Everything's gone digital. Long-playing records are now mp3 files, movies are downloadable, books can be read in electronic format, and farms and their crops are merely pixelized renditions of themselves. But they are so very fun to farm. The question you have to ask yourself then, is this: am I a Farmviller or something a lot Smurfier than that?
For quite a few people, among the more popular Facebook past-times, is Farmville. An agrarian Syms, Farmville has you create your own virtual farm, starting out with a large patch of land that you break up into small, square plots which you then plow, seed and eventually harvest. Each crop harvest, if successful, brings you gold and one step closer to owning a mega corporate farm. And as your farm grows, so does the variety of crops you can grow, and you can even branch out into livestock, ornamental and fruit trees, and even merely decorative farm elements.
Farmville on the iPhone Makes Great Use of Space
Many and many hours were spent chained to a computer, checking in with your crops. Eggplants took two days to reach maturity...what time did that mean? When did I plant those strawberries, and how soon would I need to go back on to ensure my crops wouldn't spoil? At long last, and to the great relief and joy to many, game maker Zynga announced that they were porting Farmville over to iOS. And there was much rejoicing. But how does the mobile world of Farmville stack up to the trusty Facebook version known and loved by millions?
Tools Don't Hide on Farmville HD for the iPad
Withm quite a bit of the graphics stripped away and far fewer annoying distractions and pop ups and notifications and every other thing under the sun that can take you out of your game experience, Farmville HD on the iPad and plain ol' Farmville on the iPhone are actually far preferable ways to go about tending your forty acres. Sure, you lose the ability to customize your farmer character, but that's a small price to pay for the ability to concentrate and to handle your farm duties on the go. You also gain syncability, which allows you to visit the game on a desktop, pick up with it on the train on your commute, then get to those crops on your lunch break with the iPad.
The strange thing was that even though the app was universal, we fully expected more from the iPad version than larger graphics. As far as we could make out, everything was bigger and just slightly differently laid out, a developer orientation that seemed geared toward smart use of the small space on the iPhone, rather than taking advantage of the iPad's roomier configuration.
Get Used To Seeing This
The thing with mobile Farmville, though, is that it's harder getting into the app than just tending to your farm. We had crops waiting to be harvested, all the while both Farmville apps refused to load. In some strange fashion, Zynga ties your mobile game to your Facebook account for syncing purposes, but the apps tend to lose your log-in fairly regularly and force you to have to re-enter all that information over and over. Then, oftentimes, we found that once we put in our email and our password, Farmville would hang, the start screen the only thing we'd see for minutes at a time. We tried reinstalling, opening the app through Game Center, closing then reopening, then attempting to open it on other devices, before finally giving up and harvesting those eggplants on the desktop.
Unable to log in on either device, we resorted to Facebook
Once open, though, Farmville is fairly easy to navigate and learn. We sat a seven year old test subject down with a fresh farm and she had the place humming in no time with virtually no instruction from us save not to buy anything that costs real money. (More on that later.) Tap and drag to position a plot, tap the plot to plow, tap it again to seed. No confusions there. However she quickly lost interest in the game, as the early rounds, when you're just beginning, start slow and don't provide much opportunity to purchase cutesy animals. Plus it's hard to capture a child's interest in harvests that take place two days from now rather than in pea-shooting plants protecting your brains from zombies right now.
No, You Can't Have a Pony
For our own part, we found Farmville engaging up to a point, but with push notifications enabled, it quickly became another in a seemingly endless series of tasks to complete, of transient responsibilities, of things to tap through when we pulled out our iPhones and just wanted to make a phone call for crying out loud.
Your mileage may vary.
Our test subject had no trouble getting in to Capcom's Smurf Village far more quickly and for obvious reasons. By scaling down Farmville for its mobile audience, the game lost much of its cartoony personality. Not so with the little blue denizens of Smurf Village who have no comparable Facebook presence. They are as cute and appealing here and now as they were when they first burst on the scene in the 80s. And with no pesky Facebook logins necessary, we were able to start the game (and return to gameplay repeatedly throughout the coming days) without any hassle whatsoever save for a quickly tapped through bit of intro-dialogue.
This Dialogue is Not the Smurfiest
The gist is essentially the same. Within an initially finite patch of land, you are responsible for setting up and organizing the entire Smurf village implicit in the game's name. Choose wisely where you place crop plots or houses because you won't get a chance to move them. Once your plots are settled, put your little blue army to work harvesting a variety of fruits and eventually veggies. As you harvest, you'll earn experience or XP points you can eventually lose in a trade for Vista or Windows 7 -- we kid, we kid.
Your Cute Army of Smurfy Serfs
To get you hooked, Smurf Village lets you begin with blueberries which are free to plant (though only gain you a single gold coin for successful harvest and only one XP). Blueberries also have a 30-second time to harvest, which definitely can move things along at the start. Players gain gold and XP for successfully completing levels (at which point new items become available in the store) or for playing short, simple games such as mixing potions in Papa Smurf's lab or baking pastries in stone ovens. These games are simple enough to really tip Smurf Village's hand as to who the game is pitched at. While Farmville, with its required Facebook log in and Facebook's own age policy, isn't really geared toward the single digit set, Smurf Village's games-within-the-game aim it squarely at your kids.
Earn Gold and XP
Another way to move along gameplay is to buy Smurfberries which you can use to hasten crop growth or the speed with which your Smurfy serfs get cracking on building new lodgings. To earn these through play takes forever, moving at a glacially incremental pace. Or you can buy fifty Smurfberries for $4.99 a pop. This is definitely a feature you'd want to disable if you were handing your iPad to a second grader, though even adults can have issues. In our own testing of the app, a single purchase of one five dollar cart of Smurfberries was magically transformed into two carts and a ten dollar iTunes debit. Oops.
Don't Make A Mistake and Double Tap These
Both Farmville and Smurf Village have the advantage of letting you choose crops to harvest that take 12 or 24 hours to come to fruition. This allows you to get your game underway and set things in motion to happen while you sleep or work or are otherwise indisposed for long stretches of time. While they can be addictive, neither game is really edge-of-your-seat exciting.
Harvest Time:
Both games feature similar goals and styles of play, so differentiation is actually harder, but we'll have to finally come down on the side of Smurf Village. Sure, Farmville has Facebook as a portal, but not being able to harvest your crops while on your mobile device is kind of a big deal. While Capcom needs to make it harder to accidentally spend loads of real dollars and cents on fake berries (in Farmville there's an additional step), the game loads snappily without any hang ups and moves quicker by far than its competitor.
