Latest news with #FarmVille
Buzz Feed
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
40 Extremely Embarrassing Things People Absolutely LOVED 20 Years Ago That I'm Convinced Literally No One Remembers
Around 15 to 20 years ago people loved to... Convince others the iPhone was worth the money by showing them that one app where it looks like you're drinking a beer: And also bust out that one lighter app like it was the most incredible thing ever: Just post the most boring stuff on Facebook: Or the most weirdly intense: Think Chuck Norris jokes were the be-all and end-all of comedy: Watch full-length movies that cost tens of millions of dollars to make on an iPod with a 2-inch screen: Think that talking baby in the E-Trade commercials was the funniest thing they had ever seen: The baby talks, folks. THE BABY TALKS! Think that typing like this meant you were creative: Or this: Or just add Z's to every word for no reason: Take weird pictures of your feet or hands because you all had matching bracelets or shoes: Argue passionately over whether pirates could beat ninjas in a fight: Harass everyone on Facebook with like 14 "LOST PHONE, NEED NUMBERS" groups: And like 17 FarmVille requests: Fake people out with your voicemail message: Celebrate National Talk Like a Pirate Day: Take dramatic photos of Converse: Or draw a bunch of random stuff on them: Think 3D movie theater glasses were a fashion statement: Get obsessed with Doppelgänger Week on Facebook: Take pictures with that one awful Photo Booth filter: Own that one white MacBook that got dirty after like a week: Take weird pictures of your feet or hands because you all had matching bracelets or shoes: Insist that BlackBerry was way better than iPhone because of Brick Breaker and BBM: Change your age to 99 years old on Myspace: Carry around a little leather BDSM case for their flip-phone: Maximum protection. Watch movies on portable DVD players, god rest their soul: Constantly quote that one Bill O'Reilly video where he swears: Take selfies with a big-ass digital camera: Upload 400 pictures to Facebook at once in an album with a title from a Dave Matthews Band song: Spend money on ringback tones. Sweet, sweet ringback tones: Change your profile pic to something like this: And like this: If you had this as your MySpace pic, it meant you once listened to Something Corporate. Wear shoes big enough to house a family of five: Update Facebook from a tiny lil' phone: Publicly put friends on blast: Think adding a "xXx" to a screen name made them a force to be reckoned with: Try to take a selfie with flip phones and completely missing your face, like, 14 times in a row: Accidentally pull out the charging cable while your iPod was in DO NOT DISCONNECT mode: And turn on the TV Guide and just completely vibe out: Sounds blissful, actually.
Spectator
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Truly awful: Roblox's Grow a Garden reviewed
Grade: D– There's some scholarly research to be done, I fancy, on the strange psychological appeal of boringness in videogames. These gaudy things could be non-stop excitement, and yet many of the most successful are mega boring. 'Grinding' – repetitive tasks undertaken for incremental rewards – is a matter of pride and pleasure for serious gamers; and some games – I'm looking at you, interior-decorating Sims – really do offer a digital equivalent to watching paint dry. Remember FarmVille, for instance? Here was a truly mind-numbing Facebook game where you managed a virtual plot of land and grew corn and tomatoes and whatnot, traded them for imaginary currency, bought seed to grow more crops, and so ad infinitum. It is what sometimes gets called a 'Skinner box'. It was awful. Everyone loved it. Your mum loved it. It was Facebook's most popular game by miles. Anyway, the kids have now discovered FarmVille in a new form. It's called Grow a Garden, and it's on the Roblox platform, whose audience is pre-teen or tween, and the BBC reports that 16 million people are playing it. God help us. You buy some carrot seed, dump it in your blobby vegetable patch (the visuals are Minecraft meets Lego), harvest, sell, rinse, repeat. Your plants grow while you're offline, so even while you're at school your blocky virtual blueberries are growing. I found the best place to play Grow a Garden was in my allotment, where the time I spent attending to my virtual crops was time I wasn't acquiring blood-blisters digging out couch grass and horsetails and bitterly lamenting the sin of Adam. I felt bad. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere.
