Facebook Socialite

It’s funny that Facebook is considered a social site.  For sure, it gives you a chance to interact with your friends and family, leaving messages or playing games with them.

It’s not so bad at first.  People write on your “wall” and you answer back.  Then you start getting “requests.” 

Your auntie, for instance, may be  collecting Rainbow Brite pictures from a Facebook application.  The way it works is that your auntie sends a request to people on her friends list and then those people may or may not, send one back to Auntie.  If they do, she gets more Rainbow Brite characters and, the more people that send them, the quicker she builds up her collection.

You may not give a hoot about Rainbow Brite but since your Aunt does, you go ahead with it.  Then, more and more of your friends get into it and you end up with more and requests. 

Eventually you start getting requests for different games.  People want you to join their mafia, army, dragons weir, or whatever.  Simple games where you basically just need to click on one button over and over until you run out of energy, fatigue, magic, or whatever.  These games give you an option of sending a free “gift” that will help your friends.  You’re getting a lot of them so you feel obligated to send some back.

Then there are the Flash based games.  You suddenly find yourself drawn into games where you take care of your pets, fish tanks, restaurants, gardens, and farms.  And these games are set up so that if you don’t keep a constant eye on them you’ll lose something, usually in-game credits.

For example, in Farmville, you need to plant crops.  If they grow and you don’t harvest them in time they wither away and die.  Different crops take different amounts of time to grow.  There’s about two dozen different farming games on Facebook right now so if you find yourself playing more than one then you have a lot to start keeping straight. 

You may find yourself figuring out schedules.  You can’t cook a pot roast in Cafe World now, because you’ll be asleep by the time it’s cooked.  Or you can’t go out after work with your co-workers because your eggplant will wither.  And do you go to that meeting or do you feed your fish, who are about to go belly up?

You find yourself being more of a slave to a hundred Facebook applications rather than interacting with people on Facebook.  Maybe even putting of real world events for the sake of your digital produce.

It begins to get not too social at that point; neither online nor off. 

Facebook Games VS Linux

Since I did a really good job of screwing up my Windows XP installation (that is, I killed it by accident) I’ve been spending a lot of time using Linux (Gentoo) and KDE 4.3. I love it, but there are a few problems that one can run into now and again.

Facebook games, for instance, are a crap shoot. Some will work fine and others are not so fine. Since I can’t do anything about this directly I thought I would do the next best thing: bitch about it on a blog and hope someone that can fix it will.

So here is my list of Facebook games that I use with Linux.

I’ll mention that I use Firefox 3.5.2 and Flash 10.0.32.18, which is the latest I can get with Gentoo.

• Restaurant City (Playfish) – I’ve never been able to get into this one. I always get a message saying that it’s unable to make a connection to Restaurant City. I get this often on Windows, too, but it’s a constant on Linux.
• Crazy Planets (Playfish) – This one always gets stuck at 10% on the loading screen.
• YoVille (Zynga) – It looks like Zynga fixed the problem where you couldn’t click on the game thing. Or I just managed to skip it. In any case, it looks like YoVille is now working. Wait, I take that back. The inventory screen only shows the first item in your inventory. Still, not too bad.
• Farm Town (Slashkey) – Farm Town has some display issues but that’s common with Windows, too. The only problem that I can see with Farm Town is that there are no scroll bars in the store so you can only see the stuff that’s on top. This is a minor issue until you really want something that you can’t get to.
• Farmville (Zynga) – Seems to work just fine. I haven’t seen any problem yet.
• Pet Society (Playfish) – Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Again, this is also something that happens in Windows. When PS is working in Linux it works fine.
• BeJeweled Blitz (PopCap) – As addictive as crack, Bejeweled Blitz works great with Linux. Which is unfortunate because it’s such a time sink.
• Farkle (Viral Games) – Farkle works fine. I think it cheats, but it works.
• My City (????) – This one works in Classic View. Silverlight might work with Moonlight, but I can’t be bothered to install it. The only problem I see with this one is that there doesn’t seem to be a point to it.
• Pathwords (Zynga) – Works fine. I just suck.
• Geo Challenge (Playfish) – Hmmm. Maybe Playfish has a problem with their network code that doesn’t work too well with Linux. Same problem as Restaurant City in that it can’t establish a connection.
• Word Challenge (Playfish) – Unable to establish a connection. I’m seeing a pattern here.
• Bowling Buddies (Playfish) – Same.
• Word Whomp Derby (Pogo) – Works great. No problems.
• Minigolf Party (Playfish) – Yep, won’t establish a connection. I see a common thread here.
• Uno (Gamehouse) – First, I think it’s great that this card game is on Facebook. Also, I think GH did a great job with it. It also works great.
• Kidnap! (Travel Channel) – Works fine.
• Pirates, Mob Wars, Mafia, etc – All the ones that you just click on stuff work fine, but that shouldn’t be too surprising.

