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Farmville
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Graphics & Sound:
Farmville on the iPad is much as you would expect from playing the game online, or through the iPhone. The higher-quality graphics are nice for zooming in on the action and appreciating the finer points of your farm. The interface is simply designed, with some pop-out menus for common actions like shopping or planting. Context menus help to prevent players from constantly digging into menus; when you tap a plot, you'll see a series of pop-up menus containing icons from the last few plantings. If you run out, you'll be prompted and offered a chance to buy more credits.The huge variety of objects you can buy and place in your farm is what keeps Farmville exciting. You can browse the marketplace or take inspiration from your friends' farms along the way. Music can be toggled, mostly into the "Off" position. Compared to typical console or casual titles, Farmville is eerily quiet. Navigating large farms with touch is nice, but seeing more of any one farm at once is the big payoff for playing on the iPad versus other iOS platforms. There are a few things lost in the interface, but the most important elements are retained here.
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Gameplay:
We have mixed feelings about Farmville in general. In a world view that defines games as challenging entertainment, Farmville fails on the former count. It may be entertaining in the way a snow globe is entertaining, but it's barely more challenging. A better analogy might be a seashell collection or shoebox diorama, something a person cultivates and shows off to others for recognition. Unlike most casual games that at least pretend to offer some challenge for the player, Farmville only asks that you interact with it on some regular basis. There's not even the penalty for untimely harvesting, as was the case in games like Harvest Moon. The darker side of Farmville is the incessant prompting to spend money, and we mean real-world dollars. You can earn Zynga points in various real-world transactions, at places like 7-11, but Farmville gives you lots of chances to spend your own money on upgrading your farm. From a certain angle, this more closely resembles a carnival game than anything in the videogame world. If this blend of electronic navel-gazing and tithing appeals to you, the iPad version of Farmville will just be another great way to stay in touch with your farm, as you can bridge the online platform with your mobile device.
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Difficulty:
Zero. If you have time or money, there's nothing to prevent you from having a monster farm. A few things that do make Farmville interesting as a social experiment are the benefits you gain from helping friends, or by playing other Zynga games, and checking in at special times to score items. You can't really do anything wrong or fool with anyone else's farm, and it's not a competitive game in the sense that it isn't a level playing field. There should be something on the screen that shows how many dollars (Zynga or otherwise) have been pumped into the game, to let you evaluate whether you are looking at the product of long hours or heavy investment. It's not that we're bitter about big-dollar farms, especially because Farmville encourages players to share with others. In theory, this should encourage a kind of trickle-down economy where players unable to afford big farms or invest massive amounts of time may be helped by others will fat wallets and idle hands. How this plays out in reality remains to be seen.
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Game Mechanics:
The touch interface is smartly designed for iPad, and the layout is more along the lines of what you see when playing full-screen on a laptop or PC, rather than in the browser. Common ground includes the quick-select options at the bottom of the screen, for working your crops, shopping the market, or viewing and adding friends' farms. There was more loading than we would have expected, which may be a function of low bandwidth or a need for more tuning on this platform. Perhaps associated with this was a tendency to crash or fall out of sync with the Farmville servers. The latter is a major flaw. The behavior we found was that we'd spend coins on planting, only to be told we'd fallen out of sync. When the system refreshed, our last planting session was wiped out, along with the credits we'd used while planting! These issues will not convince many Farmville players to spend their hard-earned credits on this platform, so the iPad version needs tweaking immediately. A better play would be to allow some type of offline tracking, so activity would never be completely lost if you ended up disconnected unexpectedly. Other than this half-baked aspect of Farmville for iPad, the tablet feels like a nice home for the game.
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-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Paddock |
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