cafe is an all new experience that allows players to buy their ingredients, chop, mix, stir, fry, bake and pour to create more than 40 recipes including holiday ham, fried rice, and chicken parmigiana with infinite menu combinations, while managing customer service in an economy driven restaurant to earn coins and XP points for creating tasty food and serving up dishes. Players can also purchase special ingredients and decorations to customize kitchens with virtual and real dollars. The last hook is that players must return regularly and cook to maintain the business or their restaurants could be forced to shut down for good. “With domestic franchise sales of more than 8 million

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Zynga Takes Us to the City

Zynga, makers of some of the most popular social games on the market, FarmVille, FrontierVille and Mafia Wars, has now launched CityVille, their newest in line up of -Villes in which players con build their own dream cities from the ground up. CityVille contains features that ramp up the social aspect of the game, enabling players to interact with their friends’ cities and help each other build franchises. You can play CityVille (Beta) now on Facebook in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish! .

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Making Chocolate’s Not Just a Game Anymore

PlayFirst and award-winning artisan chocolatier Charles Chocolates have teamed up to bring to life an in-game exclusive recipe collection from Chocolatier®: Sweet Society. This partnership includes 5 of Charles Chocolate sweet delight recipes such as Jasmine Tea Truffle, Raspberry Heart Truffle, Milk Chocolate Peanut Butterfly, Toasted Almond Cluster and Classic Fleur de Sel Caramel. for players to unlock and make in the game – and then have them sent right to their door or as a gift to the recipient of their choice! “This marks the first time a digital good ‘made’ on Facebook can be transformed into a real-world item and signals an important milestone in merging the virtual and real worlds,” said Eric Hartness, Vice President and General Manager of social games at PlayFirst. “We think players will really enjoy converting their in-game sweets into scrumptious treats from Charles Chocolates.” “Charles Chocolates and Chocolatier: Sweet Society are both

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Are You a Pinball Wizard?

Sony Ericsson has brought Pinball back into the spotlight with their new Emusicon Pinball app on their Facebook page, allowing Facebookers to reminisce in the greatness of Pinball days and challenge their friends to a good old fashioned Pinball showdown on with a new look on a new platform. Emusicon Pinball is fun and easy to get started with. Choose a persona that best matches your personality, and launch away… make your friends spin for bonus points! It takes me back to my early days on Atari pinball, one of my all time favorites, and earliest addictions. I am excited to be playing it again. It brings the best parts of a Facebook game to light – competition, nostalgia, fun, and a quick escape from reality. I look forward to playing it more, and if you’d like to check it out, visit the Emusicon Pinball app anytime! Go on, spread

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First Look: Zuma Blitz

This year at Casual Connect Seattle, I was fortunate enough to sit down with some of the folks from PopCap and talk industry trends, social gaming in general, and more specifically, the much anticipated Zuma Blitz. Overall, it seemed like they were in sync with the opinion that there is and has been a pretty obvious shift in the casual gaming space toward social gaming, but still respect the notion that sometimes, we do still want to just sit down and enjoy a game without the pressure of beating each others’ scores or getting in all of our good moves in under a minute. So, there is talk of integrating social feature into their existing games, giving players the freedom of playing solo, or send some smack talk to their friends, getting into the competitive spirit. Having said that, the main topic of conversation was the upcoming speedy, completely social,

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