Games.com Blog: “Over 60% of Gamers Purchase Virtual Goods- Do you buy farm cash?” plus 15 more |  |
- Over 60% of Gamers Purchase Virtual Goods- Do you buy farm cash?
- Happy Pets: New Premium Pet Mystery Box
- Happy Pets: Own a Chocolate Bunny, Easter Dog and Cat
- Happy Aquarium: Updates to Spring items, plus Easter decor
- Bejeweled Blitz: Last chance to swap gems for a free Mazda
- Happy Aquarium: Limited Edition Pearl Idol
- Cafe World sign points to a mysterious expansion
- Restautant City: Round-up Links to all 6 Fan Freebies
- Pet Society: New Diary feature reveals depth of addiction
- Pet Society: The Green Eggfish has a Sweet Tooth
- Mafia Wars robbing: Everything you need to know
- 'Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition' en route to Facebook
- Mafia Wars 10 Million Fan Appreciation Event, March 30-31
- FarmVille Cheats & Tips: FarmVille Maison materials quick links
- FarmVille Easter egg & Spring Basket glitch
- FarmVille 3 Spring Eggs possible spybot/virus: RUMOR
| Over 60% of Gamers Purchase Virtual Goods- Do you buy farm cash? Posted: 29 Mar 2010 03:43 PM PDT In an article published today on Joystiq.com a survey found that over 88% of gamers have purchased online virtual goods. According to the article by Richard Mitchell, "88 percent of gamers have purchased digital content over the last several years. The study was conducted by market research firm DFC Intelligence using a survey of 5000 gamers from the US and Europe during the first two months of 2010. The study also looked at data from several different countries -- including South Korea, the U.S., Japan, Germany, Vietnam and the Philippines -- gathered over the last seven years." (Source: Joystiq ) "60 percent of those surveyed have purchased in-game items, most of which were offered as part of free-to-play games." (Source: Joystiq )Typically, there are two types of FarmVille farmers, those that feel strongly about not buying any farm cash at all and others who have purchased farm cash or do not mind those who do. FarmVille Freaks, how do you feel about purchasing farm cash? Please vote below! To vote go to http://www.FarmVilleFreak.com This article first appeard on: http://www.FarmVilleFreak.com
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| Happy Pets: New Premium Pet Mystery Box Posted: 29 Mar 2010 11:00 AM PDT  Here are the things you must keep in mind though, before you buy a box: - Your Premium Pet Box will count as 1 pet in your room - You must have enough space in your room prior to purchasing a Premium Pet Box - You must also have enough space in your room before opening a Premium Pet Box Like all good things, the new Premium Pet Box has its downsides. If you look at the store, something like the common Green Turtle costs 18 FB Credits, and folks who are hoping to grab a "Mythic Rare" (discontinued pets) or "Mutants" (pets with special coloring and patterns), might find themselves saddled with a bunch of Commons (turtle, pig, duck, hamster, parrot) from the "Other" section of the Happy Pets store. And if you want to talk about guarantees, the higher chance of getting a bunch of Commons, even while breaking even, is still enough to piss off many players.
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| Happy Pets: Own a Chocolate Bunny, Easter Dog and Cat Posted: 29 Mar 2010 10:30 AM PDT  And while the pastel color scheme of blue-green, pink, and yellow on Easter Dalmatian and Easter Cat makes 'em look like they belong with the Psychedelic Pets instead, the coloration of the Chocolate Bunny is right on target for Easter. Related: Ultimate Easter Guide for FarmVille, Mafia Wars and more
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| Happy Aquarium: Updates to Spring items, plus Easter decor Posted: 29 Mar 2010 10:00 AM PDT Happy Aquarium's Spring-themed items set has just gotten more fun with several new Easter-themed additions:    Related: Ultimate Easter Guide for FarmVille, Mafia Wars and more
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| Bejeweled Blitz: Last chance to swap gems for a free Mazda Posted: 29 Mar 2010 09:00 AM PDT  If your parents/friends/significant other ever told you that your frenetic gem-swapping skills in Bejeweled Blitz would never come in handy -- this is one time they might be wrong. Bejeweled Blitz is holding a contest to give away a Mazda to a lucky winner, and your chance to win is coming to a close at the end of today. If you want to sign up, load the game on Facebook and click the pink 'Sign Me Up!' button underneath the game, which will prompt you to submit your email.  Essentially, you and your team of friends' scores have to reach a certain number assigned automatically, and once you do -- your names will be entered into a random drawing for the car. So, driving away in this Mazda is pretty much a crap shoot, but it doesn't hurt to enter and give your luck (combined with your killer Bejeweling skills) a test drive.  Did you sign up for the Bejeweled Blitz contest to win a Mazda?
