Wishful Features: Fullscreen mode in Cafe World
Zynga seems to have realized that most players like being able to play their Facebook games in fullscreen on their monitors, as most every Zynga game currently comes equipped with such a mode. FarmVille, FrontierVille, CityVille, etc. - they all allow you to play the game using a full-screen mode, reducing the need to scroll around the environment by clicking and dragging on the screen. After all, what better way to engage your users in a longer playing experience than to give them the ability to cover up every other window / detail pertaining to the outside world, including a clock?
Why, then, hasn't Cafe World, one of Zynga's older games, been given the same treatment. With most of my friends' cafes, and my own cafe being expanded to the maximum current size, the amount of scrolling we have to do to see all of our stoves, and especially all of our tables can be more than a bit annoying at times, especially when a pop-up appears every few seconds, but that's something we've already discussed.
Not only would adding a fullscreen mode in Cafe World allow multi-tasking to be that much easier (that is, it would make the cooking of meals a lot easier, as you could more easily queue tasks in your avatar's task queue without having to scroll around first), but it would also improve the Drink Bar and Coffee Machine systems significantly. No longer would you have to drag your mouse all around your cafe to find computer controlled guests that want coffee or drinks, as they would all be visible in one shot, while in a fullscreen gameplay mode.
In a bit of two-sided news, Zynga has acknowledged the fact that many users want fullscreen gameplay in Cafe World, but the addition of such a mode doesn't seem very promising as of this writing. Zynga writes:
With high-speed internet, a high-end computer with plenty of RAM, recent updates and the right browser, Café World runs great! But, we want everyone to be able to play the game. We work, everyday (even on weekends), to find ways to improve performance, loading, memory issues and lag. We want to make sure the game is accessible to people with computers from 5 months to 5 years old.
Back to full screen: when you make some thing bigger, you increase issues with lag, loading, memory and performance.
If you'd like to see the complete explanation, head over to the Zynga forums.
While this seems like a pretty justifiable explanation for why a fullscreen mode doesn't exist in Cafe World, user have been waiting for the feature, which has been touted as a "coming soon" addition to the game, for over a year. Hopefully the change will come sooner, rather than later, so we can move this one off of the Wishful Features list, and onto the "Fulfilled" list.
Would you like to see a Fullscreen mode added to Cafe World? Let us know in the comments!
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Wishful Features is a new regular column on Games.com - The Blog in which we talk about the features we wish were present in our favorite social games. Leave your ideas and feedback in the comments!
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