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Bejeweled Blitz, the Facebook version of PopCap's popular gem-swapping game -- gives players 60 seconds to score as many points as possible before the time runs out. The kicker is -- matching three games of the same color or more isn't second nature to everyone -- so if you're a slow on the draw and want to beat your friends' high scores, these six tips (courtesy of the game's official Facebook page) will help you go from a match-three newbie to a jewel-busting junkie.
1. Try to keep your speed bonus up at all times. With a maxed-out speed bonus every move is worth 1250 points!
2. Multiplier gems apply not only to matches, but also to your current speed bonus. For example, with a x3 multiplier, each match made with a full speed bonus would be worth 3750 points. So once you've established a respectable multiplier, maintaining your speed bonus is extremely valuable.
3. Keep an eye out for bigger matches. Look for the opportunity to match 4 or 5 gems. This will create Hypercubes, Flame and Star Gems. These special pieces are instrumental in creating large explosions, which will earn you lots of points, more chances at extra Multiplier Gems and will help mix up the board, potentially making it easier to find new matches. Lost opportunities mean lost points.
4. Matches made lower on the board are more likely to generate cascades. If you're finding it hard to make matches lower on the board, try creating and using a Hypercube or Star Gem.
5. When you earn a Hypercube, don't waste it on the first color you see. Try to use it to on the color with the most gems on the screen. Or if you have any multiplier gems on the screen, consider matching it to the color of that gem.
6. The score chart provided on the Game Over screen is a great place to discover strategies of your own. Make sure you take the time to review this chart for your highest scoring games to learn the secrets of your own success.
In the past week, flowers finally bloomed in FarmVille, bringing a substantial shift to the biggest cash crops in the game. Sunflowers and Lillies have joined the list of the top 10 most profitable cash crops. Daffodils will bring in the least cash and Lavender. Tulips and Roses hang out somewhere in between. Below find a chart, created by self-described "FarmVille nerd" Matt Blank.
Matt also did a ton of number crunching and came up with a more detailed chart -- complete with profit per hour (you know, just in case you were wondering). You can check out the complete profit chart here.
As for flowers, there are five new blooms that can be planted -- Daffodils, Pink Roses, Red Tulips, Lavender, Sunflowers and Lillies. Each flowers takes one or two days to harvest and for the money-conscious farmer -- Sunflowers will bring in the most amount of cash.
After playing FarmVille, Cafe World or Mafia Wars, players start to see a pattern to the games that Zynga makes. Yet, the company's Roller Coaster Kingdom game looks, plays and operates quite differently than its super popular peers. To help shorten the learning curve to fun, here are five must-know tips on turning your pleasant park into a big money venue.
1 - Booking Guests
Unlike other games, Roller Coaster Kingdom's paying patrons just don't show up to hand you money. You have to book tours in order to bring people to your park. Of course, it takes time from booking until they show up (from a few minutes, a few hours and up to two days). Your available coins also determine which tours you can book too. Just remember to venture back to your park when the tour arrives to welcome them to the park. If you fail to welcome them, you'll lose the patrons, their money and the cost of booking the tour.
2 - Rides
Making money from park attendees is done by thrilling them on rides. The bigger the ride, the more it costs to ride. So a House of Spooks (which costs 5,000 coins) brings in 3 coins per rider, the Tombstone Coaster (which costs 7,500 coins) gives more at 5 coins per rider.
3 - Food and Drink
The other way of making money in Roller Coaster Kingdom is by selling food and drinks. As you may already know, amusement parks gouge hungry patrons and that's true in the game too. They're a lower cost option for park owners when compared to rides and don't suffer from the capacity issues that rides do. Full on restaurants like Tooter's are even a higher value opportunity that gets you 8 coins per patron at level 1. Sadly, it costs 75k to get to level 2 (11 coins per patron).
4 - Adding Neighbors
Roller Coaster Kingdom relies on the help of others in order to obtain more items. Asking your Facebook friends to be your neighbors also adds a steady stream of income as your neighbors do better, you can receive bonuses in the thousands. So rather than wait until the next bus tour, you can use the bonus to upgrade your rides, add new rides or give patrons new food and drink options. Skip the decorations early on in your game since you'll need that for upgrades and rides that bring in money.
