Zynga is a widely popular game maker on Facebook which has under its banner, such trendy games like the Farmville, CityVille, Mafia Wars and Frontier Ville. This is a step in which Zynga will follow LinkedIn which is the world’s largest site for professional networking. LinkedIn has shown wonderful results last week after it has filed IPO. Recently even the web search giant of Russia named Yandex has made a whopping profit on Tuesday, the 24^th of May. Moreover, the plan for Zynga’s filing an IPO has been in the charts for a year, so this move seems quite expected.

An estimate already shows Zynga’s worth as on May 2011, to be $10 billion, again the post IPO success could therefore increase the game giant’s market value significantly or expectedly double its value, like the IPO did to the valuation of LinkedIn. Investors are too keen to put in money on the social networking sites especially Groupon and Facebook and other internet companies. Given the popularity of Zynga for its online gaming on Facebook, investors are eager to spend their money on it, expecting a huge turn over. Therefore, this could be called quite a profitable move for Zynga.

According to what the company claims, it has 250 million active gamers per month. Zynga’s original game of Poker still attracts as many as 35 million players; the game that is presently highest on the cards is CityVille, which reportedly has 90 million users for it as reported by AppData. These statistics prove that Zynga leads its nearest competitor, the second, most popular game developer by six times.

Last month, Zynga had hired John Schappert who had been the previous COO of Electronic Arts to hold a senior post in their company. They have also had meetings with the people who represent the Goldman Sachs (GS) and the Morgan Stanley group. Thus, they have had talks for their next task of opting for bankers to fund them as well as assist in the preparation of the regulations for the filing.

Therefore, the post IPO Zynga will supposedly bring about a hugely profitable business for the investors and both the company and the shareholders are keenly awaiting this move. Moreover, off late, Zynga has also been increasing its assets keeping this plan in mind.

Let’s wait & watch the fairytale story of Zynga!

RewardVille is supposed to “delight” players by rewarding them with points that help you to move to various Zynga levels. It also provides the users with exclusive limited-edition virtual items. One of the cool factors of the application is that it is integrable with Zynga’s various social platform games. For instance, you can get assistance from your fellow Farmville, CityVille, Mafia Wars and Zynga poker players. You can also send and receive something called “Mystery Gifts” and additional zPoints and zCoins using the cross-game application. You earn zPoints for playing any of the following games - Café World, CityVille, FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, PetVille, Treasure Isle, YoVille, Vampire Wars and Zynga Poker. As your zlevel increases you are awarded with zCoins which can be redeemed in RewardVille for in-game items. Redemption of zCoins requires a registered Zynga account while zPoints can be earned by anyone who plays any of the Zynga games.

Now doesn’t all this sound addictive? Yes it is, indeed!

What changes can you expect? Well a lot! First of all, there will be a great boost in the addiction level of game addicts. Not to mention, hours will increase substantially where players are kind of locked inside a motivating game where every stage encourages them to move ahead by providing them with rewards. Since it is all connected to Facebook everyone can expect loads of notifications and requests about joining the games, gift transactions, requesting specific help and so on. Youngsters will make their parent pay huge bills for sure. Not to mention, there will be a rise in the number of un-authorized in-game purchases and other transactions.

Leaving that aside, we should note the this game has been useful for some relief fund. Yes, the developers made the virtual items available for purchase and said that 100% will be donated to support the rescue and relief operations in Japan due to Tsunami and earthquake. So, there you see, the good cause. Zynga has earlier raised over $6.8 million for other groups including UN World Food Programme and Water that were providing relief to people affected by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Zynga has over 200 million monthly users of all its games and one million users who purchase the virtual items. With this huge number, Zynga stands to be the largest game designer and the fastest growing company. The gaming freak in you should for once say – Hail Zynga !!

N-Gage gamers in India can now buy their favorite N-Gage Games without a Credit Card. The games are currently available in the following denominations:

Rupees 49 for a 1 day pass
Rupees 149 for a 7 day pass
Rupees 299 for a full license

This price may vary for some games. You can get the games now at select Nokia Priority dealers in 9 cities in India- Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. I did call my dealer and he said that they’re yet to start selling the games – so they should be getting them pretty soon.

If you just can’t wait for your neighborhood dealer to get the games, you can head over to oxicash.in and buy the games – http://www.oxicash.in/Nokia/Nokia.aspx

You’ll first have to sign up for an Oxicash account and top up the account – you can do this by buying recharge vouchers from Sify I-Way, Chroma, In & Out or The Mobile Store outlets near you. You can also use netbanking to top up your account. Once you top up your account, just select your game and buy it online. You’ll get an instant activation code, which you can use to unlock the full game on your device. Remember that you can activate the game only on one mobile.
More information @ www.nokiangageindia.com

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Been busy in my spare time for the past few weeks playing on N-Gage. One game I got a hold of is One. The first thing which amazed me was the graphics this game was belting out on a N81 – some of the best graphics I’ve seen on a mobile game!

There are various gameplay options for One – you can play out the story mode, Versus, Survival and Multiplayer.There’s also a training mode which takes you through the various moves in the game. I would advise you to go though the training mode first, there are quite a few moves you’ll miss out on if you don’t. The keys combination are pretty easy to remember – but in the heat of a combat, you’re sure to fumble on which moves to use !

You can customize your player with various hairstyles, gear and fighting styles. You keep unlocking new gear to wear as you keep progressing in the story mode.

The story mode allows you play out the story of the One. In this mode you have to keep fighting opponents to progress in the game – each level has it’s Boss whom you’ll have to defeat to move on to the next level. While you progress through the game, it gets auto-saved only after a few fights- this behavior can be a pain at times. I would have been better if it auto-saved after every fight. Also keep an eye on your rank – every win increases your ranking – beware that ever loss also brings it down!

You can practise your skills in the Versus and Survival mode where you can choose the scenery and the computer player you would like to play against. Practise makes perfect, so hone in your skills in these modes if you find that you’re loosing too much in the story mode. Remember to set the “Ranked” option to “No” in these modes if you don’t want your Ranking to dip while practising your moves.

One piece of advice while playing this game is to keep mixing your moves – if you play the same moves, the computer player usually ends up blocking or countering you. So practice all your different moves and unleash hell for your opponents.

The multiplayer mode works with bluetooth. I couldn’t get anyone else who had One in the same room to go head to head. It would have been better if this was an internet multi-player option instead of just bluetooth.

This game is overall a good buy and will keep you occupied for quite some time if you are into martial art games. Take a break while gaming – I’ve had a bad case of cramps on my fingers after an hour or so of intense gaming.

More about One at the N-Gage Site