NZ Herald
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Roblox game Grow a Garden surpasses Fortnite with 16.4m players
Anyone older than 25 likely has fond – or madly frustrating – memories of playing FarmVille, the popular browser game that lets users grow virtual crops and herd pixelated animals. Agriculture aficionados can rejoice: Generation Alpha's FarmVille has arrived. Grow a Garden, a simplistic farming simulation that involves planting seeds
Straits Times
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Grow A Garden, Gen Alpha's FarmVille, is growing like crazy in Roblox
Grow A Garden is the first major Roblox game to integrate offline growth, which encourages players to return to see changes. PHOTO: ROBLOX NEW YORK – Anyone older than 25 likely has fond – or madly frustrating – memories of playing FarmVille, the popular browser game that lets users grow virtual crops and herd pixellated animals. Agriculture aficionados can rejoice: Generation Alpha's FarmVille has arrived. Grow A Garden, a simplistic farming simulation that involves planting seeds and collecting exotic pets, has exploded as one of the most highly played titles of 2025. Technically an 'experience' within the game-creation platform Roblox, it smashed its own record for concurrent users by reeling in 16.4 million active players in mid-June. It is a genuinely shocking feat. That number is more than online game Fortnite's peak and greater than the concurrent player records of the top five Steam games combined. Grow A Garden's allure might baffle anyone who has never toyed with slow-paced world-builders like Animal Crossing or Tomodachi Life. Players nurture a potpourri of plants and pets, which they can buy and sell in exchange for the in-game currency Sheckles. Sheckles can also be bought with Roblox's in-platform currency Robux (which can itself be purchased with real dollars). Plots begin barren before users transform them into fantastical safaris of shimmering frogs and prancing monkeys that each have their own special abilities. Suddenly, a player's dismal square brims with vibrant vegetation and beanstalks shooting into the sky. Numerous qualities elevate the game from a standard farm sim. It is the first major Roblox game to integrate offline growth, which encourages players to return to see changes. There are multiple time-sensitive components, including shops that restock with new items every five minutes and weekly drops – like the fruit-pollinating Bizzy Bees – with exclusive items that feel like can't-miss moments. Every little element has been shaped to keep people hooked, including blind-box pet eggs and the ability to steal things from other users' farms. These digital ranchers are so feverish that some have resorted to third-party sites to acquire the most legendary commodities. People have spent more than US$100 (S$129) on eBay listings for the cosmic-looking Candy Blossom Tree and Titanic Dragonflies. At its peak, Grow A Garden had more than triple the population of New Zealand, the home of Mr Janzen Madsen, who runs Splitting Point Studios, which scouts and acquires rising games on the platform. When the 28-year-old picked up Grow A Garden from the Roblox creator BMWLux in April, it had about 2,000 concurrent users. 'I was immediately like, 'Wow, this is pretty cool,'' said Mr Madsen, who is also known as Jandel. 'Farming is pretty innate to humans. If you think about it, the past thousands and thousands of years, it's what everyone's done.' His team of about 20 people scaled the game, fixing bugs and adding key elements such as daily quests. And it is still tinkering. Mr Madsen teased an update involving dogs that would recover fossils that could be traded in for sand-themed fruits, and eventually a feature that allows people to trade items. He also wants to have celebrities host live events with him. He has scaled many Roblox games, but nothing like this. He has seen people playing the game in real life, and all of his friends' children are loving it. 'To be platform-defining, or even industry-defining, is crazy,' he said. As news about the game's record-obliterating player count spread across the internet, some were dubious about its legitimacy. But after comparisons with other games on Roblox, people have largely concluded that bots have not heavily contributed to Grow A Garden's success. Some have theorised that the game is so popular because its bare-bones, subtly addictive gameplay appeals to a new, younger audience that is just starting to dominate Roblox. A popular video clip showed what looked like a classroom full of children sitting at computers excitedly awaiting a Grow A Garden update. According to Madsen's data, about 35 per cent of its sizeable player base is aged under 13. KreekCraft, a popular Roblox YouTuber, pointed to Grow A Garden's popularity on TikTok and Shorts – full of juvenile, goofy clips of the game – as evidence of its younger users. 'Normally, whenever a Roblox game gets really popular, there's an equal reaction on the YouTube side of things,' said KreekCraft, whose real name is Forrest. Instead, there is barely any long-form content proportional to the game's success. Previous Roblox hits like Dress To Impress were buoyed by influencers such as American online streamer and YouTuber Kai Cenat, but this one is all short-form videos. 'It's a lot of younger kids coming in,' KreekCraft said. 'It's a very simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand game.' Still, Grow A Garden is clearly beloved by people of all ages. Nobody has any clue how big it will become and how long it can continue this upward growth. 'It's definitely a Roblox game that came out of nowhere,' KreekCraft said in disbelief. 'It popped on the radar a few weeks ago and now it's broken every single Roblox record by miles. And it's just like, 'How did this happen? What is the ceiling here?' It blows my mind.' NYTIMES Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
