One paw is being generous here. As Kaitlyn says, this is a waste of money, 900 coins to be exact. Every time her pet leaves the room, all the stickers on the Wall Menu Chalkboard come falling down.

Another reader, Nam, says that the stickers actually work better on the smaller Brown Menu Chalkboard (400 coins) and Red Menu Chalkboard (600 coins). These were released March 1 as part of the cafe culture theme. We hope Playfish fixes the un-sticking soon, because the menu boards are really cute when they work.

BTW, if you're wondering how Kaitlyn's pet is pitch-black, this was achieved through a color cheat.
This article originally appeared on Pet Society Anonymous.

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FarmVille is more than just an ultra-popular farming simulation -- it's a chance to express yourself artistically through unique and creative farm layouts. To that end, Games.com's FarmVille Picture of the Day features some of the most interesting and imaginative FarmVille layouts out there. Got a FarmVille pic you want to share? Send it to submit2gamescom@gmail.com.

Today's pic: Mona Lisa (from FarmvilleArt.com)

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According to Happy Aquarium, their new Square Spot Fish "Works hard, parties harder!", but in the real world, these fish are sensitive to light, and need plenty of hiding space to adjust to a new home.

Square Spot Fish are also hermaphrodites. They start off as females, but can swap between male and female, depending on the sex of the fish around them. Oh, and they're called "Square Spot" or "Squareback" because they sport a colored square on their sides.

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It may be odd to think of social games as a kind of banking and credit-granting institution, but when you think about it, they're largely in the business of turning real currency into a kind of virtual credit or gift certificate that can only be spent in their virtual worlds. And its that portion of the business that may run these games afoul of laws meant to regulate credit cards and banks, according to a recent article at InformationWeek.

Dax Hansen, a partner at Perkins Coie's Electronic Financial Services, told InformationWeek that the recent Credit Card Act of 2009 has language that treats electronic point accounts -- like those used in social games -- as a sort of gift certificate. This means the virtual currency could be subject to a host of local, state and federal requirements, including "restrictions on an issuer's ability to expire the virtual currency or impose inactivity fees, requirements to give cash back for unused virtual currency, obligations to remit unused virtual currency balances to states, potential regulation as a financial institution, requirements to structure systems to avoid illegal lotteries, and privacy and data security issues," according to Hansen.

While none of these issues seems to have popper up yet in the social gaming space, Skype is in the process of settling a class action lawsuit on similar grounds.

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If you love to do virtual decorations, but hate clicking and grinding for coins, or being enslaved to a game's internal clockwork, then Happy Island would be perfect for you.

Created by Crowdstar, who also brought us Happy Pets and Happy Aquarium, Happy Island is an island resort simulation with leisurely paced gameplay and a stress-free atmosphere. Your goal in the game is to maximize tourist visits to your island by using "Attractions" and "Decorations" from the in-game store.

Today, Happy Island has released the Great Pyramid, Space Elevator, Mercury Rocket (which automatically fires up inside the store), Temple of Petra, Little Venice, and the Haunted House. But the best part about these Attractions, aside from the animations and cool designs, is that they can evolve over time through upgrades.

So what you see isn't what you're stuck with -- upgrades will make these items look even bigger and better! Want to get an idea as to how? Check out what is currently the best visual guide to all the Happy Island building upgrades.

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Fishdom, the award-winning match-3/aquarium simulation game for PC, arrives on Facebook March 5 (and later on MySpace, etc.). Unlike its downloadable counterparts, the new 'social' version of the game does not include the match-three elements and focuses more on creating and maintaining an aquarium, something along the lines of Happy Aquarium or FishVille.

Details on the actual social features in the game are scarce at the moment, but we're willing to bet that the game includes some form of gifting and ways to assist neighbors in exchange for coins or loot.



A few questions remain -- Will this game be different enough to draw fans away from the other aquarium sims on Facebook? And, will Fishdom loyalists revolt when they learn that there's no match-three in this version? We have a couple days left until all is revealed.

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These days, social games like Farmville and Mafia Wars have captured the attention of a large part of the gaming and technology industries. But it wasn't so long ago that another game seemed to be on everybody's lips as the Next Big Thing: Second Life. Over at CNet, writer Daniel Terdiman has written up a thoughtful appreciation of immersive, 3D virtual spaces like Second Life, which he fears are being pushed aside for "a slew of profitable but essentially copy-cat low-fi social games and experiences" that he finds "increasingly boring."

