Is there a formula to it? Can you easily create a successful Facebook game? Let’s take a look at the 10 most popular games on Facebook and see what we can find.

#10 – Zoo World by RockYou!

Cute animals are a sure magnet for kids and cute-crazed people. Zoo World has over 18 million monthly active users. This game offers basic, childish graphics and annoying MIDI music. The goal is to manage a successful zoo. The social features are the regular ones – send gifts to friends, boast your zoo achievements and more. The game sends constant status updates about your activity to the profile. You can also buy items and animals using real money – the usual scam. Despite its popularity, the game has a rating of only 3.5 stars.

#9 – PetVille by Zynga

Again with the cute animals. This time – tamagotchi style. In PetVille, you take care of one pet. You need to dress, feed, and decorate its house. The game borrows heavily from PlayFish’s Pet Society. It was launched about 2 months ago, and has over 18 million active users per month.

#8 – Pet Society by PlayFish

This game (again) allows you to grow a virtual pet and interact with it. In Pet Society, you can play games, decorate your house and bring gifts for your friends when you visit them. You can also compete against other pets in the stadium. These are all familiar features if you’ve ever been to NeoPets.com. As we can already see – originality isn’t a required feature when it comes to popular Facebook games. The game has about 18.7 million active users per month.

#7 – Mafia Wars by Zynga

Mafia Wars was more popular in the past, but it seemed to have slid down in the rankings. In the game, you need to start a Mafia family with your friends, do crime jobs for cash, buy weapons and fight – your regular life of crime. Mafia wars leans heavily on its social features – the more members you have in your mafia, the more options you get. This turned the game into a spam machine, where people constantly implore you to join their mafia. Mafia Wars has 24.6 million monthly active users.

#6 – Texas HoldEm Poker by Zynga

This game simply rides on the huge popularity of Texas Holdem, with some added social features, free chips and many announces to remind you that you didn’t play today. There’s also a leveling system to keep it a tad more interesting. Zynga’s Texas Holdem has over 25 million active users per month.

#5 – FishVille by Zynga

Fish are a strong theme among the popular Facebook games. They are, apparently, cute and attractive enough to gain the favor of Facebook users. This game replicates the successful model of FarmVille – raise fish, invite your friends and gather items. FishVille has 25.3 million active users per month.

#4 – Happy Aquarium by CrowdStar

Fish theme, remember? Yet another grow-your-fish game, this time by CrowdStar. Players can purchase tropical fish, teach fish cool tricks, decorate their fish tank, and visit other facebook friends in Happy Aquarium. There are over a 100 levels in this game, which accounts for long playing hours and stickiness. This game has 26.3 million active users every month.

#3 – Café World by Zynga

Café World puts the player in charge of a restaurant where they can serve food, collect money, and decorate their restaurant. Time management game developers already know that restaurant management and food games attract a big crowd. Gameplay is very simple and it’s time-based: dishes take a predefined amount of time to prep, and you have to coordinate your game accordingly. The game has 30.2 million active users per month.

#2 – Birthday Cards by RockYou!

Why is this app considered a game? Don’t ask me. Using this app, you can send cards and gifts to your friends, create a custom card or choose from pre-made card designs. This might be a useful app, but that doesn’t explain its popularity, especially after the security blunder, in which 32 million passwords were compromised by a hacker. Still, this app has over 45 million active users per month – which is rather impressive.

#1 – FarmVille by Zynga

The top of the top of Facebook’s games can hardly be considered a game, really. You are a farm owner – raising crops and gaining money by selling them. You can’t lose or die – only advance. The only challenge is how to design your farm and where to stuff your animals. There are many tips and guides on how to make tons of (virtual) money on FarmVille, but in the end it’s basically the ultimate, easy time-killer. Just point and click, and cute sheep will come to you. The lack of challenges and the easy, mindless gameplay are probably the explanation to the huge popularity of the game, which currently has over 70 million active users per month. Sending ducks to your friends has never been more popular.

So, what have we learned from looking at the top 10 games on Facebook?

1. Not for hardcore gamers – Facebook games are obviously not created for serious gamers. They are even below the average when it comes to casual games – they are easy, you can’t really lose and the main purpose is to keep you around and maybe make a buck or two when you are tempted to use real money to buy virtual products.
2. You don’t need to be original – On the contrary! Take an already popular game and copy it – the users will come. Zynga’s games are all the same one, basically, only with different graphics and “plot”. Even Texas Holdem, which breaks the pattern, isn’t original in any way. Facebook players, it seems, like the familiar.
3. Cute RULEZ – Cute animals, cute fish, cute burgers – whatever. Just form a cute game with cute graphics and cute sounds, and the players will flock over.
4. KIVVSS (Keep It Very Very Simple, Stupid) – Facebook users don’t want challenging levels or mind-flexing games. They want it simple and easy – point, click, get duck. That’s it.
5. Tons of levels – 100+ levels that can be reached is a surefire way of keeping the players playing.
6. Social Features – Invite friends and get a bonus, send gifts, get your neighbors to help you around the farm – all of these are good social features which helps games advance and gain more users.
7. Achievement for every move – You planted your first tree? Achievement! Reward! Invited 3 friends? Bonus! Got a pink fish? Here’s a medal! Well, you get the point – create a huge amount of possible achievements, and make them really easy to achieve.

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A lot of the games are repetitious – things we’ve seen before, played before and got tired of before. On the other hand, games who try something completely new and unknown don’t often succeed, because gamers sometimes prefer the familiar.

Still, you don’t have to re-invent the wheel in order to create a cool new game. Sometimes, it’s enough to give the game a different feel to it – and that’s all you’re going to need.

