farming

Almost every week for the last few years, it seems, I've gotten a press release or a pitch touting some company's great new Facebook games network or kids' virtual world.

And why not? Companies like Zynga and Playfish are making money hand over fist with their collections of massively popular social games, and 2D Flash games aimed at children like Club Penguin, Webkinz, Habbo Hotel, and others have garnered vast amounts of virtual world investment dollars in recent years.

But to someone who cut his virtual world teeth on more immersive, 3D environments like There and Second Life, these never-ending announcements of new companies trying to jump on the social gaming bandwagon have left me with one nagging question: Where is the innovation?

To find the answer, one has only to do what investigative journalists were always trained to do: follow the money. But while Facebook games like FarmVille and Who Has the Biggest Brain, and social worlds for kids or teens like Gaia Online make financial sense, they aren't all that satisfying intellectually.

After all, while Second Life had no end of technical problems and was about as inviting to mainstream audiences as obscure European philosophy, it had a complex economy, a deep social structure, sophisticated politics and always seemed, to me, at least, as the jumping off point for truly groundbreaking technology.… Read more

Monday, we wrote about how the HTC Desire's ROM had been hacked into a Nexus One. Aside from Sense UI, one of the added features was Adobe Flash 10.1, which works in the browser to enable Flash content such as videos and games.

Taimur Asad from technology site Redmond Pie shot a video showing the popular Facebook game FarmVille running on the Android smartphone. It appeared to load smoothly, though by his own admission, Asad wasn't quite clued in as to how the game works, which made the demo quite a drag to watch.

If games such … Read more

Farm Craft is an entertaining time-management game in which users must juggle the responsibilities of running a farm, or at least an extremely simplified cartoon version of one. We've seen other games that are very similar to Farm Craft, and we'd say that Farm Craft is about average in terms of quality and fun.

In this rendition of the increasingly popular agricultural fantasy game, our heroine, Ginger, is involved in a battle to save her family's small farm from big agribusiness. What this means for you, the player, is that you're going to spend a lot … Read more

Power company Caithness Energy has given General Electric a $1.4 billion contract to supply wind turbines and 10 years' worth of maintenance for an Oregon wind farm, GE announced Thursday.

The massive 845-megawatt wind farm, Shepherds Flat, will be located near Arlington, Oregon, but span approximately 30 square miles and cover parts of Oregon's Gilliam and Morrow Counties.

GE estimates that it will supply 338 of its 2.5-megawatt wind turbine models to be installed between 2011 and 2012. Although they have been used in Europe and Asia, the company says the Shepherds Flat project will include the … Read more

Zynga, the social-gaming developer behind the wildly popular Facebook game FarmVille, announced on Thursday that it has launched a new game for the social network, this one called PetVille. The news was originally reported on the Games.com blog.

According to the company, PetVille allows Facebook users to "raise, dress, and care for a pet" that they've created. Gamers can also visit friends' in-game houses and "play with their pets to earn coins you can use to make your own house the coolest on the block!"

Although PetVille's userbase pales in comparison to Zynga'… Read more

FarmMania is a hectic time management game in which Anna must help her grandfather save the family farm. By raising produce and livestock and producing other goods, all while racing against the clock, users help Anna earn enough money to make the farm a profitable venture.

The program's graphics are cartoon-style and not particularly impressive, but they're not bad for what they are, and overall the game is fairly attractive. Users start off by planting vegetables, which must be watered, weeded, harvested, and sent into town to be sold. As players advance the game becomes more complex, with … Read more

Painting the Golden Gate Bridge yellow might cause less fuss than trying to install a wind farm off Cape Cod's historic coast.

But when you're trying to build where the wind is strongest or the sun is brightest, you never know what obstacles you may run into.

In Massachusetts, a proposed wind farm called Cape Wind was dealt a blow last Friday that will delay what would be the first offshore wind farm in the U.S. The Massachusetts Historical Commission agreed with local Indian tribes who claim that the location for the wind farm should be considered … Read more

We certainly think that gardening and farming can be a worthwhile endeavor in real life. Farm Mania, however, seems to emphasize the drudgery of farming, the repetitive, tedious chores. Although it's well designed, we found the game to be downright boring.

We've played other games from SpinTop and have typically found them to contain quality graphics, and Farm Mania is no exception. The characters are cartoons with a limited range of motion, but for the most part the program looks good. The premise of Farm Mania is that Anna has gone to help her grandfather on his failing … Read more

Peekaboo Barn is a farm-themed educational game designed for toddlers, from which kids can learn about animal sounds and names. Fittingly for this age group, Peekaboo Barn has a very simple and satisfying schtick: a red barn bounces up and down gently as you hear a muffled animal noise. You tap the barn to open its doors, revealing the now-louder animal. Its name appears, and is also spoken aloud (charmingly, by a fellow toddler in English, or by an adult in Spanish mode).

The game cycles through 10 different farm animals in this way--everything from a cat to a cow … Read more