#oneaday, Day 46: 5 Facebook Games that Aren’t Shit

It’s fair to say that, as a general rule, Facebook games are pretty, well, shit. For the most part, they’re cynical, money-grabbing exercises designed only for bored soccer moms and office drones to while away the hours performing virtual meaningless tasks instead of real-life meaningless tasks. What’s worse is the fact that the real-life meaningless tasks are still there once you’ve clicked on every single field in FarmVille 300 times.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are a few developers out there who are starting to produce games which have some actual substance to them, even if almost every single one of them insists on including an utterly meaningless, pointless experience point/levelling system. Memo to Facebook game developers: you don’t “need” that to be competitive. Make a game that’s addictive and fun and people will come back of their own volition. You don’t need some arbitrary, meaningless, substanceless “reward” to keep people dangling on your Fish-Hook of +5 Monetization. So stop it.

Anyway. Here’s 5 Facebook games that aren’t shit.

Bejeweled Blitz

The grand-daddy of Facebook Games that Aren’t Shit is surely PopCap’s minute-long masterpiece. Featuring the match-three gameplay of Bejeweled condensed into a frantic, hectic minute of scoring points that is, to be honest, more luck-based than anything else, Blitz is great fun and enormously competitive thanks to the weekly-resetting friend leaderboards. Even better, the mobile versions also work with the Facebook scoreboards, allowing you to challenge friends on the go. Go play!

Zuma Blitz

See above, only you’re playing Zuma instead. You’re still matching groups of three or more colours together, only this time you’re trying not to let them drop down a big hole. Frantic and arguably more skill-based than Bejeweled, this is another good choice for daytime timewasting. Go play!

Asteroids Online

This game combines the structure of obnoxious gameplay-free experiences like Mafia Wars and actually adds some gameplay to it. Offering a wide variety of missions and some surprisingly impressive (for a web game, anyway) polygonal graphics, this is a good, challenging choice for anyone who grew up with the old Atari classics. Go play!

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

A fun, educational detective game particularly suitable for younger players. You can use it as a means of testing your geographical knowledge and deductive reasoning, or you can cheat (a bit) and using Google/Wikipedia to help you work things out. Either way, it’s a lot of fun, even if it does have a completely pointless levelling system that I really, genuinely can’t see any reason for whatsoever. Go play!

Robot Unicorn Attack

One of the quintessential two-button platformers out there, Robot Unicorn Attack is always a pleasure to play, largely because of its soundtrack. Now it’s approximately seven thousand times as competitive thanks to Bejeweled-style friend leaderboards. Pity the iPhone version doesn’t sync with these, however. Go play!

Dishonorable Mention: Scrabble

Fuck Facebook Scrabble. Why? Facebook should be the perfect platform for asynchronous wordplay. Well, two reasons: firstly, dumb copyright issues meaning that there are separate Facebook apps for the US/Canada and the rest of the world, meaning that if you have any friends in North America and you yourself are not in North America, you can’t play them. And secondly, the non-American version features some of the most obnoxious, annoying, obtrusive pre-game advertising I’ve ever had the misfortune to see. Stick to Words with Friends on your smartphone. It’s now available for Android, you know.

Honorable Mention: Word Scramble

Basically Boggle, this is a genuinely fun and competitive word game that would be much better if it actually told you when it was your turn. There’s also a decent iPhone version of the game which sadly doesn’t appear to sync with the Facebook version. Go play!