5 - Upgrade When You Can
Each ride in the park comes with a number for Excitement, Capacity and Ticket Price. More exciting rides create more demand and if those rides are upgraded, you'll gain more money. It's also a good way to maximize your rides since upgrades often are cheaper than buying a new ride.
While many decry social games as not being social enough, one aspect of several recent experiences in Café World has been to hire a friend as an in-game laborer. Making a buddy or friend serve food might be humiliating enough, Zynga's newest game, Roller Coaster Kingdom, lets you hire your Facebook friends to sell food, run rides and more while wearing humiliating themed costumes. From cowboys (sorry Libe) to walking candy corn (sorry Robin) to a wimpy tiger outfit (Al, tiger print is so you), you can test the limits of your true friendship bonds by placing them in outfits that your real-life friends might defriend you for.
Just add a new booth or ride and click Hire a Friend to start humiliating today!
If you're looking for ideas on seating arrangements for your place of business in Cafe World -- there's not a lot of advice to be found. We know that it's important to trap your waiters so they'll automatically serve and bus tables, but after employing that technique, we started to think about the best way to arrange our tables to maximize customers (and dollars). We scoured the Web to find some inspiration and we found two that seem like they'll deliver more bang for your buck.
Using blankPixels arrangement, this cafe can seat around 25 customers, giving them easy access to all of the seats. Obviously, this is a larger cafe, so players will have to level up before pulling this off.
Douglas' Cafe (below) shows how you can set up three rows of tables the entire length of the restaurant to seat 30 people. Since there's no room for customers to walk around the tables, though, it's important to place doors (three total) along each table.
Meez, a teen-focused social network where players create avatars and chat, play games, etc, is making the move to MySpace. In one week, Meez Nation will launch on the popular social network with an experience that seems like a more sophisticated version of Zynga's YoVille.
In the game, users will create an avatar and then travel to their customizable "Roomz" and to social spaces called "hangouts" in different neighborhoods where they can share music, videos, have dance contests, among other activities.
Meez Nation will be free to play, but will be supported with virtual currency or "Coinz," which can be used on fancier items for their Roomz or access to exclusive neighborhoods. Players will also be able to buy pre-paid "Meez Coin Cards" at big box retailers, such as Target and Best Buy, which will allow players to avoid making online purchases and, alternately, a way to gift Coinz to friends and family who are Meez devotees.
Unlike many of the social games currently on Facebook and MySpace, Meez will have advertising integrated into the game, offering "brands who use the Meez platform to reach teens an even greater community for spreading brand awareness through interactive advertising," says Meez CEO John Cahill.
Let's hope the game isn't overrun by advertising along the lines of PC game Second Life, where you can barely make a move without being bombarded with brands, etc. We'll pass along more information about the advertising and more when we have it. In the meantime, head to the official site get a better feel of the Meez Nation experience.
Machinarium is a stylized point & click game that will appeal to fans of the so-called "room escape" games -- games where the goal is to solve puzzles to escape a room or environment. This game stars a cute robot that is tossed into a junkyard and looking for a way out. Players must help it escape by clicking around a bizarre world of metal and machinery, collecting and using junk to solve puzzles to move from place to place.
This game's low-fi, steam punk art style makes this game extra special -- making each environment look like a piece of art. All dialog in the game is pictorial and appears in thought bubbles above character's heads.
If you've played Machinarium, you'll also notice that the game is hard. Some of the puzzles had us clicking around randomly, searching for clues. More than once, we consulted the hints (there's one hint per puzzle) and played the quirky shooting mini-game to unlock the in-game walkthrough.
So, if you're here looking for help -- don't feel bad. We needed it too. Fortunately, we found this walkthrough video that shows all of the solutions for the puzzles in the free demo. (So, don't watch all of it, unless you're OK with spoilers).
Next time you take your pet for a walk around the Pet Society neighborhood, you'll notice that the trees have lost their green leaves and now look downright spooky.
Turns out these gnarled trees are not just for looks -- run through them and they'll toss out coins, in addition to a variety of Halloween treats, including candy corn, brown and orange candy canes and the occasional gummi ghost and gummi eyeball. Once you pick up the pilfered treats, they will appear in your pet's inventory chest, where they can be eaten, gifted, used for fishing or sold for a measly 1 coin. My pet Bluer prefers to eat half and give the other half away. You know what they say, sharing is caring...
