Funpark Friends Preview

Social games continue to pop up on the iPhone at a rapid pace, and the upcoming first release from Scotland-based developer Tagplay, Funpark Friends, looks to merge the standard social experience with a Rollercoaster Tycoon-style management sim. You can create parks of various themes, and the game will actually reward you for developing relationships with other players, as opposed to simply accumulating as many friends as possible.

Funpark Friends turns your iPhone or web browser into a social amusement park

Funpark Friends will task players with building up gigantic theme parks and populating them with all manner of rides, games, and shops. Themes also play a heavy role in the experience, letting players put a Western or pirate twist on the attractions the purchase and build. From the sounds of it, the game will allowmuch more robust customization compared to other social games.

As a social game, Funpark Friends of course lets you play along with your friends. But according to the developer the game “is not simply about who can accumulate the most friends…it is about developing strong in-game relationships with those friends too.”

Funpark Friends will be launching in Australia and New Zealand later this month, with a full international release expected in August. In addition to the mobile iOS version, the game will also be playable in a web browser.

Reviews
October 15, 2013
Type:Rider Review
By Joe Jasko
They say a picture can be worth a thousand words, but as I've learned already this week, a mobile game can sometimes speak for centuries. I have a long personal history with words and different types of fonts myself: after all, I read, write, and edit articles all day long here at Gamezebo, and then by night I take graduate courses about the publishing industry. So the idea of a Limbo-like mobile game that focused on the entire history of typography, and that let you play as two punctuation marks no doubt, seemed more than right up my alley. And luckily, writing fanatic or not, Type:Rider serves to provide one of the most whimsical and artistic adventures you're likely to ever experience on a mobile game device today.For such a relatively short game, the sheer amount of variety in Type:Rider is simply astounding, and each level serves as a wonderful visual homage to a different era in the history of typography. Throughout the course of your journey towards the modern day of typing, you'll experience the whirling mind work and ideas concurrent with the Didot period; you'll ride mine carts and dodge the bullets of a Wild Western shootout in the Clarendon era; you'll traverse an industrial world of grinding gears and churning typewriters by the time you get to Times New Roman; and you'll ski down the marvelous snowy white slopes in front of a blood-red sky during the Helvetica chapter."These are just a few of my many favorite moments throughout my Type:Rider adventure, and I was constantly amazed at every turn by how rich and engrossing the slight changes in scenery managed to be, and how the letters themselves were always incorporated into the platforming segments in fresh and exciting new ways. Although the bulk of Type:Rider is more about the experience, rather than the gameplay, you'll still be met with a few nice platforming sections and the occasional interactive puzzle or two: the latter of which are always extremely unique, and involve you getting a third white circle into a three-pronged ground slot, along with your two controllable punctuation marks.
News
March 11, 2014
Dong Nguyen, Flappy Bird creator, tells all to Rolling Stone
By Jim Squires
Few games or creators have ever managed to upset the status quo in the way Flappy Bird and Dong Nguyen did. The game skyrocketed to #1 with zero marketing, earned its creator hundreds of thousands of dollars, and disappeared from the App Store due to a sense of ethics and responsibility; the game was simply too addictive, its creator said.Asides from a few tweets and a whole lot of speculation, though, we've had little to go in in terms of what really happened with Flappy Bird - or to its creator Dong Nguyen. But now, thanks to an interview with Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, we have the whole story."If you have even the slightest bit of interest in the phenomenon that was Flappy Bird, you owe it to yourself to check out the whole article. That said, here are a few highlights of what we learned;