SimCity Social. Waiting on the edge of your seat for the next SimCity game? Well, February 2013 is still very far away (seven painstaking months!). In the meanwhile we are lucky enough to have SimCity Social from EA. The game is one of those free Facebook apps that lets you interact “socially” with your friends as you play. You build a city from the ground up using your resources, money, and energy to add new buildings (including homes, farms, businesses, factories, and landmarks to name a few). You can invite your friends as neighboring cities and share resources and help each other grow. It lets you become friends or foes with their cities (you can send them gifts like hot air balloons or prank they with a flock of birds pooing all over the city). As your population grows you get more and more advisors that set goal for you to reach, which steers the gameplay in certain directions. Click here to go to the app page for SimCity Social and follow the directions to add the game to your Facebook profile.

A side note on SimCity Social: the game does not tell you which of your Facebook friends are actually playing. Like all of the social app games, it tries to get you to spam your friends list (and your timeline) to ask everyone to join the game. I highly recommend searching your friends pages to find out who is already playing to make sure you only send invites and game items to them. Otherwise you might end up annoying a bunch of friends that have no interest in the game.

Urban Dead. This is one of those addictive multi-player web based games that you sign up for and quickly use all of your action points and then obsessively wait for them to refill so you can continue playing. You start as a survivor in the city of Malton after the zombie apocalypse has begun. There are four classes of character types to choose from including three survivor categories; military (privates, medics, scouts) , science (doctors, lab assistants), and civilian (police officers, firefighters, consumers), or you can choose to be a zombie from the get go. As you travel around the city you find items, earn experience points that let you gain skills, seek out good hiding spots, and look for other survivors and groups to join. Become a zombie hunter or eat as many brains as you can. This is the best online zombie game we’ll have until someone makes a Dead Rising MMO. Click here to sign up for Urban Dead.

Hollywood the Game. One part writing community and one part City simulation turns Hollywood and moviemaking into a game. You write a movie script, pitch it to player run studios, cast it with your favorite actors, design creative including posters and trailers, advertise the movie, release it, and finally watch the box office roll in. What will you do with all of that virtual cash? How about buying a house in HTG Malibu, a fancy car from one of your favorite movies, or how about games and DVDs based on virtual movies released in the game? The more items and awards you gather help your future releases in different ways. And with totally open game play, you can find yourself taking on a number of jobs, from producer or studio head, to a creative company, a casting agent, editor, video maker, or even a real estate agent selling virtual homes and offices. Become a big wig in a completely player run virtual Hollywood (the screen shot above is part of one of the many City maps). Click here to sign up for Hollywood the Game.