Click to Harvest!

Back in late March, Happy Aquarium developer Crowdstar introduced a one-day-only Pearl Idol. The idol cost about $14, but it gave players one free pearl a day, forever. As we noted at the time, this means the idol would actually pay for itself after about five and a half months, making it a pretty good deal for players committed to Happy Aquarium long term.

Today, the Pearl Idol has come back “by popular demand,” with two twists:

1) The price is now significantly higher. The new Pearl idol is 198 FB$ ($19.80), while the old one was 138 FB$ ($13.80).

2) This new Pearl Idol is available in a limited quantity, instead of for a limited time. As of this moment, there are about 1950 remaining.

One interesting observation – the availability of the Pearl Idol appears to be updating in real time. We came back to the game after seven minutes, and 10 more Pearl Idols ($198 worth) had been sold.

Players can also purchase more than one Pearl Idol, this time around. So if you’re a Happy Aquarium player with deep enough pockets, you could buy several and essentially give yourself unlimited Pearls.

Happy Aquarium developer Crowdstar added another small collection of props to their flagship fish-raising title, over the weekend. Players can now give their aquariums a Zen Garden theme.

New decorations include: Japanese Maple Tree, Mountain Pagoda, and Zen Stones. A Shimmering Rainbow was also added to the Happy Aquarium store, although we aren’t positive it is intended to be part of the zen garden item set.

Three varieties of bamboo are available in the Coral section of the shop, as well – straight, swirly, and crooked.

As most readers probably know by now, Mafia Wars developer Zynga made a surprise announcement last week that Paris would be the game’s next expansion, not Las Vegas, like most people were assuming. Perhaps Zynga has something more special in mind for Sin City?

In any case, Zynga ran a very brief two-question survey over the weekend, asking players to select from a list of cities which they would most like to see added to Mafia Wars. Could this list be the cities Zynga is considering for future expansions? For now we can only speculate.

List of potential Mafia Wars expansions:
Athens, Greece
Dublin, Ireland
Istanbul, Turkey
Johannesburg, South Africa
London, England
Los Angeles, USA
Mumbai, India
Prague, Czech Republic
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Rome, Italy
Sydney, Australia

Although they aren’t as exotic, we at SGC think London or Dublin would be fantastic.

In amongst all the Arbor Day, Earth Day, Far East, and other limited edition item packs, Farmville developer Zynga occasionally likes to slip in a few unthemed, permanent additions to the Farmville marketplace. The latest example of this in action: two new Farmville crops are now available: Purple Poppies, and White Grapes.

The White Grapes cost 245 coins to plant, can be harvested after 12 hours, and earn 360 coins and 2 XP when harvest. The Purple Poppies are a high-level crop, only available to players level 38 and higher. This makes Purple Poppies the highest level seed in all of Farmville, in fact. Previously this record was held by Asparagus, which unlocked at level 37.

Happy Pets developer Crowdstar got into the Earth Day spirit this week by releasing three limited-edition Earth Day pets: a dog, a cat, and (oddly) a parrot.

There are two major ways a social game developer can make an item limited. They can release a set number of them, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. Or, they can release an item for a specific amount of time, retiring it from the in-game store after a specific date.

Timing an item has been the traditional method of choice, but releasing set numbers is now increasingly en vogue.

Crowdstar has hedged their bets with these Earth Day pets and done both. They are only available until Monday, April 26. And there is also only a few thousand of each for sale. One interesting side note – if they launched with equal numbers, their current number remaining seems to indicate that the kitten is more popular than the puppy and the parrot, by a fairly healthy margin.

All three are for sale for 68 FB$ ($6.80), and have blue and green Earth-inspired coloring.