Posts Tagged ‘games’

First of all, all graphics in this post belongs to Zynga.com. The screen dumps are mine, but the game isn’t :p

Anyway…this is the newest game from Zynga. In Frontierville you start out with a small piece of land that is overgrown, and then it’s up to you to clean it up. There’s lots of weed and wild flowers to remove. Trees growing everywhere and along the way you encounter angry bears and rattlesnakes that you need to chase away.
What you see above is my homestead the way it looks right now. All the images in this post have a bigger version if you click on them. And if you’re not interested in this rant and the ins and outs of this game, you can always skip the entire post ;)
I won’t go into too much detail here since some surprises can be fun if you want to play this, but you start out as a single person, preparing the lot for your spouse to arrive.

While you build a cottage and clean up your lot, the game provides you with tasks to do to achieve this or that. Like most games today you can customize a lot of things, and your game characters are among those things. Currently I’ve got a couple who’s got a son, all of which I’ve had to finish different tasks to get. Building houses, buy trees, harvest and buy animals belong to those.

In “My Stuff” you will find what you see in the images above. “Gifts” will show what you received from your friends. “Family Album” is where you can change the look of your character/characters. “Inventory” is a drawer where gifts since earlier will appear, such as animals, trees, building material and energy. While you harvest and feed your and your neighbours animals, you will find things. They are rewards that belong in the “Collection” box. They are automatically placed where they should be and you’ll get a note on the screen when it’s time to trade them for coins and XP.

Just like most games, Frontierville has it’s own store. And this is where you can find anything you might need. The payment is both coins and “horse shoes”, and the later you can either collect while you play and level up (currently you’ll get 1 horse shoe for each time you level up), or you can buy them using FB credits. In most cases there are alternative decorations or whatever you might want to buy, and that you can pay with coins. In some cases, such as for fences, buildings etc. you will also need enough wood. And wood you’ll get when you clean up all the trees. In time more trees grow as well, so you will always have something to chop down :p

To buy energy you’ll use the pie slices that you earn while harvesting. The more of those you’ve got, the more energy you can buy. The game will generate more energy for you when you’re not playing it as well, so if you leave it for a couple of hour or so, the energy bar is full again :)

The tab Specials is where you’ll find limited items and things you might need to level up and finish the tasks. It’s easy to get carried away when you clean up in the beginning of the game and I’ve made the mistake to clean up a bit too much. So now I don’t have enough thorns to clean so I can finish a task that is currently under way. However, just like everything else that grows, thorns will turn up sooner or later, but it means that I have to leave some of the big trees alone. And I could buy the thorns I need, but I rarely spend any money on these games, so I rather wait.

To build a cottage or any of the other buildings you are sending and receiving building material. That’s partly what your neighbours are needed.
You can customize the buildings and each of them has it’s own purpose. You can collect Bonus from them and the pictures above show what you’ll see when you enter a building. Most of the things you can make inside any building has a purpose later on.
I just finished the school house today and so far there are no classes, but Zynga has announced that there will be lessons of some kind.

At your neighbours Homestead you can harvest, water and revive their crop. You can also harvest their fruit trees, clean up weed, wild flowers and trees. Or feed their animals. In return you get coins, XP and a heart for each thing you do. And you gather the hearts to build your reputation. The higher reputation, the bigger bonus will the neighbours get and in return you’ll get more coins. So it’s a win win situation ;)
And for 50 coins you can hire a neighbour to do work for you. In return your neighbour get the coins of course and if you’re lucky your neighbours will return the favour.

Overall this is a lot more fun than Farmville, maybe because the interactions are different. There are more things to do than just harvest and feed animals over and over again. Your lot will be overgrown unless you keep it tidy. The tasks generated by the game makes for different goals along the way and it’s just a very neat game :)
Simple as that.

By now we are all more or less aware of that sitting down too much and for too long is bad for us. It’s the dark side of any frequent computer users day that for each day we get more unhealthy by not moving around enough.

We even buy games that will put us into some sort of physical motion and to keep us away from the Land of Heart Attacks. As grown ups we are allowed to make our own choices. Choices that are more or less healthy since we all know what we should do and not do. The younger generation doesn’t have the same guidelines without us, and when a 10 year old has to stop and rest in the stairs, it’s bad. When physical activity has to be planned to be included in their spare time, it’s not normal. At least not by my generations standards.