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| Happy Aquarium: Limited Edition Pearl Idol Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:30 AM PDT  
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| Cafe World sign points to a mysterious expansion Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:00 AM PDT  Looks like Cafe World will be undergoing some kind of expansion, as we discovered the lot across from our cafe looks like it's under construction. Not sure if we'll be able to see our neighbor's cafes outside of our own, or if we'll be able to own more than one restaurant at a time. Actually, the ability to own a series of restaurant could be rather interesting, especially for upper level players who might be running out of steam. We're not sure when said expansion will take place, but since there's a scheduled outage for the Cafe World later this evening, it might be coming sooner than we think. What do you think about the idea of owning more than one cafe?
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| Restautant City: Round-up Links to all 6 Fan Freebies Posted: 29 Mar 2010 08:00 AM PDT  Restaurant City has been posting links to free ingredients, coins and items to fans on their official Facebook page all over the weekend and a day. To make it easier for everyone, we've rounded up all the links to the latest fan freebie offers here (in order of oldest to newest since the offers are time-sensitive): Note: All links below will launch the game. FREE Chicken: http://playfi.sh/bGYPRA FREE Chili: http://playfi.sh/d9EBNp FREE 500 Coins: playfi.sh/9ZW54k FREE Chocolate Bunny: playfi.sh/94VadH FREE Orange: playfi.sh/bs5nbD FREE Cheese: playfi.sh/9f5X7N FYI, there's also the FREE Blobian (a UFO decor item that looks like an alien green blob) but many fans, including ourselves, have noticed an "invalid item" error when trying to grab it.
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| Pet Society: New Diary feature reveals depth of addiction Posted: 29 Mar 2010 06:30 AM PDT  As with many of the game's new features, there are some kinks to be worked out. Many players have reported errors in gender and birth date. Sushi's own diary shows the correct birthday but wrong gender. He is technically a boy, even though I like to dress him in girls' clothing and make him kiss other cute boys.  Most surprising, however, is the last item called "Times We've Hung Out." I assume this means the number of times I've logged into the game. When I saw this number, it was like a splash of cold water on my face. I had not realized how much of an addict I was until I saw the large number. I'm too embarrassed to reveal how many times I've "hung out" with Sushi in the past year and a half, but I will say that it's probably way more than the times I've played with my real pet, or hung out with my real friends, or showed up for work.THANK the Holy Rainbow Poo God that other people can't see this diary. Just like a real diary, this is meant to be for your eyes only. But of course, the staff at Playfish who've been compiling all this data, can see it too. How to See Your Pet Society Diary Go to the bottom of your screen and click on the Books tab. The diary is the first book from the left. This article originally appeared on Pet Society Anonymous.
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| Pet Society: The Green Eggfish has a Sweet Tooth Posted: 29 Mar 2010 06:00 AM PDT  This article originally appeared on Pet Society Anonymous. Related: Ultimate Easter Guide for FarmVille, Mafia Wars and more
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| Mafia Wars robbing: Everything you need to know Posted: 29 Mar 2010 06:00 AM PDT  Mafia Wars' new feature, Robbing, has just been released but I had quite some time to play with this new feature and learn everything about it so that now I can offer you a complete guide to robbing in Mafia Wars. So if you're interested to know more, keep reading. What is Mafia Wars Robbing? It is a new feature introduced by Zynga, the game's developers, in which they allow you to spend your stamina points to steal from other Mafia Wars players. If you succeed, you gain experience and money and some mastery for this new feature. How does the Mafia Wars Robbing work? Every time you click the Fight button, if in New York, you will be taken to the robbing page. There you'll see a set of properties you can try to attack: each of them with a marking regarding the difficulty: easy, medium and hard. This basically tells you how big are your chances of succeeding (so you should aim for the "easy" jobs). Every time you click the button to rob a property, you will use some stamina, depending on the size of the property you're aiming at, and you'll be told if you succeeded or not. If yes, you'll receive some sweet rewards, a mastery bonus and some experience. How to always win in Mafia Wars Robbing? Basically, as in fights, you need to have a bigger and stronger Mafia than your opponents and/or a better attack skill than the opponents' defense. You can also purchase boosts from the inventory panel to help you with the process and the general rule of thumb is to always aim for the easy jobs instead of the more difficult ones. Also, have in mind that the amount of Mafia you can use depends on the property you're attacking. So it's always great to have a powerful Mafia, not just a large one! What are the Robbing Mastery levels? Whenever you succeed a mission, you get a mastery bonus. There are 10 levels of mastery you can achieve and each level gives you more experience in return for successful robbing. It is unknown at the moment if higher levels give you other goodies too. All in all, this new Mafia Wars feature is a really cool one and adds some extra stuff to do for those who were tired of classic fighting. It's also hard to master and it takes a while to complete it, so the more experienced players will certainly have some extra things to do and not get bored with the game! What's your opinion on this new feature? This article originally appeared on Social Games Help.
