Yu-Gi-Oh! BAM

Genre: Collectable Card Game
Developer: Konami


The Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise is one that spans two similar, but completely different worlds. The first is a popular anime series for young adults that features colorful characters in a world where simple digital card games affect everyone’s life. The second is a physical card game, categorized by its depth, challenge, and sky-high prices for competitive play. In an attempt to blend both worlds, Yu-Gi-Oh! BAM takes the series to a new social freemium space.

Yu-Gi-Oh! BAMis similar to the original card game in that it borrows card art and concepts, but watered-down mechanics make for a much simpler game. There are no sacrifice summons, spell speed chains, fusions, synchros, or any of the deeper mechanics that the original game offers to be found. Instead, you’ll be playing a title that’s much closer to a modified version of the card game War. Yu-Gi-Oh! BAM might not be the best way to duel, but it's definitely the cheapest

You’ll meet dozens of characters from the animated series across an expansive grid of single-player challenges. There are literally hundreds of unique duels across the entire campaign, spanning several hours to complete. And even if you do, you can always challenge a friend to a game with your own custom deck.

There are three monster/spell zones in Yu-Gi-Oh! BAM (as opposed to five in the original game), and each player brings deck of fifteen cards. Each turn, your hand will fill to a maximum of three cards from the deck. Once both players have selected which zones they want to drop their spells/monsters, tapping the “Bam” button will cause everything to collide head-on.

Long story short, monsters with more attack will destroy the weaker monsters and inflict damage to their opponent’s life points. While spells and effects constantly alter the playing field, the entire game centers on this straightforward mechanic.

In addition to spells and monsters, however, are special one-time use abilities. These range from helpful (“gain 500 life points”) to all-powerful (“destroy all monsters and spells on your opponent’s side of the field”). And it’s here that I realized that abilities are just the tip of a very large microtransaction iceberg.

Yu-Gi-Oh! BAMfunctions under a dangerous “let’s throw in every freemium tactic into one game” strategy, making the game’s currency and development options more complicated than the game itself. I could spend an entire article letting you know about every facet of the freemium model, but I’ll save you the time. Here’s a list of what’s been implemented:

Three different types of currency (all purchaseable), an energy system that locks you out of playing the game for long stretches without paying premium currency, a system that rewards you for bringing more friends into the game, the ability to call on a friend when you need help, and a mission-based level-up system.

Are all of these practices bad? Not at all. In fact, playing through objectives and missions took up more of my time than I ever thought it would. But mashed together, things can get to be a bit of a headache in the long run. For example: most of the game’s best cards are locked behind premium currency. After browsing through the game’s current library, the very best deck would cost you about $60 worth of duel points.

This isn’t uncommon in the physical game (a single card can run as much as $100+ if it’s rare and powerful), but for such a simple digital game, it’s a shame that you can only buy your way into power.

I think my larger problem with the system is just that I never felt compelled to drop any money in the first place. Yu-Gi-Oh! BAMsimply isn’t a deep or competitive card game. As a social title, it provides dozens of hours of entertainment for free, but it lacks the compelling gameplay to make it a game worthy of deeper investment.

All in all, my time with Yu-Gi-Oh! BAMwas enjoyable. Its simplicity and heavy reliance on microtransactions will likely turn hardcore followers of the card game away, but it’s a decent time sink if you’re looking for a quick game to supplement your usual social browsing.

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ChefVille

Genre: Social Games
Publisher: Zynga

ChefVille casts players in the role of a new restaurant owner aiming to make a name for themselves in a small local community. The game begins with players designing their avatar — which may be male or female, and customized with a selection of facial features and clothing — and then introduces the various core concepts of play.

The player’s time in ChefVille will be split roughly equally between finding ingredients and using them to cook various dishes. Each dish requires a specific combination of ingredients, some of which may be found in logical places (bread may be found on a rack outside the town bread store, tomatoes may be found growing in the garden) and others, such as salt, which must be acquired by visiting friends’ restaurants. Once ingredients have been found, the player must use an appropriate item of kitchen equipment to create the dish. Bubbles representing the individual ingredients appear over the player’s head and must be clicked on, then the dish takes a period of real time to cook — though as usual, these tasks may be sped up with hard currency.

Once the dish has been prepared, the player earns points towards “mastery stars” for the dish, and it is served onto one of the restaurant counters. More counters mean more dishes may be served at once, and more mastery stars mean a greater number of servings come from a single cooking action. In an interesting touch — and a nod to the foodie audience Zynga is hoping to court — some dishes unlock a shareable “real-life recipe” upon achieving two mastery stars.

Customer orders can be taken automatically by wait staff or by the player, with the latter option providing more soft currency rewards when the customer pays up and leaves. Wait staff will continue to take orders while the player is not actively playing, allowing for the generation of income even if the player has no energy left to play — assuming they have left some items on their restaurant’s counters, of course.

Over time, the player’s influence in the town expands and various new areas open up, providing access to new ingredients and thus more foods. These shops must either be staffed by friends or populated with game characters, hired using hard currency. Similarly, constructing some items — especially those that provide regular income of ingredients — requires the player to either request help for materials from friends or cough up further hard currency. It’s a very conventional system that Zynga has used with great success in its previous titles, so as the saying goes, “if it ain’t broke…”

Social features are a little limited right now aside from the “friend-hiring” and help requests. Gifts may be exchanged between players, and visiting each other’s restaurants provides rare ingredients and currency income, but there is little incentive (or indeed ability) to directly interact with one another. Players are encouraged to visit friends through the reward of “hearts,” the game’s social currency, but there are relatively few items which actually require these. Moreover, hearts can simply be purchased using hard currency, somewhat diminishing their “social” value.

Perhaps more concerning for the game is the fact that a number of bugs and technical issues are evident. When returning from a friend’s restaurant, for example, the game regularly gets stuck in a loading loop requiring the page to be refreshed in order to continue. The interface, too, sometimes has issues when a button is in the same screen location as an interactive item in the game world — several times during testing the game registered a click on the button as a click on the object behind it instead of the button itself, leading to wasted energy points. Flaws like this are unusual to see in Zynga games, which are usually polished to a fine sheen before being released to the public.

ChefVille has some good ideas — the “real-life recipes” function is a particularly nice touch — but the execution needs a little tweaking and refinement before it’s ready for primetime. As such, it’s one to keep an eye on for now and maybe check back in on in a month or two when some of the proposed additional features have been added, and hopefully some of the technical issues have been resolved.

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