Things I am playing:

- MouseHunt: It’s my holidaytime game, it seems – I have been playing it regularly for the last couple of winters but I wander off in January. It works really well with my day-job, though, so I may keep at it. It’s been updated regularly and there’s a ton of content, in addition to the holiday events.

- Levyn Light: This one’s due a review. It’s from the makers of MouseHunt and is pretty much the same style, but is a fantasy-themed game. Well-thought-out content and decent, although imperfect, gameplay.

I had spent a bunch of time playing Farmville, Gardens of Time, and Castleville, and I may come back to them, but they don’t run very well on my netbook so until the new computer arrives I’m letting them go. (And once the new computer arrives I may be playing full-scale games for a while.)

Anyway, still alive! Hope everyone’s holidays went well, and happy new year!

In the meantime, I’m going to catch up to some of my email and take a look at some games that developers have wanted me to point out. I’ll put together some full review pages for the ones that really catch my eye.

The first one I’m pulling up from the depths is StreetRally. It’s a car racing game, as you might have guessed – you pick out your car, upgrade parts, and race around street courses. The racing is handled by the arrow keys – it’s real-time and everything, and performed just fine on my netbook, although it’s top-down which often confused me – when I was driving to the top of the screen, the arrows mapped to the direction I wanted to go, but when I was driving towards the bottom, they were reversed. I would have preferred an absolute direction rather than a relative direction, but I confess to being absolutely terrible at racing games in general.

I’m also planning to pick up some games I reviewed a while ago, and take a new look at them. In the meantime, enjoy your new and improved Facebook feed!

It’s a cute little building game with some interesting tweaks to the usual formula. You start off with your gnome and one helper, and actions take a certain amount of time – the simple ones take 5-15 seconds, the major ones might take hours. As you play, you expand your play area, find more helpers (which increases your capacity to do things) and unlock and complete various quests.

The graphics are generally adorable (disclaimer: I know one of the artists on the project personally and I love her style,) but I’m not super focused on decorating and I’ve been totally, totally stuck on quests for ages because I need items that come very rarely (or cost money) and even when I get them, I haven’t gotten the random success on their use. So my play has dropped way off, and I’m not super thrilled with the game overall. I log in occasionally, though, and maybe I’ll break on through – they did add a way to get the machetes I need via gifting and not just paying money, and that’s a good sign.

The Sims Social: Everyone’s playing this, and there’s a reason. If you liked any of the Sims games, you’ll dig this one. It’s basically a simplified version of The Sims, where your friends are the NPCs. It’s on the spammy side, but so charming that I’ve almost forgiven it.

Empires and Allies: Zynga’s army-building game. It’s a Zynga game – it’s got the city-building you’d expect – even some crop-growing for you farmers – and a simple, well-executed rock-paper-scissors combat game on top.

Pig Up!: This is a very early preview from Popcap, so the game’s fun but simple at this stage. You shoot your pig from a cannon, click to make him flap up and down to catch power-ups and avoid enemies, and try for the longest distance. I’m enjoying it even at this early date, and can’t wait to see where it goes.

Adventure World: Zynga’s newest – think Treasure Isle with more puzzles and less tedium. It’s new but pretty polished out of the gate. Good stuff so far.

There are a bunch more I want to try, and some I want to come back to, and I’ll keep everyone posted!

I’m going to start treating this as a little bit more of a blog – I’m going to chat about what I’m playing and what I think about it in a general sort of way. I will still occasionally do reviews, and I’ll tag blog posts in a way that will attach them to reviews, so you can see my ongoing thoughts about a game – Facebook games change so much over time, and take such an extended amount of real time to get into, that I think this will be more useful in the long run than trying to cover more games in brief.

I’ll be using Twitter to alert people to new posts and probably to make short comments that don’t warrant an entire blog post, and as usual the Facebook page is a great way to keep track of what I’m up to and get a new friend for any game I’m playing.

I’m excited for this new plan! See you around!

- Jeremy

- Prize mice of various degrees of rarity can be caught – they carry King’s Credits, which you can use to buy all sorts of helpful in-game items.
- Catching prize mice is a matter of luck, but you can improve your chances by finding Lucky Coins on regular mice, swapping gifts with your friends, and inviting new folks to play MouseHunt.
- The two super-rare mice, the Leprechaun and the Mobster, drop cash and Super|brie+, respectively. They are very tough to find, and if you find one, you can’t catch another for 90 days.

The MouseHunt team has done a great job providing all the details in their King’s Giveaway news post – check it out!