The main reason for the transition away from full 3D virtual worlds, Terdiman reports, seems to be ease of use. While virtual spaces like Second Life could be incredibly deep and complex, they were "about as inviting to mainstream audiences as obscure European philosophy," as Terdiman puts it. Today's social games provide a similar (if less robust) way to interact with your social network without the need to download software or spend weeks learning how to navigate a complex and sometimes confusing new world. "It's all very easy to tap in to," as media consultant Ron Meiners put it to Terdiman. "It doesn't demand much."

And then there's the cost for the developers. Why spend the huge amounts of time and money creating an in-depth, 3D virtual world like Second Life when, for a fraction of the cost and manpower, you can crank out a simple Flash game like Farmville? "The return on investment is simply not there," Engage!Expo organizer Chris Sherman said of 3D virtual worlds.

The full story is well worth reading for anyone interested in the direction social games and virtual worlds seem to be heading.

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Yes, this is 100% true, YoVille have decided to add a new small feature to the buddy list, as asked for by most YoVillians on the forums.

As YoVille heard that most of you wanted an 'offline' mode for when you are a little busy doing some decorating, they have now brought the 'offline' button. The button is at the top on the buddy list. You can now go offline and sign back on at any time while playing the game. The button is here for you to have a bit of free time to yourself. Many people may not want to go offline but it is optional, and the best thing is... it's official, so this button, if you haven't got it yet, will be coming to you shortly.

This news is credited to YoVille Lounge.

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It hasn't been more than a week since Happy Pets first introduced pigs for adoption, and now they've followed up with four new colors: Black, Hot Pink, Blue ("Blueberry Oink!"), and White. As you can see in the image above, these are Facebook Credit only, and each color has a different adoption fee.

The White piglet costs 24 FB Credits, just like the Blue one. Hot Pink and Black are the most expensive at 36 Credits.

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If you think FarmVille's a social gaming juggernaut, boasting over 80 million players, Facebook Platform Manager Gareth Davis predicts that something bigger and better will trump the farm simulation game in 2010.

"There will be a killer app for social games in the same way that "Mario" was for Nintendo, "Sonic" was for Sega and "Halo" was for Xbox. We're going to have our Halo, our Mario, soon," Davis says in this Forbes article.

But that's not going to be FarmVille, he says. "[FarmVille] is a light simulation [game] that has mass appeal. I think that we will see a new kind of game that people have not really seen before."

Davis doesn't say which game will revolutionize social gaming, though he namechecks both EA's Madden and 2K's Civilization Network, which are both scheduled for launch on Facebook this year. He says Facebook has also been working on building out the integration on the major game consoles "and so this year you're going to see a lot of the major game franchises integrating with Facebook in a really interesting social way."

That certainly could be interesting, though there's no additional information to back up his boast. We couldn't help but wonder if Facebook would be on tap to create this 'Halo,' but Davis says Facebook isn't looking into building first-party games -- yet.

We'd really love to see a follow-up discussion on Facebook's recent announcement that it will take a 30% cut of profits from virtual items purchased via Facebook credits, which has been implemented by all of the big social gaming companies. That move could revolutionize social games in a very different way.

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Every week brings something new at Happy Aquarium, but it seems that last week, the game decided to return their UFO demo tank to the mothership early to showcase their new Baby Playtypus and a few of their fairyland items, such as the "Resting Fairy Statue" and "Rapunzel's Tower".
To assuage the jilted Space fans though, they've added a "Toy Astronaut" and animated "Pulsing Radar" to the store, but there's also three new Wild West or Desert items this week that aren't getting showcased: "Hay Wagon", "Cactus", and the "Broken Wheel". With any luck, these will be part of next week's demo tank setup. We just hope Happy Aquarium strives harder with their demo tanks, cause they've got a unique thing going here that other Facebook aquariums titles have yet to implement.

Lastly, here's a tip about the demo tanks in general -- a tank usually has an item called the "7 Day Cleaner", on the top left corner. This serves as a countdown for how long a demo tank will stay up (and the UFO tank was missing it last week). Right now, there's just "2 Days" left before the current tank disappears from the game, so head on over quick to watch these items in action, and don't forget to collect your free coins from the treasure chest!