The Star
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Generation Alpha's 'FarmVille' is growing like crazy in 'Roblox'
Anyone older than 25 likely has fond – or madly frustrating – memories of playing FarmVille , the popular browser game that lets users grow virtual crops and herd pixelated animals. Agriculture aficionados can rejoice: Generation Alpha's FarmVille has arrived. Grow a Garden , a simplistic farming simulation that involves planting seeds and collecting exotic pets, has exploded as one of the most highly played titles of the year. Technically an 'experience' within the game-creation platform Roblox , it smashed its own record for concurrent users by reeling in 16.4 million active players on Saturday. It is a genuinely shocking feat. That number is more than Fortnite 's peak and greater than the concurrent player records of the top five Steam games combined. Grow a Garden 's allure might baffle anyone who has never toyed with slow-paced world-builders like Animal Crossing or Tomodachi Life. Players nurture a potpourri of plants and pets, which they can buy and sell in exchange for the in-game currency Sheckles, which can also be bought with Roblox's in-platform currency Robux (which can itself be purchased with real dollars). Plots begin barren before users transform them into fantastical safaris of shimmering frogs and prancing monkeys that each have their own special abilities. Suddenly, a player's dismal square brims with vibrant vegetation and beanstalks shooting into the sky. Numerous qualities elevate the game from a standard farm sim. It is the first major Roblox game to integrate offline growth, which encourages players to return to see changes. There are multiple time-sensitive components, including shops that restock with new items every five minutes and weekly drops (like the fruit-pollinating Bizzy Bees) with exclusive items that feel like can't-miss moments. Every little element has been shaped to keep people hooked, including blind-box pet eggs and the ability to steal things from other users' farms. These digital ranchers are so feverish that some have resorted to third-party sites to acquire the most legendary commodities. People have spent over US$100 (RM425) on eBay listings for the cosmic-looking Candy Blossom Tree and for Titanic Dragonflies. At its peak, Grow a Garden had more than triple the population of New Zealand, the home of Janzen Madsen, who runs Splitting Point Studios, which scouts and acquires rising games on the platform. When Madsen, 28, picked up Grow a Garden from the Roblox creator BMWLux in April, it had about 2,000 concurrent users. 'I was immediately like, 'Wow, this is pretty cool,'' said Madsen, who is also known as Jandel. 'Farming is pretty innate to humans. If you think about it, the past thousands and thousands of years, it's what everyone's done.' Madsen's team of about 20 people scaled the game, fixing bugs and adding key elements like daily quests. And it is still tinkering. Madsen teased an update involving dogs that would recover fossils that could be traded in for sand-themed fruits, and eventually a feature that allows people to trade items. He also wants to have celebrities host live events with him. Madsen has scaled many Roblox games, but nothing like this. He has seen people playing the game in real life, and all of his friends' children are loving it. 'To be platform-defining, or even industry-defining is crazy,' he said. As news about the game's record-obliterating player count spread across the internet, some were dubious about its legitimacy. But after comparisons with other games on Roblox , people have largely concluded that bots have not heavily contributed to Grow a Garden 's success. Some have theorised that the game is so popular because its bare-bones, subtly addictive gameplay appeals to a new, younger audience that is just starting to dominate Roblox . A popular video clip showed what looked like a classroom full of children sitting at computers excitedly awaiting a Grow a Garden update. Per Madsen's data, about 35% of its sizable player base is under 13. KreekCraft, a popular Roblox YouTuber, pointed to Grow a Garden 's popularity on TikTok and Shorts – full of juvenile, goofy clips of the game – as evidence of its younger users. 'Normally, whenever a Roblox game gets really popular, there's an equal reaction on the YouTube side of things,' said KreekCraft, whose real name is Forrest. Instead, there is barely any long-form content proportional to the game's success. Previous Roblox hits like Dress to Impress were buoyed by influencers like Kai Cenat, but this one is all short-form videos. 'It's a lot of younger kids coming in,' KreekCraft said. 'It's a very simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand game.' Still, the game is clearly beloved by people of all ages. Nobody has any clue how big it will become and how long it can continue this upward growth. 'It's definitely a Roblox game that came out of nowhere,' KreekCraft said in disbelief. 'It popped on the radar a few weeks ago and now it's broken every single Roblox record by miles. And it's just like, 'How did this happen? What is the ceiling here?' It blows my mind.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