It would be nice if the rest of the world would start realizing that more and more people are using an operating system other Windows. While I’m not a huge fan of Apple, I do like diversity so Playfish, Adobe, and others should do a better job of checking their stuff against other OS’s.

A Small Update

     It’s been a little while since I’ve posted an update.  My life is a little on the chaotic side at the moment.  Problems, problems, problems.

     What you can expect in the future (hopefully this weekend):

• Review of the Vanilla Milkshake flavored Pop-Tarts
• Review of the Facebook game, Tower Bloxx
• Review of the Facebook game GeoChallenge

     I’ll also try and mention Pet Society more because it’s getting me tons of hits.  That shouldn’t mean anything to anyone but me, since I don’t have advertising on my site.  But I still like to think people find the place worthwhile to visit.

     Speaking of Pet Society, as I mentioned before the stadium is open.  You can race against your friends (if you can find them in the game) in a hurdle competition.  You have to jump over hurdles, clear your path of banana peels, and use “speed pads” to seemingly gain a speed boost. 

     I’ll tell you right now that the game cheats.  A racer behind you will speed by you with no problems at all, sometimes, even if you use the speed pad.  And sometimes you don’t jump too well.  And sometimes you just get screwed.  But it’s still a good way to get extra cash and points, even if you don’t win every race.

     The cafe is still not open and everything else is more or less the same.  Playfish is supposed to be adding 10 more ranks, though.  If you’re stuck at level 23 you won’t be for long.

 

Pet Society

For any of you folks looking for Pet Society news, the Stadium is now open.

I had hoped this would be where you could get pets to fight to the death for glory and money, but it isn’t.

Booger & The Dr Pepper

     I got my bottle of Dr Pepper this morning.  Checking the cap, I saw that it was a winner so I hurriedly plugged the code into the website.  I wondered if I were going to win another screen saver?  Maybe the same wallpaper I’ve already won?  Would it be a ringtone I couldn’t use?

     No!  None of those things.  I won a Dr Pepper keychain!  Now I have to wait ten to twelve weeks to get the thing.  Sheesh!  I want it now!

 

    For anyone interested, my Pet Society pet, Booger, has hit upon some sad financial times.  He sure could use your help, if you were so inclined.  Could you let this poor dog bear animal live on the street with nothing more than a tin can, a tire, and a rubber ducky?

     It looks like Playfish has a new game out now, too, called GeoChallenge.  I’ll have to take an in-depth look at that one, too, pretty soon.

Facebook Games Review III: Pathwords

     Pathwords is one of those games that’s great if you have a good vocabulary and a pretty good eye.  It also helps if you’re playing with friends that don’t have a good vocabulary or good eyes.

     When Pathwords starts up you’re greeted by a hexagonal grid that’s covered in letters.  The object is to start on a letter by clicking on it and then dragging your mouse over the other letters until you form a word.  The letters you have selected are also reflected on the bottom of the screen and are colored red, if you don’t have a valid word, or green if you do.  When you release the mouse then the tiles you used are destroyed and new blocks fall to take their places.  It’s a timed game, too, so you have five minutes to find as many words as possible. 

     Overall it’s a pretty good game.  There’s nothing spectacular about it.  Really, it’s quite utilitarian.  I

can’t recommend playing it on a laptop with a touchpad, though.  Sometimes the cursor can go all over the place and you end up trying to spell a word just to get gobbeldygook out of it.

     Like most Facebook games, Pathwords keeps track of your score and taunts your other playing friends with how great you are. 

     There is some strategy that comes into play.  If you see a big word coming up but you can’t quite get to it yet then you will need to settle on lesser words to let the other letters fall into place until you can get your big word complete.

     So, grab your dictionary and try it out for some interesting times.