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Rockyou's Hero World (reviewed here) saw a major update to the game interface and underlying rules last Friday. The most immediately noticeable change is a reorganization of the Missions page, which groups missions by location, making it easierto find the missions you need to reach that next hideout level. Vehicles, which used to cost a dear amount of in-game cash, are now available as rewards for beating certain enemies, and you can now purchase a single piece of armor multiple times, in order to better equip your team of Superfriends.

Hero World administrators also promised more changes coming in the near future, including bug fixes, tweaks to the way epic battles work, and even special "world events" that will "get everybody in the app working together to earn big rewards." Future updates will include rewrites to the mission descriptions and in-game storyline, hopefully meaning an end to less-than-super heroics like "Rescue a cat from a tree.

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Zynga's Official Farmville podcast last Friday announced an exciting new feature coming to Farmville sometime this week: Gift wishlists. Soon, you'll be able to post a request for any item from Farmville's "free gifts" page, and post that request in a handy feed for all your Farmville neighbors to see. Your neighbors will then be able to send you that item as a gift with a single click -- no fuss, no muss.

Sure beats the current preferred gift-requesting method: Posting awkward Facebook wall posts begging for that last harness for your stables. And it's a whole lot easier than simply hoping your neighbors guess the specific items you're looking for. No word on a specific date for the feature to hit, but the podcast promised it will show up sometime this week.

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Starting today, due to a change of Facebook's rules, Applications (including games) will no longer be allowed to send notifications to the users using them. This change was announced quite a while ago and it's been quite fun to see how the major players reacted to this change. Read on to see how did and how will this change the social games universe!

First of all, I'm sure you've seen them recently (I'm talking about the image above). All the applications went mad to make you a fan (at least) or have you signed up to receive e-mail notifications. Zynga was one heavy promoter, offering huge cash prizes in Cafe World or impressive Limited Edition Items in Mafia Wars. All the other games did something similar.

There were rewards, bonuses, goodies - pure heaven for the regular player. But why do these games want you so badly? Well... it's all about the money and the viral aspect of the social games!

If you don't allow an application to specifically send you notices, it won't. Therefore, you will never know when new stuff is added to the game, an update has been made, a special event is being held - basically all the "spam" that made you play these games. And if you think that this is crap and you'd still be playing your social games no matter what, just try to remember how many times have you quit a specific game just to notice that an update was made, a new item was introduced or one of your friends started to play it, and start playing that game once more?

Well... that's why all the social games are trying to make you their fan - to keep you updated and to make sure you keep playing!

How will this measure influence the social games world? Probably on the short term there will be no major changes, but I do predict that in the near future the number of social gamers will decrease (and by social gamers I mean gamers that play at least a couple of times per day). Even more, newer games will find it a lot more difficult to "make it" - since they won't have the solid user base to help them naturally expand their boundaries, nor the trust from the new players to grant them permission to their e-mails, the upcoming social games will find it quite difficult to become popular.

In the long run, this will mean that the giants like FarmVille, Restaurant City, Mafia Wars etc will grow even bigger, with more independent developers having to shut down their games due to the lack of players.

On the other side, this might also mean that the future Facebook games will be innovative and of high quality since they should go viral by other means than those of "spamming". Which is good for us, since for some time now Facebook seemed to get invaded by poor FarmVille clones!

Will social games die in 2010? Absolutely not! But the rules will be changed a little and developers will have to do a bit more to get our attention. From this point of view, they have a lot to learn from FarmVille's creators, Zynga.

This article originally appeared on Social Games Help.

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If you haven't signed up to receive e-mail updates from Mafia Wars via email, you will get rewarded to do so right now: if you join the mailing list of Mafia Wars, you'll receive a cool Limited Edition Item. Will you do it?
As you can see above, the armor you'd receive has some really impressive stats: 23 Attack and 47 Defense! It's a really cool item it's worth to give your e-mail for.

Add to that the fact that you'll receive updates on Mafia Wars via the provided email, as well as notifications - since Facebook doesn't allow them anymore, I can say it's a pretty fair deal.

What do you think? Will you sign up for the e-mail updates from Mafia Wars? If so, will you do it because you love the game and you want to stay updated at all times or because of the Limited Edition item?

This article originally appeared on Social Games Help.

