Gamezebo Archives - October 2011

Mafia Wars 2 is a Facebook game developed by Zynga that puts you in the shoes of a budding mafia kingpin. Gamezebo’s Mafia Wars 2 strategy guide and walkthrough will provide you with a quick start guide, tips and tricks, hints, and cheats to help you survive in the world of Mafia Wars 2.

Meteor Games' Serf Wars “updated” recently. For most games, an update means adding in a new game system or adding more items to a game's cash shop. For Serf Wars, the “update” makes the game so radically different that previous players will be asked to start building their kingdoms over from scratch. While Serf Wars is still basically a simplified medieval castle-building sim, the game's update expands the role of combat in the game dramatically. Overall game balance has also gotten tweaked for the better. You can now build a more interesting kingdom more quickly, with missions to guide your efforts.

When you stop and think about it, playing golf is a lot like shooting artillery. You have to consider factors like trajectory, firing power, wind speed, as well as hazards like livestock and suicidal groundskeepers. OK, maybe not that last part, but all of these are the types of things you have to account for in Worms Crazy Golf, a surprisingly clever and fun addition to the Worms franchise.

When you sit down and think about it, alot of the tropes we take for granted in video games are pretty ridiculous. Shopkeepers refuse to sell you anything until you accomplish some menial task for them, the King refuses an audience until you find some magical item, the guard won’t move out of your way to let you leave the area until you satisfy him, etc. We’ve been playing so long we just accept it. Well, Fara is here to not only make us do all those things, but let us know in the process how goofy that is.

Horizontal platformers have held some of my favorite games in the mobile space to date. Monster Dash from Halfbrick stands out as perhaps one of best. Now Super Bit Dash from FakePup has stepped up to the contestant table. With its mix of fantastic controls and almost endless appeal, this is one game you owe yourself to check out.

Boasting a slew of innovative and potentially amazing ideas, Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom combines aspects of real time strategy with that of the role-playing genre. Interesting though these concepts may be, they are far greater in theory than in practice, and though many elements of Majesty shine, they are often overshadowed by cumbersome usability issues and lack of control.

Sometimes you really want to love a game but just can’t bring yourself to do it. There can be many reasons for this. The game may look lovely, for instance, with 2D visuals that look hand drawn. Or it may give you a giant world to explore full of all sorts of strange and unexpected surprises. It might even offer a lot of social features to encourage you to play with others. Glitch does all of these things and they definitely make it a title worth checking out. But at the same time, the moment to moment gameplay can be quite dull, which makes Glitch a game that’s easy to like but hard to love.

With games like It Girl and Top Girl, CrowdStar certainly knows what it's doing when it comes to more casual social games. But Wasteland Empires is something totally different. Aimed at the burgeoning mid-core demographic on Facebook, the game puts you in control of a fledgling settlement in the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic world. You'll be carving out a life in a world full of death, not only by building up a suitable colony, but by defending yourself in player versus player combat. Life is hard in Wasteland Empires.

Card games have been around the Internet a long time, and Facebook is no exception. Now social developer RockYou is looking to add its version of poker to the digital pot with Hooked. While Texas Hold’Em games such as Zynga Poker and Playdom’s WSOP Poker have been around for a long time, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for change. Hooked takes the basics of the popular card game and shifts them into a sort of arcade-style app, tasking users with making as many hands as they can in the time allowed.

Randomly-generated gaming content is seeing a real boom as of late, with numerous indie-developed titles churning out the replay value by allowing the game to be different every time you play it. Sometimes it can unfortunately dilute the overall experience, and other times - such as with roguelike The Binding of Isaac - it can make the game infinitely playable.

When the title Zombie Parkour Runner for the iPhone came across the desk, the look given was questioning. Considering parkour, or free running, is far from easy, the concept of the undead doing seemed a bit odd. When it was learned that it was an automatically side scrolling platformer that just had zombies in it, the expectations were lowered further. However, Zombie Parkour Runner has proven to be one of the most fun iOS platforming games on the market, using simple taps and timing to do incredibly awesome things.

Endless survival games are a dime a dozen on the iPhone nowadays, but when a developer gets one right, it can be magic. Just look at games like Jetpack Joyride or Tiny Wings to see what I mean. Whale Trail is the latest title to offer a similarly sublime survival experience, and it seems to do so with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek.

We all know most robots have one thing on their minds. No, not hunting down oil for their mechanical joints or plotting to overthrow humanity. In Robot5 HD, all one robot wants to do is climb a mountain of boxes—that, and achieve psychological development through self-actualization. Nothing out of the ordinary.

With this third installment in the fantastic Drawn series, Big Fish continues to set the standard that all other puzzle/adventure games should aspire to. In Trail of Shadows, you meet a grandfather figure speaking to a young girl named Iris. Through his bedtime story, we learn of a young boy with the power to bring his paintings to life. One painting however, was better left in the boy’s imagination, as it unleashes a terrible wizard that draws the boy inside and traps him there, ruining the rest of the boy’s painted worlds along the way.

Hello again, fellow Gamezebo readers. I'm Tomas Rawlings, the designer of the new upcoming Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, a role-playing/strategy game set in the midst of World War I. It’s based on the classic, multi-award winning paper role playing game of the same name, which coincidently this year celebrated its 30th anniversary.

Camp Magic is a simulation city building game from Moga Studios. Using your magical abilities, you need to build a kingdom all your own. Building a kingdom isn’t all that easy but with Gamezebo’s quick start guide you’ll have all the tips, tricks and walkthroughs you’ll need to get your kingdom going in no time.

Hollywood needs to either stop making tie-in games for its movies, or it needs to step things up. A lot. There are a lot of great films that get crummy-to-mediocre adaptations, designed to nab as much money as possible with a minimal amount of effort. The latest example of this is In Time for the iPhone, which is so mediocre that it almost feels remarkable.

If you’ve ever been to your nearest casino, you’ll immediately feel at home in King Cashing: Slots Adventure. The game has a lot in common with your average slot machine, and adds a dash of RPG elements to spice up the experience. While King Cashing isn’t the deepest game out there in the mobile space, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth in this adventure.

Augmented reality games have offered a neat blending of the real and fictitious since their inception a few years back, but thanks to the release of some new software by Total Immersion, AR game designers can blur that line between fiction and reality right on your face. Literally.

With Idle Worship, the developers at Idle Games are attempting something rather ambitious, creating what they describe as the first truly social game on Facebook. Though the game hasn't even launched its open beta yet, it's already gathering plenty of buzz, including being the only game featured at this year's Tech Crunch Disrupt conference. And a unique and creative game needs an appropriate work space, so we decided to take a look at where Idle Games does its thing in the latest edition of Gamezebo Cribs.