Check out 4 Differences for example. A new game on Kongregate, that from first look offers nothing new – it’s just another “Find the Differences” game, and it’s even less challenging than the usual ones, because you only need to find four differences, rather than the usual five or six.

Still, 4 Differences is a lovely, different gaming experience. The most prominent feature are the graphics – they are extremely well done and unique, and give a special feel to the game. The surreal music contributes to the soothing effect, making this a fun, relaxing game, with a lot of cool ambiance.

In each stage, the screen is split into two parts – and your mission is to find the differences between the similar-but-different images. For extra comfort, the mouse pointer will move simultaneously in both halves of the screen, making it easier to point out the differences.

The graphics aren’t static, though: airplanes fly in the sky, animals suddenly walk around and the entire scenery moves, reflects and waves with your mouse gestures. A lovely experience which makes this game much more fun to play.

So, we have a simple concept with a unique execution, great graphics and wonderful ambiance. All in all, 4 Differences is a cool game to play!

8 out of 10 points in the Shark Lady scale

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Most of them look dated, for sure, but whether you’re looking for some decent side-scrolling action, nostalgic hits from the golden age of adventure, classic titles of interest, or even MMORPGs, you’re bound to find something in the following pages.

[30 Commercial Games that are FREE]

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What’s new on Bejeweled Blitz?

Bejeweled Blitz now presents a new big feature – Boosts. These are five different upgrades you can “buy” with virtual coins you collect during gameplay.

The game is still played as we all know it – you have one minute, align the gems, create chain reactions and get special power-up gems.

The new Blitz, though, now presents you with coins – they appear as a yellow gem and have the number 100 written on them. If you align 2 yellow gems and a coin – you get 100 coins for future Boost purchases. These coins appear randomly throughout the game, and at the end of the game you also get 1 coin for each multiplier you’ve collected.

The Boosts

There are 5 different boosts you can buy on the new Bejeweled Blitz. Each gives you different bonuses or upgrades, and each also has a different cost.

Detonator (2,500 coins) – This boost will detonate all power gems on the board – so you don’t have to align them yourself.

Scrambler (3,500 coins) – This boost can be used twice per game, and will scramble the board. Useful for when you have no good moves and need a fresh start.

+5 Seconds (5,000 coins) – Adds 5 seconds to the game, so you get to play 65 seconds.

Mystery Gem (5,500 coins) – A cool boost for gamblers. This gives you a random power gem at the beginning of the game.

Free Multiplier (7,500 coins) – No wonder this boost is the most expensive – it will give you a X2 multiplier right at the start of the game. This greatly increases your chances to get a higher score.

Even More Medals

If you already filled up all your medal bars and reached Gold Level on all scores, the new Bejeweled Blitz presents you with new challenges. There are now medals for 300K points, 350K, 400K, 450K and even 500K points. If you are the competitive type, this is sure to keep you busy for a while. Here you can read a guide for getting a high score in Bejeweled Blitz.

It seems that PopCap assumes that you can reach higher scores in the new Blitz, because of the boosts. So, start clicking away and see if they’re right.

Higher Scores, More Addiction

It’s clear that the new Bejeweled Blitz was designed to make it more addictive. The ability to get upgrades via the coins, will make you come back more often. The new medals are also guaranteed to make the more competitive players try harder and waste more minutes (and hours) in order to get higher scores and all the possible medals.

The New Bejeweled Blitz – Tips, Tricks and Strategy

1. The basics are the same – if you are looking to score big on Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook, you still need to work fast and make use of your 60 (or 65) seconds. Here’s a guide for scoring big on Bejeweled Blitz.
2. Boosts X3 – when you buy a boost, you actually get it for 3 rounds. You can have up to three boosts active at any time.
3. The Best Boost – the Free Multiplier boost is obviously the best one. It gives you a X2 right at the beginning, and if you can activate it right away, you won’t even need the 10 seconds rule.
4. The Best Boost Combo – that would be a Free Multiplier, Mystery Gem and Detonator. You can also switch the Mystery Gem with +5 Seconds.
5. Don’t chase the coins – all the coins that are left on the board are added to your total at the end of the game. If you can get them easily – that’s great, but don’t go out of your way to collect them, even though they can be a bit distracting.
6. Multipliers are still the key – not only for the game itself, but for the boosts as well – each multiplier grants you a coin at the end of the game.

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Researchers say they can predict your performance on a video game simply by measuring the volume of specific structures in your brain.

The new study, in the journal Cerebral Cortex (cool name, guys), found that nearly a quarter of the variability in achievement seen among men and women trained on a new video game could be predicted by measuring the volume of three structures in their brains.

According to the research, expert video gamers outperform novices on many basic measures of attention and perception, but other studies have found that training novices on video games for 20 or more hours often yields no measurable cognitive benefits.

These contradictory findings suggest that pre-existing individual differences in the brain might predict variability in learning rates, the authors wrote.

The researchers found that players who had a larger nucleus accumbens did better than their counterparts in the early stages of the training period, regardless of their training group.

The full article is available here

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Namco Museum Video Game – Namco Bandai brings its classic roster to the NDS, giving fans a handheld dose of gaming history!

In addition to the included legendary roster, Namco Museum DS also brings an updated version of fan favorite, Pac-Man Vs. Never before available as a separate product, this present day remake of Pac-Man headlines this Namco Museum, bringing classic gameplay with a twist.

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Here’s what they say:

“We sat down trying to figure out the best iPhone games of 2009 and found the task of narrowing down the list to a select few to be near impossible. Instead, we’ve organized our year in review into categories with what we feel is an excellent cross section of games from 2009. If you just got an iPhone or iPod Touch for Christmas, this list is an excellent starting place to catch you up…”

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This is a set of video game packaging mock-ups imagining “retro games with modern themes” for the “Cartridge Video System 2600″.

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