Okay, I confess: I’ve played a few Facebook social games. For a long time I vowed against these kind of games, because of a long-standing view to not play games meant for the “casual crowd” like my mother. Eventually once I got a Wii a few years ago, I caved in and enjoyed the goofy stuff like Wii Sports Resort. This “relaxing” of playing casual games extended to Facebook and the social games there, thus my really stupid stigma of not playing “casual games” had disappeared, and for a while, was my thing.
My first taste of Facebook games was Wheel of Fortune. I have a bunch of big game show fans on my Facebook friends list, many of whom I’ve known for years, and it makes sense they’d jump on board to the game show games. After getting hounded for requests on Wheel of Fortune, I hopped on and started doing the daily puzzle thing like the rest of my friends.
After a while we all kinda got burnt out and moved on from Wheel. It didn’t help that Wheel was a single player game on Facebook, thus not as exciting to play as the actual TV show. That was the end of that for a while, I stopped playing Facebook games with the exception of contests, such as winning a Def Leppard track pack for Rock Band 3 thanks to a contest program once.
Cut to months later, where I started getting requests for The Price Is Right Slots and Zynga Slingo. At that point, I had not played any Facebook games for several months, and decided that now was the time to scratch that itch again. First with TPIR Slots, then with Zynga Slingo. Now here’s my rough opinions of both.
I’ll get TPIR Slots out of the way: It’s a slot machine based off many pricing games from the long-standing American TV game show The Price Is Right. You start out with a low maximum bet and one slot machine, based off the “Cliff Hangers” pricing game, and level up your way to unlock new slots also based on other pricing games.
Each slot machine has icons based on the TV show or the Pricing Game in question, plus a Wildcard and special tokens. Get a line with 3 pricing game icons, and you receive a token. Get three tokens and play the pricing game for extra chips. There’s also Contestants’ Row (or as it’s called sometimes, “Contestant Row”) tags, getting three of those will get you into a special version of the Contestants’ Row game for more chips.