I’m old enough to have grown up without computers and video games. We spent a lot of our free time outdoors, on our bikes usually in the summer time and in the winter it was skating and skiing. Or just simply roaming around in the snow. TV, which was the big thing when I was a kid, was limited between 5.30 PM and for a couple of hours in the evening. Other than that, we were always moving around doing something.

Maybe we have to sacrifice a couple of generations before these new times and ways of working and enjoying things around us can be dealt with in a way that also allow us to stay fit and healthy. Everything is great in moderation, but it’s not that easy to teach. To live by it pretty much means that you will find a Golden Path that includes a bit of all the activities you enjoy or need to do.

We are living in a time where the ideals are clashing with reality in a very harsh way. While fast food and take-outs are sneaking their way into people’s life very early, bundled up with hours of work and play sitting down in front of a computer screen, the messages that the fashion industry and media is sending are skinny characters on the red carpet. It’s like we all reached the top of the mountain where reality is further away from the ideals than ever before.

Personally I spend way too much time in front of the screen, sitting down. Work take it’s own space of course, but so does the fun bit. When the work day is over I usually paint in Photoshop. And that doesn’t take any moving around or standing up. If I had some balance in my day I would at least be standing in front of an easel instead of painting in Photoshop. Not that it includes a lot of exercise to paint on a canvas, but at least it would get my fat butt out of this chair for a few hours every day.

Now, I wish I could justify all those hour in this chair by saying that I also do baking, cooking, cleaning etc. The problem is that my baking adventures contains a lot of calories, which I will sit down and eat later. Sometimes even in front of the darn screen. And the cleaning is not enough to compensate for hours of sitting down.

It’s a problem. It really is. I could jog, but I hate it. I’ve tried to drag Robin out for a walk every day, but he dismissed the idea in an early stage and it never happened. And to walk by myself is no fun. Company makes a lot of things easier and we could both use a bit of moving around since he’s no better than me when it comes to this.
But it’s all about motivation.
And balance.

It makes me wonder where the next couple of generations will be when they reached my age.

Well, this should be the last “window” in our Advent Calendar if I was doing this according to the tradition that I grew up with, but we’ll see what happens tomorrow. I have barely slept during the night because of the left side of my upper body, so there might not be a game on Christmas Day, but more because I’m hurting like crazy than anything.

In any way, I started to put together tomorrows game yesterday, so with a bit of help from my friend who’s still snoring in the bedroom, it might be possible :)

Today’s game is similar to the ones I’ve posted lately. The only difference is that you need to put something together first. It’s kinda broken.
I hope you’re not still running around doing any shopping today. We won’t go anywhere today since we had more snow last night and it’s kinda icy out there.

Download is below and is approx.  5.7 mb in size.

Be good…and to my Swedish visitors – God Jul och Gott Nytt År!

Download: ChristmasEve

It’s December 23 today and in Sweden it’s the day before the Big Day. They celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day…which means that they have a longer holiday than the rest of us :p I celebrate on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. That’s the positive thing about having both old and new traditions :pp

Now…the game today was partly put together last night and this morning. Yesterday was spent partly in town, so I didn’t get a lot of time to do this during the day.

As usual, there’s a character there to help if you get stuck. Not that this is rocket science or anything, but it depends on how old you are I guess :)

Download is approx. 3.5 mb today. After this one there’s 2 more games, with the last one on Christmas Day.
I will be back laters :)

Download: CalendarTwentyThree

It’s a Winter Wonderland out there and we need to go into town today. Joys :p The car has nothing but summer tiers (of course) and hopefully they cleaned the road a tiny bit…or at least added some salt on the bigger road about a mile from us. We’ll see.

But that’s not what I was suppose to blog about at all. There’s a new game below and a new helper today. Santa’s original helper is busy helping Santa…heh…so we have a replacement for him.

File size today is approx. 2.4 mb to download. If any of you have downloaded and tried all of these games…or a few of them or something like that, I would appreciate some technical feedback a lot. Did it work? If not, what happened? Or what didn’t happen? What it looks like is less important since I’m trying to figure out how the games behave technically on other computers than my own.

So send me a line, either using the form in this blog (I think there is one anyway…otherwise you can always use croxie(at)gmail(dot)com) or you’ll find me on Twitter under @simplychrista. But poke me and let me know how the games work for you.
Now it’s time for me to get ready so we can go into town and fight with everyone else at the grocery store :pp

Have a great day :D

Download: CalendarTwentyTwo