Building your mafia empire takes more than just adding more muscle to your mob. In Mafia Wars, you'll need to buy property and create buildings in order to make serious cash that you'll use to buy new properties and equip your mafia in the New York episode of the game. So we compiled the smartest tips, used by the pros to help turn your fledgling troop of hoodlums into an empire.
1) Buy 10
While you can't start off the game by buying 10 of everything, each purchase that you make increases the value of the property. So if you buy a property for $1,000, your second might cost $1,100. So say you bought 10 Abandoned Lots one at a time? $1,200, $1,300, $1,400 and so on. Purchasing in this way would make $10,000 worth of abandon lots sell for $15,400. Or, you could just save up, then buy 10 properties at once (the highest amount allowed) for $10,000, without the $5,400 markup.
2) Mafia Mike's
Every mafia needs a bar to meet in and purchasing each one is a privilege in Mafia Wars that only comes when you add new Mafia Members. The bars are invaluable since they also turn a tidy profit early on in the game. For instance, our 11th Mafia Mike's will cost us a mere $15,200 with a return of $288,000. That's a lot of drinking and a worthwhile investment.
3) Protect Your Property
After your build up your empire, you'll be given the option to protect them. Protecting properties may not sound like fun but it's an effective strategy for protecting your money making buildings. Given the removal of the rob option in the game, which allowed fellow players to rob your properties in order to loot and topple them, protection might not seem worth the high cost. But given that the robbing feature may return, protecting now may make for a safer tomorrow.
4) Choose Mogul
When starting a game with the strategy that you want to be a big money earner, choose to play a mogul. The two other types in the game, Fearless and Maniac, must wait up to the three hours to make a return on their properties. Moguls, being the busy types that they are, make a profit every 53 minutes.
5) Trade in Reward Points
Can't wait to build up your property? Then you can use your Reward Points (earned or purchased) to gain money from Mafia Wars' Godfather.
No one every said being a restaurant owner would be easy. You have to put in a lot of hard hours, and follow a few rules to go from food noob to the Gordon Ramsey of the Cafe World set. Actually, earning experience points, aka Cafe Points, in Cafe World can be easy, provided you're willing to put in the time climb the virtual chef-ing ladder. Here's six surefire ways to turn your cafe into a happening hot spot.
1. Cook Chips & Guacamole and Bacon Cheeseburgers -- lots of them. Chips and Guacamole only take three minutes to cook and Bacon Cheeseburgers take five minutes. That means you can buy them, cook them quickly, then serve them while starting another round, racking up 4 and 7 experience points respectively. Keep doing this for a solid hour and you'll gain between 60-84 experience points.
2. Don't Let Your Food Spoil. Be Vigilant. Food takes a certain amount of time to cook and to rot -- so you need to be aware when your dishes will be ready to serve. If the food spoils, you will not only lose the dish (and the money it cost to buy it), but you will not gain any experience points, key to levelling up fast. We recommend setting an alert in Microsoft Outlook or on your phone to remind you to check on dishes in the game.
3. Don't Use All Stoves to Cook Higher Level Foods. As you start to cook foods that take longer (1 day, 2 days); it's important to leave one or two stoves open for faster items, like the bacon cheeseburgers. Then you'll be able to gather experience points quickly, but also benefit from the experience gained cooking items that take longer.
4. Visit Your Cafe World Friends Daily. All of Them. This is the biggest no-duh tip in the book; if you visit your Cafe World friends' restaurants and try their daily specials, you will be rewarded with five (5) experience points. You can only get this bonus once a day -- so be sure to check in with all of them every day.
5. Look Out for Random Requests for Help. Sometimes during the game, other Cafe owners will randomly pop in and ask for help. You have a limited amount of time to accept their request , and if you decide to help out, you will score five (5) additional experience points.
6. Buying New Restaurant Items Does Not Yield Experience Points. You can buy as many Ming Chairs and Checkered Floor tiles you want, but it will not give you any additional experience points. If you want to power level, we recommend using the most basic chairs, tables and then skip the decoration and use the money to buy more stoves, serving areas and, of course, food.
Cafe World from Zynga exploded onto the social gaming scene last week, and in a matter of days has managed to gain 1.9 million followers. Much like Playfish's Restaurant City, this game puts you in charge of a small restaurant where you cook and serve customers for cash and experience points, which are both required to upgrade your cafe.
