GREE’s push into the US continues with a new game, Alien Family. This is the second GREE-developed title for the US, after last week’s Zombie Jombie. GREE claims that where Zombie Jombie was aimed more at a core gamer crowd, Alien Family is intended more for a casual crowd.

Players build a village of aliens on Earth, bringing in a variety of colorful aliens to live in their village. They do this by building homes and facilities, farming for resources, and exploring for new aliens. Players will send off UFOs that will bring in new aliens, that they can then power up using the Fuse Machine to send them off to explore for new aliens, in order to help create the best alien village possible.

Zombie Jombie had a solid launch for GREE, reaching #9 on the top free games chart, and #37 on the top grossing chart. Despite being new to the market, their promotional methods appear to be already in high gear, and with a more casual title, those numbers could increase. Alien Family is available now.

FREE!

Alien Family

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2012-03-21 :: Category: Games

In an industry obsessed with zombies and social farming, what do people need? A combination of the two, duh! Which is exactly why iPad owners should be rather excited by the announcement that freemium hit Zombie Farm is now an universal app.

Previously downloaded by 15 million users, Zombie Farm is clearly really rather addictive. And why not? Where else can you farm and harvest your own zombie farm after all? The entire experience is cutesy yet zany. Following the typical social gaming experience, Zombie Farm is a freely available app with a whole bundle of different in-app purchases available if players choose to invest their money into the title.

The release of the universal app ensures that iPad owners can experience Zombie Farm at a high resolution covering the iPad’s 1024×768 display. Also the user interface has been improved specially for iPad owners making it much easier to navigate. There’s also much more control over alerts such as being informed of harvest or invasion poblems, thus giving players more of a heads up of an issue.

As well as that, Zombie Farm’s latest update brings with it the Brainiac pack offering bundles of brains at a great discount rate, and an exclusive pet brain that can’t be found anywhere else. There’s also a new profile bar that allows players to switch between accounts easily, always handy.

Finally, there’s been a plethora of bug fixes to ensure that players no longer lose any data, a problem for a minority of users in the past.

Intriguingly, the update notes also state that developers, The Playforge, are promising the ability to play alongside friends with new social features coming soon. It looks like the future could be very bright for Zombie Farm fans indeed!

Also, if you act now, you could win a brain, which is Zombie Farm’s in-game currency. Head over to Twitter, and retweet (RT) the following linked tweet. Be sure to include the hastag:
Zombie Farm is now on the iPad! Universal app wants to give you BRAINS! RT this to enter to win a brain! #gimmebrainsZF

FREE!

Zombie Farm

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2010-02-09 :: Category: Games

What do you get when you mix Farmville, Google Maps, Yelp, and zombies? Fleck Touch.

Fleck Touch is a massively-multiplayer game that takes place on Google Maps. It’s possible to plant plants, trees, shrubs, and more on plots of land that actually exist. Players can dig up zombies from tombstones and fight them; especially if they are encroaching on the players real-life address! It’s even possible to buy restaurants that actually exist (I’m told that they must be reviewed on Yelp to show up). Friends can go on cooperative quests and zombie-blasting outings. And everyone who plays on Fleck Touch plays on the same, real-world Google map!

Fleck Touch provides quests for those who need some direction. Starting quests like building a house and dancing with another player are available. And more complex quests like killing certain amounts of zombies start popping up after getting used to the game.

Like all free games of this sort, the moneymaker is buying in-game currency. There are coins, which are relatively easy to get by farming and killing zombies. And there are gems, which are a bit harder to get (and cost much more) that are used to buy the coolest stuff (of course!). The currency can be used to buy more plants, decorations and power-ups. Some power-ups include Red Bolt which gives more stamina (not wings!), Ca$hUP (which looks like a bottle of ketchup) increases how many coins are gained, 24 hour Bolt Shots double stamina for 24 hours, and other humorous references.

Fleck Touch is available for free on the iPad and is playable in a browser. While Fleck has officially been launched, the developers are still looking at the game as a work in progress with more to come.

“…even though this is the culmination of a year+ of work with a pretty sizable group of people (for a mobile game – this is still smaller than even the smallest team I’ve worked with on a console game by a significant margin), it’s also not really the end of development – it’s only the beginning. We’ve got a ton more work to do,” written on the Self Aware website.

FREE!

Fleck Touch

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2011-05-05 :: Category: Games

Farmville has only just appeared on the iPhone, and ngmoco is already testing the waters with their own farming sim, We Farm. If you thought We Rule was the developer’s answer to the Facebook farming phenomenon, you were only half right.

Everything about We Farm should be immediately familiar to We Rule fans; from the plot of land you are originally assigned, to the farms (called gardens) you have to maintain, to the Gro (think Mojo) you have to purchase to speed up various processes, there is little initial difference between the two games.

The differences become more apparent as you play through the tutorial which quickly progresses you to a level 6 farmer. Building a coop allows you to raise chickens (and later ducks and, I assume, other fowl as you progress in the game) which you must pet to keep happy. This latter innovation brings a simple type of Tamagochi pet management to We Farm, but it remains to be seen if this is developed at later levels in the game. I’m currently building some of the other farm areas available during the early stages in the game, so it remains to be seen what other new features We Farm will surprise me with.

The overall presentation of We Farm is, if you can believe it, even more cartoonish and exaggerated than We Rule, and the sound effects and music complement this approach perfectly, with frequent interludes of hayseed, down home banjos and harmonicas. It definitely has its charms, but will fans of We Rule want to build a similar mini-society in a similar way? The two games are very much alike.

We Farm is currently available in Canada. Look for it to hit the US iTunes store soon.