Zombie Takeover

Sure, we've all got time to kill - but are killing enough time for the undead?

Zombie Takeover is one of those resource management, time-based games in the same vein as FarmVille; you allocate coins and gems to make certain enhancements (which in turn make you more coins), but everything takes a preset amount of time.

The game contains some RPG elements, where you buff up your zombie army (and later vampire army, and werewolf armies) and then battle pesky nearby humans.

Graphics are in the range of the undeniably cute, which is a great fit for the device.  Give this game a shot (it's free, after all)!

Demo: Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

The items featured in the window tell customers what you primarily sell.

It's not often you get a feel for how the other half lives, but that's exactly what we get in Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale (demo available on Steam).  It's the oldest story in the world: girl's father leaves adventuring and a mysterious fairy loan shark visits the girl telling her t hat she owes some ungodly amount of money on her father's behalf.  She lives in an adventuring town, so why not open an adventuring shop to make back the required gold?

To this end, Recette (the player) and her loan shark/item shop partner, Tear, buy goods low, and sell them high! With a payment lurking every 7 days, it's sometimes stressful when your worried that the poor little Recette might be out of luck without your skillful intervention.

Command changes to the adventurer you hire,
for dungeon crawling hack and slash.

To get items, you may buy them wholesale, or from patrons looking to sell (you're like a pawn shop).  Additionally, you can hire adventurers to go out with you into dungeons to defeat monsters and loot chests.  The adventurers will be equipped with any items they have bought in your store, so it behooves you to consider wisely in item placement and sales to adventurers.

The demo takes you through the first week and the recruitment of a base-level adventurer.  The graphics are quaint, but they really work for the game.  There is plenty of tongue-in-cheek dialogue, which is actually pretty welcome, since the premise is silly anyway.  We also get a glimpse of a rival shopkeeper, so that promises to be interesting.  Also, we really ought to find out what happened to your father and why he burdened you with this massive debt.

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is a great grab, even though it's no longer on sale on Steam.  Highly recommend that you run the configuration program prior to playing or you may hit every button on the keyboard before learning that Z was the default key for "Accept."  (Z?  Seriously?)

Flash Game Friday: Corporation, Inc

Oh, resource management games.  I have a confession to make.  I love you.

No, now, don't freak out on me.  I think we're ready for this next step.  After all, I've been clicking to and from things for hours (gosh, has it been that long?  It felt like mere minutes), and you've been rewarding my minimal effort with power-ups gifts of your love to make my clicking easier!

Upgraded bathrooms make employees happier.  That makes sense, I guess.

That's why I'm dedicating this Flash Game Friday to Corporation, Inc.  It was pitched to me as a "SimTower like" experience, and I loved SimTower.  And it has everything you'd want in a resource management game: employees, offices, upgrades.  An easy to use and navigate interface allows you to extend your office to heavens, or just build a 9 floor wide complex full of researchers hellbent on discovering the secrets of world domination (no, really!).

Check it out, especially if you want a distraction from work, by - you know - doing some other type of work.

Harvest Moon

Oh, cows.

Did you know that I used to be a farmer?  Like, I actually farmed things.  Seeds went into the ground, time ellapsed, and then mature fruits and vegetables were picked and sold.  This process taught me three important things:

1. Farming is not a valid career choice for me.
2. There is a point at which you cannot be any dirtier or any sweatier.
3. Video games make things that are chores seem like fun.

There was a time when FarmVille was an insanely popular Facebook game.  Click to hoe ground.  Click to plant seeds.  Click to water.  Click to harvest and sell.  It was a pretty crappy time waster of a game, even for a resource management game, though it probably did teach some basic concepts of profit margins (they game could be even more edu-taining if it had some Drug Wars-esque supply/demand algorythms).  This is not how real farming worked, and whats more, Zynga wasn't the first company to capitalize on the notion of turning farming into a simple point here and do this; it was a Japenese company called Victor Interactive Studio, and localized for the United States by Natsume.

Harvest Moon (or rather, the Harvest Moon series, as there are about a dozen iterations now) was a sprite-based resource management game released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1997.  You control a young man who must repair a desolate farm, plant crops, make money, and woo a local townswoman to then be your wife.  Resource management describes games where you must balance a finite set of resources (in this instance, it is mostly time and stamina, although there are some aspects of space and money) in order to acheive your goals.  There is no mini-game aspect for planting: just move to where you want the seeds to go and push a button.

Again, I should iterate that this is not how real farming works.

I devoted a great deal of time that I could have actually have been farming to playing this game about farming, which probably says something about me and my generation, but I couldn't help it: the Harvest Moon formula worked. 

You're an open book, Rick.

I've started to play through Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town - or more specifically, its sequel More Friends of Mineral Town.  The difference between the two is that the latter allows you to play as a female farmer and woo one of the male townsfolk.  The game is the same tried and true Harvest Moon.  Gotta clear the weeds and rubble from the farm, hoe the ground, plant the seeds, water the seeds, harvest the crops, feed the chickens, milk the cows, brush my horse... However More/Friends of Mineral Town is a lot more dating sim than the previous versions.

If you want to try your hand at farming, it'd probably be easier to try the above mentioned FarmVille, but you miss out on the nostalgia and (lite) interactive fiction of the Harvest Moon games.