Playfish's Hotel City - New York & Night View Background

The Background feature for Hotel City is finally out! Well it is not that easy to get these new beautiful background (of course) and some efforts from friends will be necessary to complete the items needed for each of the background.

The New York background has more requirements compared to the Night View background. For both, the items (also known as luxuries) could be obtained (once a day) from visiting a friend where a shopping bag icon is placed against the friend's avatar. A second way is for friends to send you the required items. Of course, there is always a way to meet these new requirements by using (and paying) for Playfish cash. It cost about 50-60+ Playfish cash to get the background.

Is it worth it to get the new background given all these efforts? Yes I certainly think so. Take a look at the New York background (seen from the Bell boy hotel) and I will say this is a much welcomed alternative to the original one.

So yes to those who are working hard to get the required items, all the best for your efforts! After the New York and Night View backgrounds (33 & 25 luxuries required respectively), Playfish will likely release the San Francisco background.

There is some level of satisfaction to see the required items being completeted, and I guess that adds a needed level of re freshness to a somewhat routine gameplay.

So do help out other players to get their luxuries and in return those who help out will also have luxuries from Hotel City.

See related:
Playfish: Hotel City - New City Scape & Exterior Deco
Playfish: Hotel City - Ghost in the Room New feature

Restaurant City - Sushi Bar

The Sushi Bar of Restaurant City is old news, but heh I just managed to get my Sushi Bar! The Sushi Bar is free, but the player will need to level up the salmon sashimi to level 10 before it is made available. I'm not sure why is it called Sushi Bar when it is more commonly known as Sushi Belt?

With the Sushi Bar, two diners can eat (standing) at the bar and earn coins for the player, i.e. no need for waiter or cook. However, the dishes displayed are those Japanese dishes with level 10, and thus it will be a long way to go before my Sushi Bar is filled with the dishes.

So here's how the Sushi Bar looks like. I'm placing it in the garden for an outdoor sushi experience. The Sushi Bar has the additional function for the player to check on the level of the various dishes that can be placed on the Sushi Bar.

Restaurant City is now 24 Hours!

Restaurant City is now 'open' for 24 hours! Well that simply means the 'workers' in the Restaurant City can operate in 24 hours shift rather than the original 4 hours slot. That is a very useful change, since there is now less need to keep tab on the shift every few hours.

There are actually a number of 'options' to choose from, i.e. in similar fashion with Hotel City where the longer shifts cost more. This is qutie different from the original version where workers 'work' for free. The 30 mins shift is still free, and the actual 24 hours shift can only be unlocked with the player submitting the email address.

For players who gave their email addresses, the Restaurant City will reward them with a new stove design! - Pocketwatch Stove.

Another innovation is the use of a '1 click' step to operate the restaurant, i.e. no more employee by employee switching of roles and rest. For a start, the plyer will need to assign roles to each of the employee.

Well, if you feel that the Restaurant City now requires more coins, the good news is that the game rewards players with more coins too! The slot machines and the trees (when shaken) give more coins.

I am actually glad that Playfish introduces more changes and new look & feel to the game (other than new dishes), since Restaurant City has become somewhat stale of late. Good work Playfish!
For those who select shifts, there will also be this reward!

Playfish: Hotel City - New City Scape & Exterior Deco

A hotel needs to be set against a nice backdrop of city scape, and the hotel will look especially nice at night with all the city lights. So that is what Playfish's Hotel City is going to do - introduce the 'New Locations - New Background'. So Hotel City players can now select their favourite city backdrop. I wonder what backdrops will be available - sea side resort, neon night life, mountainous scenery ... or?

For a start Hotel City already introduced exterior decorations, i.e. decorations now just for the rooms but for the exterior of the building as well. I guess that will merge closely with what the player select as the background for the city - for example, nice pine trees for the mountainous settings, or fountains / park chairs for a neon lightlife backdrop.

Oh well, I guess we will now in the coming week or so.
Note: The background feature is out! See the related post (link below)!

See related:
Playfish: Hotel City - New York & night View Background

Playfish: Hotel City - Ghost in the Room! New feature

Over the past week, Hotel City has introduced more interactive features into the game to encourage players to stay longer per play.

