The Gaming Den

Who here plays any of the various games on Facebook? Vampire Wars is about the only thing I play with real regularity, since I've gotten bored with everything else. My only real irritations with it are the cliches (VAMPIRES VRS WEREWOLVES, GRR!!!) and that it's all about your Epeen, ie, number of fellow playing friends.

...so, really this is "doesn't it suck how these games we play are shittily designed, and who wants to help me manipulate that design shit?"

Castle Age, and to a lesser extent Mafia Wars and Vampire Wars.

Vampire Wars got stale there for a bit until they added more missions.

I can't even call them games, they're just websites with incentive to keep coming back.

I repurposed one of my facebook dummy accounts into a games account. It has dozens of friends, not one of which is a person I know in real life. Some of the games can be fairly entertaining, but are necessarily broken up by long wait times on the completion of actions/refreshing of action points and often stalled while waiting to hit the 20+ number of friends needed to progress.

door games, like the upcoming Heroes of Neverwinted in closed beta on facebook now; are just time wasters with mostly clicking the mouse the most and spending more money, "wins" the game.

a better online game than the ones on facebook would be "quest for idle", but i forget where to find it.

the old text games such as Barren Realms Elite, Legend of the Red Dragon, Falcon's Eye, prior to AOHell and NWN.0 were MUCH better door games.

you still had limited energy per day that regenerates at a time, but you didnt have this "spend money to be better" micro-economics involved in them. also they had more depth than most website door games today.

Sims seems close to the original game, but there never was much to that to begin with, and some other games seem close to RTS games, but the energy-driven micro economics of them take away form them being anything like Warcraft, Age of Empires, etc.

My brother has fun with Backyard Monsters. There's the usual method of bribing your way to victory, but the in-game currency can be acquired very slowly over time and most of its uses just let you do ordinary things faster. Just make sure you buy an extra worker ASAP.

I played Backyard Monsters awhile. The "get stomped by everyone else" period lasted way too long for me.

The only one I've played recently is Dragon Age: Legends. Unfortunately, it's gotten to the point where one combat has so many waves that it takes 20+ minutes to complete (compared to a minute or two at low levels). But on the bright side, it doesn't require a bunch of friends or "credits" or anything to play.

Oh man, bring back BBS door games. "The Pit" was hilarious.

Joke's on you, I don't even have a Facebook account.

Other than Scrabble or Words with Friends I'll cycle through a bunch of shitty FB games for ~10 minutes a day. For my door game-like fix I play Kingdom of Loathing.

I used to play a lot of those games. I went through the process of removing most of them. The only game i play these days is Jeopardy.

I'm into CityVille

And FarmVille

And when I'm in the mood, Zynga's Texas Holdem Poker Game

I play none of them. To play for free you have to harass your friends list and I've blocked all those games. I refuse to get involved.

I will go over to newgrounds and play flash games there that are far more entertaining and don't require me to spam my friends list endlessly.

I played castle age for a while, til I realized I had about 500 friends on facebook I didn't know for the sole purpose of castle age bonuses, and the constant spam was pissing my real friends off, so I eventually just blocked the app and cleared my friends list.

I do sometimes play Tetris Attack, but I don't think that really counts.

The solution is to make a dummy account for it. I was actually rather surprised to see more people don't do this. I can just plug my dummy account into those rings of strangers who friend each other just to get game bonuses and watch while a million people add me. And now that account's wall is filled with the personal details of people I've never met. It's kind of surreal.

The problem with that, Cham, is when you're level 200 something and don't want to have to work back up.

A great deal of those games seem to nominally work with just one friend, so I usually just used my dummy account for that.

I've tried a few including a Pokemon clone and Farmville, but ultimately hid and blocked them all.[/list]

Xpert Eleven is a really fun fantasy soccer manager game that can be played from or outside of facebook. It also doesn't spam up your feed with shit which is a major advantage.

I strongly suggest that if you want to play FB games you create a dummy account that doesn't have your name, then add friends who want to get spammed with the crap the games generate. I did that and had a lot of fun with them, and my friends weren't forced to look down on me with pity that I was wasting all my time on cartoon castles and trains.

The DnD Adventures were pretty nice. A good set of small encounters and challenges to steal for your games.

Actually, I'm really liking Words with Friends, but that's just scrabble

I was curious if anyone here has tried Heroes of Neverwinter yet, specifically in how closely it cleaves to 4e play. While a lot of classes/races/powers have been stripped from it, and things like healing surges have been removed, I got the impression that it does a decent job of emulating 4e skirmishes. This is not to say this is a laudable goal, and I got bored with it pretty quickly, but it was almost entertaining for 10 minutes.

Nebuchadnezzar wrote:I was curious if anyone here has tried Heroes of Neverwinter yet, specifically in how closely it cleaves to 4e play. While a lot of classes/races/powers have been stripped from it, and things like healing surges have been removed, I got the impression that it does a decent job of emulating 4e skirmishes. This is not to say this is a laudable goal, and I got bored with it pretty quickly, but it was almost entertaining for 10 minutes.

I've played it and I agree with your assessment: it's moderately similar to 4E -- similar enough that it also becomes boring after about 10 minutes.

completely agree with hogarth. If I ever get into the situation where I have to explain someone what is wrong with 4E (again) I'll just invite them to Heroes of Neverwinter.

I'll say: Here, play this. Except you'll have to imagine playing it without animations, not having a selection wheel but a load of action cards and notes instead, and either using smurf figures for monsters or spending a LOT on maps, monsters and tokens.