Playdom's new game Fanglies brings innovation and fun

Tonight, Playdom quietly launched their new game Fanglies to the public. Fanglies is an adorable combination of city building games, mixed with a bit of pet care and some elements of FrontierVille thrown in for good measure. It is one of the more feature-complete social game launches we have seen, and raises the quality bar for engagement, depth of gameplay, and whimsical fun. Read on for a preview of Fanglies, brought to you by Games.com - The Blog!

Like most Facebook games, Fanglies starts you out by letting you create and customize your avatar, which is a sort of unrecognizable mix-and-match animal with fangs. After you create your avatar, you step through a guided tutorial that shows you how to get started in playing the game. If you name it, this game has it. You are given your own little village and are prompted to both increase the size of your village and buy yourself another Fanglie. The number of Fanglies you can have is directly related to the size of your village. Each Fanglie has a set of desires that you can view by clicking on them, and these desires cost energy but give you XP and coins so that you can level up. Clicking on their desire will make whichever Fanglie you chose perform a little emote and animation and will earn you XP. This appears to be the most obvious way to level up in Fanglies.
On your village, you can do a number of things. Random dig spots will appear on your village occasionally and you can harvest them for collectibles. There is also a fishing hole in which you can fish for collectibles (which requires energy to do so). The collection system is robust, allowing you to trade in your collections for rewards and create wishlists to share with your friends. Villages can also hold decorations, and this is the city-building element of the game. Shops and attractions can be built on the island that can actually be used to create other items. For example, if you purchase the shop titled "Cheap n Nice", you can then create furniture for your home. Purchasing the Parks & Gardens building allows you to make items like birdbaths or park benches. These all require coin and a particular length of time to complete, but actually give you a tangible reward when they're completed.

Every village also starts with a den, which is a building on your village that allows you to enter the inside if you click on it. The inside of the building is an isometric room that can be customized with a ton of furniture. For the shopoholics, the store has everything you could ever want to buy to decorate your house with. For those who are more thrifty, they can create their own furniture through the village shops. Having an interior and an exterior to decorate is sure to satiate any creative appetite.

Fanglies also has all of the standard elements of social games, such as gifting, neighbors, inviting, purchasable avatar additions, and the ability to buy a secondary currency (gems). Everything is bright, slick, and polished. The game feels more done than almost any other game we've tried, and the fun is instantly shown to the players. The added mechanics of an interior space, finding collectibles, gaining energy, manufacturing decorations, and fishing make Fanglies stand out from the crowd. We think we're looking at the next big thing for Playdom, for sure.

FarmVille slowly rolling out 26 x 26 farm expansion

Tonight, observant FarmVille players may have noticed a new banner below the game tonight that proudly announced that 26 x 26 land expansion is being released. The message does say that this new feature will be rolling out over time to all farmers, however, so you may not actually have the expansion just yet. Many players on the official forums have confirmed that they have the Grand Plantation in their Market, and many others do not have it yet.

Once the Grand Plantation comes to your market, you'll need to shell out a bit in order to purchase it. Here are the requirements for purchase:

    Must have 35 neighbors, with 5 new neighbors
    80 Farm Cash or 2 million coins to purchase


This price is quite a bit higher than the 24 x 24 expansion, which only cost 500,000 coins. Don't go to hog wild with planting and taking up all of your new space, you'll want to leave room for the crafting stations and buildings that are undoubtedly coming soon. There are also a ton of new Swiss Alps decorations available that you may want to leave space for.

FarmVille releases Swiss Alps themed items

FarmVille released a huge set of new Swiss Alps items tonight, including many animals, buildings, decorations, and two new crops. These items are all available for anywhere from 16-21 days depending on the item, and some are available for Farm Cash and others are coin items. There are plenty of nice looking items for your farm in this set, even if you aren't familiar with Swiss culture. Check out the full list of new items below!

