Tag: Farmville »

With iOS4 and the iPhone 4 hitting this week, it's not so surprising that we've seen tons of new apps. This week's Friday Five features a number of big-name efforts, many of which highlight the features of the iPhone 4 and iOS4. Let's get started!

Farmville
The productivity-sucking, Facebook-spawned plague has been unleashed upon the App Store masses. Someone say a prayer for us all. The iOS version is supposed to sync with the Facebook version, so if you already have a farm, don't worry about maintaining two! Just like on Facebook, you "grow" both plants and livestock and earn coins and XP for your troubles. This app also includes in-app purchase options for both coins and premium "Farm Cash."

Eliminate:GunRange
I don't know why Eliminate:GunRange is missing spaces in the title. I can tell you, however, that it's ngmoco's brand-new, iPhone 4-exclusive title. A spin-off of the popular Eliminate FPS series, GunRange is designed to take advantage of the iPhone 4's gyroscope and Retina display. The game drops you into one of three shooting ranges and lets you blast away at targets using any of twelve weapons. Support for the iPhone 3GS and additional content are promised in the future.

Windows Live Messenger
Despite the whole Apple/Microsoft battle, Microsoft has apparently seen fit to release a messenger client for its Windows Live service. It's pretty much your typical IM app, with hooks in most major social networks (Flickr, Facebook, Youtube, MySpace, etc). In addition to chatting and sharing photos, you can access your Hotmail email account from within the app.

NPR Music
NPR is a wonderful, wonderful organization. It's simply incredible how much they give away, for free. NPR Music follows their long-since-released NPR News app and gives you access to NPR's musical selections. Listeners can choose from Classical, Hip-Hop, Jazz, and more. Live streams from over 75 public radio stations are available. Folks with new iPhones can take advantage of backgrounding, listening to music even when the app is closed.

DC Comics
DC makes its iPhone debut with many familiar comics: Batman, Green Lantern, the Justice League, Sandman, and more. The app itself is something like a comic-store, from which you can download individual comics via in-app purchase. Most comics run $1.99 apiece. (A few freebies are available, too.) For viewing comics, there's either a full-page view or a Guided Reading option; with the DC app, all of your comics are contained in one simple app. Comic lovers should at least download the free app and check out the full selection.

Update 5/1/2010: gokbert is our winner -- check your email and respond and we'll send you the iTunes gift card code.

We Rule from ngmoco:) is one of the more popular community trading games. A genre of game most popularized by Farmville. This type of game revolves around building things and trading goods and services with other players. In We Rule one of the best ways to gain experience points and in-game currency is to sell and buy services with other players. Both buyers and sellers gain in these transactions.

To sell services, you just need to build buildings that sell goods and services. This is basically any of the buildings other than farms and homes. Users can then come to your kingdom and order from those buildings just by touching them. This is the same way that you can order services from other kingdoms. Visit other kingdoms and look for open signs to see what's available.

So let's use this post as a place to share each our Plus+ Network usernames so that we can start trading with each other. The idea being that we build a community within the We Rule community all trading with each other to build our XP as fast as possible. I'll start, I'm jeff148apps.

Add your Plus+ Network username below, in the comments. We can then all add each other as friends and start building up experience points and gold. To make it a little more enticing, we'll pick a random user from below for a $15 iTunes Gift card so you can buy more mojo in the game. We'll give away the gift card next weekend.

Also, make sure you have the latest version installed. Ngmoco recently fixed some bugs related to open businesses that should make things easier for us all.