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Cafe World is trying to lure their fans in to sign up for e-mail updates from the game by offering them a chance to win 100 free Cafe Cash. So if you wish to try your luck, all you have to do is to sign up to receive Cafe World notifications via e-mail. Read on to find out more about this offer!

The reason why Zynga is trying to make you apply to receive their emails is simple: starting today, Facebook is no longer allowing notifications and therefore the game might lose some players who are not that active. However, if you decide to follow the banner that looks like the one below and sign up for e-mail updates for Cafe World, you receive the following bonuses: - 20,000 coins once you've signed up
- a chance to win 100 Cafe Cash EVERY WEEK at Zynga's draw. So if you are a fan of the game and you'd also like to have a chance of receiving so much cafe cash for free, sign up to receive updates via e-mail!

Now share your thoughts with our readers: did you sign up for the e-mail updates or not?

This article originally appeared on Social Games Help.

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Sure, Zynga is the undisputed king of Facebook gaming at the moment, and the company is reportedly worth up to $3.3 billion dollars in private stock. But that doesn't mean everyone is champing at the bit to invest in the company.

In a recent post on investment advice site The Motley Fool, Matt Koppenheffer tries to tamp down the enthusiasm investors might have for the company's seemingly inevitable initial public offering. Koppenheffer's three main arguments:

Zynga CEO and founder Mark Pincus is kind of sleazy: To support this, Kopenheffer cites Pincus admitting he did "every horrible thing in the book" -- including accepting ads from Spyware like the Zwinky toolbar -- to make revenue quickly in the early days of the business. "I'm not sure he's the kind of CEO I'd feel comfortable investing in," Koppenheffer says.

Competitiors are getting in in a big way: While Zynga may have been the first ones to strike it really big in the social games space, their success has attracted the attention of some big players. Major game publishers like Electronic Arts, Take Two and Atari are bringing their brands to Facebook, and Chinese companies like The9 and Shanda Interactive are prepared to make a big push for Zynga's business.

Tried and true companies are safer than the "next big thing": While investors are always eager to jump on to trends, research shows well-established companies like Altria and Coca-Cola tend to do better than flashy start-ups, in the long run.

So is Zynga the next Google or the next Pets.com? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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Playfish has launched the Mystery Box feature in Restaurant City and you can get yours for free by clicking the link I'm providing you with in this article.

Unfortunately, unlike other Mystery Boxes in other games, the one you can get in Restaurant City for being a fan is not too impressive: it offers you just a free random ingredient. I got a strawberry, for example:
Either way, it's better than nothing so if you want to open your Restaurant City mystery box and grab a free ingredient, click here.

What did you get?

This article originally appeared on Social Games Help.

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Looks like Playfish listened to some readers' requests to turn an entire room into an aquarium.
Sushi's friend Luxe snapped up both the Coral Reef Floor (10 Playfish Cash) and Coral Reef Wallpaper (20 PC), which are available at the Cash Shop. We're really impressed by the Coral Reef Wallpaper. The aquariums in the Garden Shop are often too confining, and this paper gives fish the expansive environment they need. Luxe hoped that the coral reef was functional and not just decorative.

Another player, Jacel, noticed that there might be a limit to how many fish the paper can hold before some of them stop moving. He tried putting in about a hundred fish, but saw that some of them were frozen in place. When he took out some of the fish, he saw more general movement in the wallpaper.

Verdict: The Coral Reef Wallpaper gets 4 paws. Luxe was less impressed by the Coral Reef Floor (10 PC), which is advertised as a "bubbling underwater floor." The bubbles are just too subtle. When Sushi ran across the floor, only two bubbles rose to the air. We hope that Playfish makes this floor more exciting and worthy of its pricetag.

This article originally appeared on Pet Society Anonymous.

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There's a funny new fish in the Pet Society pond. The Breadfish was introduced today along with many other items that revolve around the theme of cafe culture.

My pet Sushi was sure that the new Small Loaf of Bread or the Chicken Sandwich would be the right bait, but after six loaves and two sandwiches, he's starting to wonder if the Breadfish is on the Atkins diet. He's also tried the other new items in the food shop, but the Breadfish hasn't nibbled. How about you? Have you caught the Breadfish yet? And if so, what did you use?

Update (12 hours later):
Thanks to readers for responding. Looks like the Small Loaf of Bread is the ticket. We're going back to the pond!

This article originally appeared on Pet Society Anonymous.

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