When getting started with Cafe World, here are six tips that will put you on the road to culinary greatness.
1. To gain experience quickly, cook as many bacon cheeseburgers as possible. They take five minutes to complete and every time you complete a batch, you rake in 7 experience points total. Repeat. All day long.
2. Before going to bed (in real life), put on a 12-hour dish, such as the Triple Berry Cheesecake, so you'll wake up in the morning with a fully cooked course ready to serve.
3. Cooking dishes that take a longer to cook will help you make cash fast. Just be sure to set a reminder to check back when it's done or it will go bad, and you'll have to start over from scratch. (That's a bummer, trust us).
4. To keep your restaurant rating from dropping when you're not playing, close your shop by removing the doors. To remove the doors, click on the chair-shaped 'Customize' icon in the game's menu. Then click and drag your door(s) off the screen, and they'll disappear. When you're ready to reopen, click the 'Customize' icon, and place the door(s) again.
5. Minimize the amount of space the waiter will have to walk to serve customers. Forming a U-shape with the tables -- the open end facing the stoves and serving counters -- is an easy way to pull this off. See image above as an example.
6. To lower the amount of customers that leave, use dividers and other obstacles as a way to slow down their walk to the table, giving you more time to prep food and serve more customers. (Thanks ITZLOGIC, for the tip)
Have any more must-read tips for Cafe World? Let us know in the comments below.
Like you, we've spent many hours blasting colored stones in PopCap's addicting game, Zuma. If you want to take your high score over the edge, however, follow these eight tips compiled by our staff.
One of our favorite tips: be sure to shoot coins, which make random appearances in the game. If you hit one, your score will quickly multiply. This is harder than it sounds, because the coins often appear behind a line of stones, which means you have to wait until you have a clear shot to score the extra points. Better yet, create your own clearing by using a rapid double-tapping technique (i.e. clear out a line of colored stones that are blocking your patch. That creates a temporary gap, which gives you a fraction of a second to shoot and hit the coin.) It takes practice to pull off this technique, but your score will thank you.
Click through the gallery below to read all eight tips & tricks!
Welcome to the Zuma tips gallery. We hope these tips will help improve your Zuma game and help you put up high scores.
The keys to being successful at the game are accuracy and efficiency. The game starts out slow and forgiving, so take time to fire intelligently. Watch what happens each time a group of balls is destroyed.
The frog houses two balls at a time. The ball in his mouth is the ball "in the chamber." The color on the top of his head represents the color of the ball that is "on deck." The two can be switched at any time by clicking on the right mouse button. Use this to your advantage at times when the second color would be more useful.
Each level has a target score represented by the orange progress bar at the top of the screen. When the orange bar is filled (it will turn green), "Zuma" is achieved. The state of "Zuma" means that the balls will slow down and roll backward temporarily if they are further than 50 percent along the curve. Use this time wisely to assess the situation and ready the best strategy, like setting up combos to clear the balls quickly.
Another big score is the chain bonus. If five or more subsequent shots each generate an explosion, this is considered a chain. Starting with the fifth, a bonus is added for each subsequent explosion. This is the easiest way to generate bonuses, but it also has the weakest point pay-off. The best time to employ this method is on the levels with a double curve. There are two independent curves generated their own ball clusters and, generally, there is much more curve exposed, so there is a better possibility of keeping the chain alive.
Balls of a like color attract. If a group of balls explodes, the remaining balls on either end of the explosion will draw toward each other if they are the same color. This is how to making combos. If those two remaining balls draw together and another group of three or more is formed, it will explode, creating a combo. Two or more explosions generated by a single shot are considered a combo. With each explosion, the bonus becomes greater and greater.
Shooting coins is always the best way to get points. It takes the least amount of time and has the highest yield. There is a trick to shooting coins, as they always lie behind balls on the curve. Opportunities to hit these coins usually present themselves randomly. A coin behind only one line of balls is easy to hit with a double tapping technique.
The final bonus is the gap bonus. This bonus is achieved when shooting through a gap in the balls to cause an explosion. The smaller the gap, the higher the bonus. Firing to create an explosion on the closest part of the curve and then firing quickly at the balls behind the gap you just created is the best way to score big. Watch for opportunities behind two (or more) gaps. They don't come around often, but the point yield is such that you won't want to miss it.
