Gaming Blog – The Shockwave Spark

Every day, the entire team here at Shockwave is focused on how to make your gameplay experience better and more entertaining.  Usually that involves making sure we pick the best games and help you to find and enjoy the ones that interest you most.  Every so often, though, we see an opportunity to really upgrade the Shockwave experience across the board.  A number of months back, after talking to a lot of our players, we decided it was time.  Today, we’re extremely proud to introduce you to what we’ve been working on - a whole new Shockwave!

It goes without saying that it looks a lot different, but the changes are more than skin deep.  While we’ve refreshed the look, we’ve also made a tremendous number of changes under the hood.  Let me walk you through some of the key differences:

More Personal

Let’s start from the top… literally.  You may have noticed that at the top of every page on the new Shockwave, there is now a “My Shockwave” tab.  This part of the site is all about you. When you become a member of Shockwave (it’s free, by the way), you have a whole new set of options at your disposal.  You can rate and review games, add them to your personal favorites list for easy access, make and challenge friends, and set-up your own public profile with a personalized, talking Game Face/Avatar.  Not to mention, you’ll also have the chance to earn Tokens & Trophies (see more on that below).

You don’t have to go to the My Shockwave page to take advantage, though. Once you sign-in, you’ll start to have a more personal experience throughout the site.  The new “member pod” next to the My Shockwave tab will give you quick access to your recently accessed and favorite games, while also providing you a quick glimpse of your token balance.  Whenever you’re in a game category page (say, Puzzles), you’ll see a handy list of any games that you’ve favorited that fit this category.  And when you’re playing games, you’ll be able to compare your score to your previous scores or those of any of your Shockwave friends.

More Rewarding

While we all deserve a little time to unwind and enjoy a game or two, a lot of us play games to get that rush of excitement when you get a new high score, reach a new level or, let’s face it, outplay our friends and family.  We wanted to take that even further, so we have introduced achievements to a number of our games and site activities. These come in the form of Tokens & Trophies.

Think of Tokens as your reward for being involved with Shockwave. Just about everything you do - from playing and rating games, to writing reviews, to filling out your personal profile - will earn you tokens.  The better you play and the more you get involved, the more tokens you will receive.  “Ok”, you’re thinking “but what do I do with these tokens?”.   I’m glad you asked.  You can take your tokens over to Token Central where you’ll be able to exchange them for a chance at real cash prizes - up to $25,000!

For our Club Shockwave and Shockwave UNLIMITED members (and occasionally for our free members, as well) we’ve introduced Trophies.  These are badges of honor, personalized to each game, that you win for sheer skill and determination while playing.  Winning any trophy will be a sign of great skill, but the majority of our trophies will also have multiple accomplishment levels - if you’ve seen the Olympics, you’ll understand the difference between Bronze, Silver and Gold immediately.  But there’s something even higher than gold - we have also introduced Supreme full-color animated trophies that recognize the absolute pinnacle of gameplay achievement.  There are only a select few of these, so having one in your trophy case truly shows your expertise.

Oh right, your trophy case.  What would a trophy be without a place to display it?  Once you win your first trophy, your public profile will be upgraded with a beautiful wooden trophy case to show off your greatest achievements.

More Ways to Find Games You Love

Even with all these new features, the most important thing to us is connecting you with great games that you’ll enjoy.  Everyone is different, and we all have our own unique taste in games, so we are making it easier to find the ones that are right for you.  First, we’ve drawn a clear distinction between Online games (those you play while on our site) and Download games (those you download to your computer).  Maybe you prefer a quick online puzzle game like Daily Diff during your coffee break, or maybe you want the deep, graphically rich download experience of Chocolatier 3.  Maybe you like both at different times.  Either way, we’ve made them easier to find.

We’ve also introduced new game categories like Time Management, Hidden Object and Matching to make it quicker to narrow down what kind of game you want to play right now.

Finally, if you’ve written a game review on Shockwave in the last few months, you may have noticed we started asking you to choose from a list of descriptive words that match the game.  These are tags, and we are now using these tags to help you look at our game collection in different ways.  Want to see which games members like you think are the cutest?  Or the most challenging?  Or even the most tedious?  Just click the word and we’ll show you a list of games.

More of Everything with Club Shockwave

Today we also introduced a brand new service called Club Shockwave.  It’s designed for people who want to get even more out of their gaming experience on Shockwave.  Club Shockwave members have a chance at the biggest cash prizes - up to $4,999 every single day and the $25,000 Shockwave Golden Ticket drawing. They also have access to hundreds of exclusive games and puzzles, including Carnival Catch Keno, Captain Kidd’s Caribbean Freecell and Word Express - as well as full archives of Daily Jigsaw, Daily Diff and Line by Line, among others.  Then there are the trophies I already mentioned earlier… these opportunities to challenge yourself and show off your achievements are reserved for Club members.  If you want to learn more, I’d encourage you to take the tour of Club Shockwave.

Oh, by the way, if you are a member of Shockwave UNLIMITED, Club Shockwave will now be included in your subscription at no extra cost.  You don’t have to do anything - you already have access to all the new features of Club whenever you are signed in to your Shockwave UNLIMITED account.

Whew. I’ve really just scratched the surface, but as much as I enjoy talking about it, I’m sure you’d rather get back to playing and discovering for yourself.  I hope you enjoy the new Shockwave as much as we enjoyed creating it for you!

-John.

P.S. We’d love to hear what you think of the new site, good or bad.  Drop us a line through the comments in this blog or feel free to Contact Us directly.