Zynga announced a series of new games today for Facebook, including a new ‘Ville game, the just-launched Mafia Wars sequel, a hidden object game and a series of mobile games available, some of which will be available on Facebook’s mobile platform as of tomorrow.
Hidden Chronicles – Zynga enters the hidden object genre with a dynamic hidden object game where the puzzles change with each replay.
Zynga Bingo – As part of the “Zynga Casino” franchise minted today, Zynga Bingo joins Zynga Poker (a.k.a. Texas HoldEm Poker) as a social casino experience where players can join a virtual room in which friends and strangers are playing bingo. Like other bingo games currently available on the Facebook platform, games are broken out into different themed virtual rooms with distinct visual elements. It sounds like players in the Zynga Casino network will be able to track which bingo rooms or poker tables their friends occupy in either game.
CastleVille – This is the first game from Zynga’s Dallas studio, formerly known as Bonfire Studios. It’s an expansion of the ‘Ville franchise that asks players to build a medieval-themed town around a castle. Story elements include special characters that players discover as they make various gameplay choices, creating a branching fiction where two players might have completely different casts of non-playable characters in their game. A player-versus-environment element encourages players to team up and defend their castles against attacks from “beasties” that live in the forest around the castle town. Additionally, any item in the game is up for trade with other players in a truly free market experience. In sum, it’s medieval CityVille with Empires & Allies combat and market elements.
Mafia Wars Shakedown – Not much was said here, but Fusible outed the game when Zynga began buying up domains for it. Looks like it’s coming to both iOS and Android at some point.
DreamZoo – Coming to iOS “soon,” this is a zoo game that combines real animals with whacky color schemes for an experience that might help differentiate it from the many zoo games already available on the mobile games market.
Zynga also spent some time characterizing HTML5 game FarmVille Express — which goes live tomorrow on Facebook’s mobile platform. It’s a trimmed-down version of the FarmVille mobile experience that allows players to harvest crops on the go, and potentially complete some quests.
Source: Inside Social Games
Tuesday, October 11, 2011