The single most important reason to collect as many points as possible is obtaining extra lives. An extra life is earned at 50,000 points. A good way to gather points is with speed. The faster you clear a level, the better chance you have of receiving a bonus. Each level has a pre-determined "Ace" time. Beating this time can bring in a bonus as high as 25,000 points. The best way to finish quickly is to garner as many points as possible as quickly as possible. Usually a combination of shooting gems, gaps, and chains is the best method. If the board is a double curve, take the chain bonus as far as possible while hitting any gems you can, while also paying attention to any gaps you create.
, has arrived for PC and Mac. Right now, the game is exclusively available at publisher PopCap's site for $19.99, where you can also download a free demo as well.
Maybe all this technology is making us yearn for the simpler days -- Facebook has recently seen a boom of farm-themed social games. Part time-management, part strategy, these addicting games have us planting and harvesting crops week after week. Who knew we had such a green thumb?
Here's the quick and dirty on five of the most popular farm games on Facebook, along with our recommendations for which ones you should invest your time in.
Farmville
Features: - 2D 'farmer' avatar that you can customize. - You can trees or livestock to your friends as gifts. - Earn money to buy fences, hay, barns to customize your farm. *Most of the games we listed have this feature - Each crop takes a different number of hours/days to ripen, but if you wait too long to harvest, the crop will die. - Wide variety of animals, each produces its own product (milk from cows, wool from sheep, etc). - Friends leaderboard so you can compare your progress. *All of the games have this feature.
Recommended: Yes! We play this one a ton at Games.com offices. The customization options means we can design our farms just the way we want them, and the addition of farm livestock is charming (and let's face it, realistic!). Some of the wait times for certain crops are a bit long (4 days is about the upper limit), and you'll have to re-plow fallow land after harvesting, so the 'quicker' crops end up turning a smaller profit. But overall Farmville is cute, addictive and well-made.
If you've played any time management games (usually played by clicking on items and assigning them to actions in order to meet goals in a given number of minutes) on our site, chances are you've played at least one of these following games. The best time management games, I've found, revolve around food -- maybe it's because the genre is conducive to the food service industry, or maybe it's because well, who doesn't love food?
Here are the top five food-related time management games you can play right now on Games.com!
The story: A burger machine from space lands in your restaurant, spitting out patties, buns, cheese and assorted fast food goods. Your job? Rush to assemble customer's orders as fast as you can.
Our take: Burger Shop is super addictive and easy to learn. It gets hectic once the range of items available opens up, but isn't that the fun of time management games?
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We've been writing up tons and tons of posts on Cafe World and the shear amount of things we've written is enough for us to round up the top posts on Cafe World.
Bejeweled Blitz, the Facebook version of PopCap's popular gem-swapping game -- gives players 60 seconds to score as many points as possible before the time runs out. The kicker is -- matching three games of the same color or more isn't second nature to everyone -- so if you're a slow on the draw and want to beat your friends' high scores, these six tips (courtesy of the game's official Facebook page) will help you go from a match-three newbie to a jewel-busting junkie. 
The other way of making money in Roller Coaster Kingdom is by selling food and drinks. As you may already know, amusement parks gouge hungry patrons and that's true in the game too. They're a lower cost option for park owners when compared to rides and don't suffer from the capacity issues that rides do. Full on restaurants like Tooter's are even a higher value opportunity that gets you 8 coins per patron at level 1. Sadly, it costs 75k to get to level 2 (11 coins per patron). 
Each ride in the park comes with a number for Excitement, Capacity and Ticket Price. More exciting rides create more demand and if those rides are upgraded, you'll gain more money. It's also a good way to maximize your rides since upgrades often are cheaper than buying a new ride.
Meez, a teen-focused social network where players create avatars and chat, play games, etc, is making the move to MySpace. In one week, Meez Nation will launch on the popular social network with an experience that seems like a more sophisticated version of Zynga's YoVille. 
1. Cook Chips & Guacamole and Bacon Cheeseburgers -- lots of them. Chips and Guacamole only take three minutes to cook and Bacon Cheeseburgers take five minutes. That means you can buy them, cook them quickly, then serve them while starting another round, racking up 4 and 7 experience points respectively. Keep doing this for a solid hour and you'll gain between 60-84 experience points.
specials, you will be rewarded with five (5) experience points. You can only get this bonus once a day -- so be sure to check in with all of them every day.
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