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| 'Secret of Monkey Island Special Edition' en route to Facebook Posted: 29 Mar 2010 05:30 AM PDT  InstantAction (IA), a Web-based games site with the promise of "Real PC gaming in your browser," has the ambitious project of attracting 'core' gamers to Facebook, or to Web games at large. But at the same time, they want to decentralize social gaming, and take away its reliance on social networks by using a distribution method that -- pardon the pun -- expects to be a real game-changer to how games are played online.For most life-long gamers, the real attention-grabber is a game that IA's put in the seat of their new vehicle -- and that's bringing "The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition" to Facebook. First released in 1990, The Secret of Monkey Island is a highly quotable, cult classic adventure game that was remastered and re-released last year, as a "Special Edition," by LucasArts. Originally a PC game, it's so beloved that it's also sold on Xbox Live Arcade, and for the iPhone/iPod Touch. I was saw the game at PAX East this weekend, and it definitely looks better than the XBLA release (which was compromised due to compressed visual and audio). IA's plans to launch The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition as a 20-minute demo on Facebook for free, and the full version for $9.99, which is a reasonable deal once you understand the scope of this launch... ...because IA has developed a distribution method similar to YouTube's 'embed' option. Using the embed feature means that you can play any game published by IA, anywhere and anytime on the web. You can stick the game on your Web site or on a blog post. You won't have to log into Facebook, or even IA, to play their games. And you purportedly won't have to wait for long downloads. This works because all your save states and gaming profile will be hosted by IA, which dramatically increases the game's online portability. The other feature that's being offered is something similar to Facebook's Games Hub where you can see when your friends last played a game, or are "currently playing." But IA offers even more detailed info, such as in-game screenshots of everyone's progress. This is a controversial move, but IA recognizes the need for privacy and assured me that they intend to go with highly customizable privacy settings, something that Facebook has yet to implement for their games hub. Now, the flipside to all this is that, aside from the friends tracking feature, The Secret of Monkey Island on Facebook is going to remain a single-player experience. IA doesn't care to woo the typical Facebook demographic, and they're not taking advantage of the social networks on Facebook, which everyone feels is part and parcel of the social games boom. At the same time, IA claims they're doing this to increase gamers' sense of community by providing a deeper narrative experience. There's already plenty of criticism from players and developers that social games are not as social as they seem, and there are those who try to defend social games from the core or how casual can be core in its own way. Or that even, social gaming isn't sustainable, developers will move beyond Facebook, and these games will eventually evolve into something different. Obviously, this is a really divisive topic in the gaming community, and IA's innovation is clearly a response to that. Now, I can speculate how the game embed feature might be the forefront of the next great change for online games, but history is still much being written at this stage, so I'd rather fork over my 10 bucks to IA for their well-done release, and tell you to give The Secret of Monkey Island a try.
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| Mafia Wars 10 Million Fan Appreciation Event, March 30-31 Posted: 29 Mar 2010 04:00 AM PDT  In honor of reaching 10 million fans on Facebook, Mafia Wars will be giving away a few tokens of their appreciation starting March 30 (12:01 a.m. PST) to March 31 (11:59 PST). For 48 hours, Mafia Wars Facebook fans will be able to the following: * Double mastery in all cities (New York, Cuba, Moscow and Bangkok) * All fights will produce 25% more experience * Everyone who plays during this even will receive a limited edition item called the 'Heavy Hand' To stay informed about this event (which seems like will be a great way to get a leg up in the game), hit up the official Mafia Wars Facebook page, and -- if you're not a fan already - click the button at the top that says 'Become A Fan,' which will allow you to stay abreast this event and all other official Mafia Wars updates. We'll bring you the stats for the new Heavy Hand shotgun as soon as they are available.
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| FarmVille Cheats & Tips: FarmVille Maison materials quick links Posted: 29 Mar 2010 01:30 AM PDT Many virtual farmers been running into this problem where friends request certain material for the FarmVille Maison, but don't have access to the requested items in their Free Gifts selection. That's where these FarmVille Maison quick links will come in handy.
To send any of these items to your fellow FarmVille-ians, simply click on the image of the item you want to send, and that will automatically pop a page that will let you select whom you want to send the item to. Once your selection is made, hit send and, voila, you've done your good farmer-ly deed for the day. [Via FarmVille Freak} Did you find these links useful?