Hotel City has allowed for a 'concierge' phone where the residents of the hotel can call up the players when they experience discomfort in the room, and such discomfort includes ghost!

Well the more mundane discomfort will be that the room is too hot, too cold, a fire breakout, and finally the ghost. I've not come across other concierge calls yet. It will be nice to introduce the request for food, cleaning ...etc.

By clicking on the room (the player got to first find the affected room amidst the many many rooms), there will be coins provided as rewards. This can happen to both the player's own hotels as well as the other friends' hotels.

I wonder what else will Hotel City introduce next to induce a longer stay in the game.

Cafe World - Finally, The Super Stove & Spice Rack!

Finally I have the super stove in Cafe World, where the dish can be prepared via a single click! It was a rather tedious exercise, where everyday I need to keep an eye lookout for those Cafe World alerts in the Facebook that free parts are available.

All in all there were 40 parts to the super stove and yes I resorted to buying some parts. Actually it wasn't that big a deal to cook a dish via a single click. It saves some time which is true, but given that I have many other normal stoves, I'll still be spending a lot of time clicking on the normal stoves for cooking. Oh well, just for the novelty of having a super stove I guess.

For those who want to have more than 1 super stove, Cafe World has the option where the player needs to buy a new stove frame, and repeat the entire process of accumulating the different stove parts again. Nope, 1 is enough for me.

Once the super stove is completed, the player need to retrieve it from the storage, and the super stove does count towards the existing stove limit, i.e. it is nto a loophole to get more stoves.

Actually, I think the spice rack (introduced earlier) is much more useful since it allows the player to use spice and accelerate the cooking time, or to 'cure' spoiled dishes. The parts to the spice racks are easier to get, but yupz I spent 1 Cafe World dollar on the racks as well.

I'm not sure what other new gimmicks will be introduced in Cafe World, but hopefully the new gimmicks will nto require as much tedious accumulation of parts again.

Rubble Trouble by Nitrome

After getting bored with yet more social games, I decided to try out the good ol' single player flash games. There are pretty good ones like Samorost, Machinarium, Bomba etc. One can easily find good games on Miniclip and one of the latest top games is Rubble Trouble by Nitrome.

Nitrome has many good games, including Bomba (which I covered earlier) and another game involving dismantling of ice pieces. Well the current Rubble Trouble game is also about dismantling of items, in this case it's buildings and the job centres around demolition using various tools.

The Rubble Trouble game play is very simple. It's just a mouse and click game where the player select given tools to destroy the required building(s) in a fixed period of time. There is ample time for most of the levels. The tools are pretty self explanatory and there will be a simple description tied to each tool. For example, using a canon ball tool means the player can position a canon ball firer and click to fire the ball at various angle. Clicking longer means there will be more power stored in the fired ball. Of course, the power bar for the canon ball is reactivated under prolong holding of mouse button.

There are many other tools and here's the description for some of them:

Nitro - area effect bombs with small radius. The 1st tool for demolition.

Grabber - A 'grab' machine to hold on to a piece of the building. Very useful to move pieces in order to avoid damaging surrounding important buildings.

Missiles - tough to control but useful.

Airstrike - carpet destruction with limited range but easy to use.

Chain gun - well, chain gun! A rotational military grade weapon and now it is used for demolition.

At the end of each level, the player can submit the high score and be compared against other players' scores for some competitive play. The fun part is not in the competitive play (I feel) but in completing each level of the puzzle.

There are other elements introduced into the game, for example some levels will include surrounding important buildings (e.g. glasshouse) and the player must not cause the destruction of these buildings. Another element is the trapped characters in the buildings and that means players must be careful when demolishing the buildings.

Another aspect of the Rubble Trouble that is interesting is the simple and fun dialogue at the beginning of the levels. These dialogues introduce the levels and make the game more personable. The Ivan's and the Larry's of Rubble Trouble do bring a smile to the face while the player tries hard to complete the levels.

I've only managed to finish up to level 23 out of the 30 levels and yes do give the Rubble Trouble game a try!