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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Top 5 Magazine Web GamesFriday, April 10, 2009 The dirty little secret of Web traffic at some sites is the overwhelming popularity of simple, casual games. Your editors bang their heads against the wall and work late hours to produce peerless prose, and where do many of your visitors end up? Flipping jewels for hours in your “Arcade” section. Truth be told, gaming is among the most popular forms of entertainment media online, and for the middle-aged female demo casual games are like crack. Some service content sites find a quarter of their overall traffic and hang time going to the collections of syndicated card and puzzle time-killers, and so many publishers have learned to love that gaming traffic. While many arcade sections in major media sites continue to be the familiar falling black, shooting marble and color-match games that built the genre, there is some room for magazines to brand a game effectively. We played our way through a number of games to find a few gems worth a replay. Now the state of the art in branded games is pretty low, mind you. Finding credible games (or even risible campy titles) was tough in a realm where syndicators often slap a logo onto a generic Bejeweled clone and call it a day. Worse, there are a lot of poorly tended game gardens out there, folks. More than a few games loaded slowly or not at all. And very few sites do much to leverage the popularity of the gaming sections by pushing other content into the mix. Gaming remains a bit of a ghetto on sites, even if it is well-trafficked. So here are our Top 5 magazine-branded games. 1. Seventeen Editor’s Assistant: Ok, we have played Halo 2 against the pros online. We have done things in Grand Theft Auto IV we would never tell our mothers. We have cramped up from fevered Rock Band strumming. But scheduling the calls, photographer shoots and crises in this task management game is daunting. Set at Seventeen's  office, you have to keep your editor’s day-timer straight. You dress up your avatar first and then start responding to all the modern communications tools that overwhelm a dutiful assistant. It is like dressing up Barbie and then consigning her to hell…stylish hell.2. Cosmopolitan Makeup Mah-Jongg. Sometimes a branded version of a familiar old game play actually works. In this case the matching tiles challenge is re-skinned with tweezers and eyelash curlers instead of Mah-Jongg suits and you play against the clock. We guess you are late for the party or something. For a bit of extra challenge, different tiles have higher and lower points. We haven’t figured out the scoring system yet, however. Why is a bottle of perfume worth less than a blush brush? And it goes without saying that most guys should avoid this game. There are objects here that are unidentifiable to us, but look downright medieval. 3. Playboy’s Dancing Girls: The name tells it all, and the fact that you don’t even have to play this game to enjoy it .jpg) tells you even more. A four-screen video console runs video of dancing models in inappropriate street attire dancing different steps, You click on the one who is strutting to the “Monkey,” “Egyptian,” Twist,” etc. We think you get points for right answers, but frankly we stopped caring too soon into it to know. We think the designers stopped caring too. The game is introduced by a cheesily animated talking head of the young Hef and a voice that doesn’t even try to mimic the legendary publisher. Did we mention there are half-clad dancing girls? 4. ELLEgirl Style School: One of several interactive tutorials on style, the Style School lets you choose your wardrobe and then gives feedback on your selections. Kudos to ELLEgirl for making games into something a bit more thoughtful and instructive than the usual fare. Although we suspect a bit of grade inflation going on here. We trashed a few models and still came up with grades of B and “good effort…but” results. Still, there is good advice here. This fella won’t be mixing a green sage green handbag with his skinny jeans again. That's for sure. 5. Combine Combat: Years after its release, Agriculture.com’s simple arcade game remains one of the few b2b online games around, and it still holds up. You try to clear a field with your combine before the computer-controlled  rival. There are several points of brilliance here. The John Deere-sponsored game uses Deere logos as power-ups and has you collect their new products as bonus points, all the while informing you of their product benefits. And then there is the ambient music (think Terminator for farm equipment) and background bird noises. We need more b2b games with this much attention to detail...and raw combat among professionals. There must be some uproarious game notions lurking somewhere in the minds of waste management or medical device trade publishers. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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