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| FarmVille Easter egg & Spring Basket glitch Posted: 29 Mar 2010 01:00 AM PDT  While FarmVille Freak Melissa T. was redeeming prizes from her Spring Basket, a glitch occurred that showed she had collected a total of 4,294,267,282 Spring Eggs! That's 4.3 billion Spring Eggs!!! The glitch then caused an out of sync error and the count returned to normal. She was not able to use any of the billion eggs to redeem for prizes. Says Melissa, "Hello farmgoddess, I was redeeming prizes from my basket tonight when my basket said I had WAY more eggs than I should. I promptly got an out of sync message but I got a print screen before it reloaded. Thanks, Melissa T" How many FarmVille Spring Eggs have you collected? This article originally appeared on FarmVille Freak. Related: Ultimate Easter Guide for FarmVille, Mafia Wars and more
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| FarmVille 3 Spring Eggs possible spybot/virus: RUMOR Posted: 29 Mar 2010 12:00 AM PDT UPDATE: After investigating some external links provided on Facebook newsfeed, from our experience none of them contained viruses. We cannot confirm that any of these links themselves caused a virus. Of course it is a possibility that could happen, but we believe this is a rumor that is 100% NOT true. Some FarmVille Freak users have reported that after clicking on a Facebook newsfeed of what they thought was a link to the 3 Spring Eggs Gifting, it turned out to be a virus, not related to FarmVille. These links were re-post "ads" provided by other Facebook users, not affiliated with FarmVille. Our intention of posting this on FarmVille Freak is to inform you and bring awareness that there could be a possible virus with malicious parties posting fake links. We are NOT confirming this rumor as true and are waiting on an official Zynga response. The important thing to remember, is to please be wary of any links that you click on especially by those provided by non-FarmVille related group pages. Do not install any unknown applications after clicking on links. Not all the 3 Spring Eggs links contain viruses, the ones that originate from FarmVille are legitimate links to the Gifting Page. Legitimate FarmVille links should begin like this: http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/gifts* Note: This possible virus is NOT associated with the 3 Spring Eggs links that we posted on FarmVille Freak earlier this week. FarmVille 3 Egg Links: 3 Blue Spring Eggs http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/gifts_send.php?gift=easter_item_06 3 Orange Spring Eggs http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/gifts_send.php?gift=easter_item_07 3 Pink Spring Eggs http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/gifts_send.php?gift=easter_item_08 3 Purple Spring Eggs http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/gifts_send.php?gift=easter_item_09 3 Red Spring Eggs http://apps.facebook.com/onthefarm/gifts_send.php?gift=easter_item_10  Here is an explanation of the bad 3 Spring Eggs links as experienced by FarmVille Freak William, "Good Evening, Last night, my wife and I were playing FarmVille. She clicked on a post that advertised that you can send three Spring eggs at a time. When she clicked on it, my computer froze and I lost internet connectivity. After running SpyBot, it found several instances of spyware (FunWeb Products) associated with the spring egg application. SpyBot easily removed the worm and I was able to resume farming. Sending FarmVille 3 Blue Spring Eggs on Facebook (Click to Enlarge) The curious thing is this. The application author is Rawand Bradosty. When the request finds itself in your request page, it passes itself off as being from FarmVille. When you try to block the application, a warning will pop up and ask you if you want to block FarmVille. So there is no definitive way to block the thing. Perhaps you might want to warn your users to this. FarmVille 3 Blue Spring Eggs on Facebook (Click to Enlarge) - FarmVille Freak William" --- from FarmVille Freak Calyr Elf: "The application author is Rawand. Rawand did not create any application. He just posted links that used the FV application. It is not a new application.If you look at the links he posted, you will see they come from FV. The guy is being villified simply for posting FV links......people are going crazy with all kinds of weird talk. I even heard people make up wild tales about him. He's just a guy that was trying to do a nice thing for everyone, and people go nuts....sheesh. Let me repeat....he did not create an application. He merely posted links to a FV app. Now.....on the other hand. If you get 3 spring eggs and it does not take you IMMEDIATELY to the spring eggs section, after you click on it. If instead it takes you to a page asking you to install a new app, THEN IT IS FAKE. But that's not what is happening to the vast majority of people who are crying fake. Most people are simply using the real genuine FV app, but they fear it is fake. I have a feeling that FV is going to avoid this problem in the future by NEVER making something available for the newbies, and that's a shame. But I digress.... NEVER agree to install a new app....you never need to do so with FV. Once you install the FV app, that's it.....you don't need to install others to make something from FV work. (at least not at present, and FV would certainly make plenty of announcements if they did in future.) Just DON'T INSTALL MORE APPS! BE SAFE!" What do you think? Did you encounter any problems using 3 Eggs Links? Related: Ultimate Easter Guide for FarmVille, Mafia Wars and more
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