I’m not an art student. Despite my achieving adulthood some time ago, the best I can usually cobble together in the realm of drawing is a stick figure or a happy face that rivals the artistic endeavours of a 5 year old. Yet I’ve always found myself drawn to Pictionary. In the 80’s I was an avid Win, Lose or Draw fan. And today? Today I have Charadium.

Asguaard is a throwback to the 16-bit days of console gaming, evoking classics like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger with its sprite-based graphics and turn-based RPG battles. As a game for fans, Asguaard offers players an intriguingly self-aware plot that takes place in a memorable world that’s stuffed full of secrets to uncover. A terrible winter creeps over the world of Asguaard after some unknown power opened the Pandora Box, threatening the dwarves and fairies with annihilation if the legendary humans they’ve summoned from another world cannot save them.

Big Fish Games is now offering Faunasphere, its massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, on Facebook. Players now have the choice to access the virtual world through their Web browsers at Faunasphere.com, or through the Faunasphere App on Facebook.

Settlement: Colossus takes the hidden object genre and fuses it with a strategy game to create something wholly unique in the space. Instead of finding random objects, your tasked with collecting resources that are necessary for survival, which makes the whole experience much more engaging. Unfortunately, it also adds a layer of unnecessary repetition that will cause some frustration in an otherwise excellent game.

Here is some wisdom for you: the number of long, thin items a hidden object game asks you to find is directly proportional to how much that game is going to suck. Virtually every level of Shutter Island, a tie-in with the upcoming movie of the same name, has you looking for pencils, cigars, matchsticks, candles, scalpels, thermometers or icepicks. In other words, there's a whole lot of bad going on with this game.

Last October, the New York Times published an article that claimed FarmVille farmers outnumbered actual farmers in the US by a ratio of more than 60:1. Dr. Phil recently hosted a show all about the dangers of FarmVille addiction. At a recent U.K. press event, Facebook executives boasted that FarmVille was even bigger than their chief competitor, Twitter. Move over Mario Madness. Take a hike Pac-Man Fever. There’s a new video game sensation that’s sweeping the nation, and it’s not afraid to get its hands dirty. It seems like no matter where you turn, just about everyone is playing FarmVille.

The term “playing god” gets thrown around a lot these days, but when was the last time you did? Pocket God slips you into the role of deity and has you oversee the life and (mostly) death struggle of a small island people. It’s cute, it’s charming, and it’s all about squishing island folk. Get ready to do some smiting, because these pygmies need to be kept in line!

Richard Garriott, the veteran game designer best known for his award-winning Ultima series of fantasy role-playing games and Ultima Online, the first commercially successful massively-multiplayer online game (MMO), has founded a new social media company called Portalarium.