Facebook is a treasure trove of casual, social gaming. Hundreds of games let you grow virtual crops, raise fake pets, pretend to be a mobster, play a little poker, and otherwise entertain yourself between bouts of actual productivity. This month we check out two entries in the virtual-work category, which involves setting tasks in motion and then coming back later to reap the rewards.
Zygna makes many of the most-played games on Facebook (like FarmVille, the insanely popular farming sim), and Café World follows the virtual-work formula. You manage a fledgling café, cooking up dishes, serving them to customers, and earning cash to spend on more ingredients and fresh decor to keep the patrons coming in. As you gain experience (Chef Points), you level up, making more dishes available. The social aspects involve visiting your friends’ cafés and leaving them tips, as well as sending gifts back and forth--after all, nothing says “I love you” like 100 servings of cheesecake.
Our Café World customers just love to eat dinosaur eggs.
Time marches on in the game whether or not you’re actually playing. If you don’t get those cheeseburgers off the stove when they’re ready, they’ll spoil, and you’ll have to start over. We wish the game wouldn’t prompt us to post to our Facebook wall so often and that Café Cash was easier to get without shelling out actual dollars. Still, plenty of fun can be had for free, and the cute animations keep us slaving away at our stoves.
Meteor Games’ Little Rock Pool is a virtual aquarium, but it uses the familiar “raise, harvest, and sell” model--you buy fish and plants for your pool, wait a certain number of hours, and then sell off the larger plants and “harvest” the fish for cash too. You use this money to purchase decorations for your pool, and as you gain experience points, more and more items become available. The only thing you need to worry about is your fish dying from lack of food--even when you’re not actually playing--but they can go a day or so between feedings just fine.
Feedin' the fishies in Little Rock Pool.
Your pool attracts debris (like tin cans and bike tires) that you need to clean out, and you can pop air bubbles for an extra experience point or drop in a pebble and watch your fish scatter. But on the whole, Little Rock Pool has a lot less to keep you busy than Café World. Side “quests,” such as finding a home for an exotic fish, absolutely require interaction from friends, which was a pain since none of our friends were playing and we declined to harass them into it. Meteor Games is a little less stingy with the in-game currency (Meteor Cash) than Zygna, but you’re definitely encouraged to shell out real dough for fake cash. We still had fun for free, thanks to the colorful fish and peaceful animations.