Crops:

Alpine Roses
Cost 145 to plant
Sell for 250 coins
Harvest in 10 hours
XP Gained: 1

Swiss Chard
Cost 35 to plant
Sell for 100 coins
Harvest in 14 hours
XP Gained: 2
Animals:

Hampshire Lamb
Cost: 12 FV
Harvest in 3 days
Sell for 90 coins

Simmental Cow
Cost: 14 FV
Harvest in 1 Day
Sell for 18 coins

Breton Horse
Cost: 22 FV
Harvest in 3 days
Sell for 140 coins
Buildings:

Swiss Cottage - 32 FV
Swiss Farmhouse - 36 FV
Swiss Cabin - 250,000 coins
Swiss Barn - 30 FV
Swiss Tool Shed - 24 FV
Swiss Chalet - 85,000 coins


Decorations:

Swiss Alps - 42 FV
Miss Swiss Gnome - 18 FV
Mr. Swiss Gnome - 18 FV
Evergreen Tree II - 40,000 coins
Rocks with Lichen - 25,000 coins
Firewood Basket - 5,000 coins
Shaded Picnic - 8 FV
Floral Fence - 10,000 coins
Oval Planter - 8,000 coins




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Social games help drive growth for China's Tencent network

The largest social network in the world's largest country just keep getting, um, larger. And social games are a big part of that ever-increasing largeness, according to the latest financial results from China's TenCent.

Sure, services like instant messaging, bundled SMS packages and events like the World Cup also contributed to Tencent's 65% increase in year-over-year for the first half of 2010. But their latest financial report highlights many areas where social games helped drive growth, including:

    Tencent mobile business, which saw revenue from mobile social games increase.
    Tencent's QZone blogging platform, where revenue increases were "mainly fueled by enhancements in bundled privileges relating to social games."
    Tencent's online game revenues increased due to 5.9% on the strength of "improved monetization" for games like Cross Fire. These games are expected to do even better in the third quarter because of the "improved seasonality" of the summer school holiday.
    "Our recently launched game titles, namely Dragon Power, a hardcore 2D MMOG, and World of Fantasy, a self-developed MMOG, also contributed to the growth in revenues."

It's not all peaches and cream for Tencent gaming, though. Looking ahead, the company expects "the success rate and extent of success for new game titles may decrease" because of "slowing industry growth, intensifying competition and increasing sophistication of gamers." And the company has recently come under fire for rampant game copying and efforts to push smaller players out of the market. Remind you of anyone?

Quote of the Moment: The race to take over Europe

"I think [social game monetization in Europe] is going be even better for us than it is in North America, because there is less competition. One of the reasons why Playdom is expanding to European social networks now is that we were the major player on Myspace for a very long time same as Zynga had Facebook all to themselves. When you are one of the first few developers on a social network the revenues are just insane. I think it is going to be the same on StudiVZ or Netlog. One example why we think the expansion is going to be successful is our revenue on Orkut."

-Playdom's International Operations head Lloyd Melnick explains why the company is eager to expand to Europe in an interview with Social Games Observer.

FarmVille Farmer's Market update lets you request bushels from friends

Today an update was made to the way farmers obtain bushels. Since the Crafting Buildings were released we all have been hard at work trying to upgrade and level up our recipes. This has been difficult at times because of recent restrictions on how many bushels we can purchase from neighbors, as well as not being able to find bushels at all.

Well, now there is a way to 'request' bushels.

FarmVille Farmer's Market Request Bushels As Gift

If your neighbors are not currently offering the bushel you need to make a recipe you can request them on Facebook homefeed and neighbors can send them as a gift.

FarmVille Farmer's Market Request Bushels As Gift Facebook Image

When your neighbors see this on their Facebook homefeed they will be able to send you the bushel you need when clicking on the post!

FarmVille Farmer's Market Send Bushel As Gift To Neighbor

If your kind neighbors send you a bushel from a request, you will need to accept them from your FarmVille gift requests. After accepting the bushel will go directly to your bushel inventory, NOT YOUR GIFT BOX.

This article originally appeared on FarmVille Freak.

FarmVille Unreleased Animated Mule

Thank you FarmVille Freak Vezok for finding this unreleased FarmVille Unreleased Mule!

Note: Unreleased items have no official release date or guarantee that they will make it to the FarmVille Market.


This article originally appeared on FarmVille Freak.