Thursday, September 10, 2009

Facebook Games Are Eating My Schedule – Seriously

I can’t tell you how many hours of my life I have lost in the last few months by playing Facebook games. There’s FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Restaurant City, and the most recent culprit, Happy Aquarium. I’m not complaining of course – I have a lot of fun with these games and they take so little effort or energy to play. After a long day of work, it’s nice to sit back and just click some buttons absent-mindedly. But, just because I have fun with them, doesn’t mean I want to stand around and play them half as well as I could and waste a bunch of time.

So, when I saw the Happy Aquarium Secrets website the other day, I stopped what I was doing and checked the guide out. It turns out that this guide, which was just released by the mega-guru guide writer, Tony Sanders, is exactly what I was looking for (and didn’t even know it).

Whereas before I was very intently focused on playing the game as much as possible, I eventually wanted to start playing it as well as possible. If I could get the same tasks done faster, why not do it? I could then spend time playing other games or watching TV or talking with my family a bit longer than just through dinner.

Happy Aquarium Secrets made it easy to focus on the game more intently by showing me multiple ways to manage my fish with special training and mating tips, charts for the selection of the right fish that matched my schedule, and the best way to set up my tanks so that I made more coins without having to worry about dead fish or missed opportunities.
In short, Happy Aquarium Secrets turned my casual hobby into a hardcore endeavor and I’m having a blast because of it. If you’re anywhere near the same boat as me, check out Happy Aquarium Secrets and see what it can do for you.


Happy Aquarium

The Best and Worst of the Happy Aquarium Guide Rush

I’ve seen a lot of new games hit the Facebook megasphere and they all have something in common – if they’re big enough, a couple dozen guides follow right behind them. Well, the newest culprit is Happy Aquarium and right now there are a good number of guides hitting the market trying to capitalize on the rabid hunger for information about this game. Unfortunately, for anyone out there who is interested in finding the one perfect guide, it can be hard narrowing them all down to just one good selection.

That’s where I come in. I’m always fond of reading through these kinds of things and learning new tricks, so I’ve been writing the guide authors, checking their strategies, and picking up each guide to see how well each one performs. It turns out that they are all fairly good – at least on a basic level – but there is only one guide that goes above and beyond those basic essentials and provides the information every good player needs to have.

It’s called Happy Aquarium Secrets and it’s written by none other than Tony Sanders – the mega genius behind the FarmVille and CafĂ© World guides out there that have been so popular. It’s no surprise that this guy’s guides are so good either – he clearly spends a lot of time and energy going through each one and making sure that they are as well represented as possible.

He covers basic stuff for sure, but the key here is that they contains as many advanced strategies, formulas, and numerical calculations as possible to make it easy for players who may not understand the intimate aspects of this game to choose the right fish and balance their tanks on the way to level 42 and beyond. In short, if you need a good guide for Happy Aquarium, then you should really check out Happy Aquarium Secrets – it goes above and beyond what I would have expected.


Happy Aquarium

Happy Aquarium Anyone?

It’s been a long time since I sat down in front of the first Facebook game I played. I think it was YoVille – back a year or two ago, when everyone kind of joked behind your back when you played these games. Fast Forward to today and everyone is playing at least one of the dozens of Facebook games on the market. My newest love is Happy Aquarium, the original aquarium game from CrowdStar that lets you raise and sell your fish for a nice profit.

There are a lot of clones now, but this one is still my favorite because it focuses more intently on things like getting your fish to learn tricks, mate, and grow familiar with you, the owner. I like the sense of camaraderie there – of controlling your fish tank and having pets instead of commodities. That doesn’t mean you don’t sell your fish off just as frequently, but at least you get to have some fun with them first (and they look so cute).

It’s a pretty simple game too, as long as you don’t want too much out of it. For the first month or so, I was happy to just login each day and swap my fish, train each of them and mate those that could. It was fun and I got to go and see how everyone else had set up their tanks. But, then I started wanting to get some higher level content and I wasn’t making enough coins.

That’s when I checked out Happy Aquarium Secrets – the new guide for Happy Aquarium that was released pretty recently by Tony Sanders. It shows the direct route to setting up the right tanks, how to choose fish, how to manage your XP, coins, and pearls, and how to spend what little time you have if you’re on a schedule. Basically, if you’re playing this game even remotely more than casually, you should check out this guide. It does a stupendous job making your life easier.


Happy Aquarium

The First Guide I’ve Seen Like This

There are a lot of guides out there these days – for everything you can imagine, from how to make a solar panel to playing a basic video game like Happy Aquarium. I bet you can guess which one I want to talk about today. I’ve been neck deep in Happy Aquarium since the day I first saw it on a friend’s newsfeed back in September. It was as an eye catching game with an interesting conceit and it was a lot more fun that I would have expected from this kind of game.
Fast forward a few weeks and CrowdStar has made their game bigger, better and a whole lot more complex as you reach the upper levels. As a result, I was very much intrigued when I saw the Happy Aquarium Secrets guide on another site the other day. I had to see what the pros were saying about their game play style and see if I could make my own methods any more effective.

It turns out, I very much could.

There were a few things I was missing from the way I played the game. It started with the basics. Happy Aquarium is a game that relies on your ability to balance out the values of the fish you are raising with the time they spend in the tank and your own schedule so you can get back and swap them out for new ones (or mate them and create new fish). For those who are unable to create a good schedule, the game gets much harder and takes longer to master.

Happy Aquarium Secrets focuses on creating a good time line that will allow you to play the game as best as possible without wasting huge chunks of effort. For me, that was a massive boost. In short, if you’re a casual player without much need for a guide, feel free to move on. If you’re like me though and need to be the best as much as possible, you should check out Happy Aquarium Secrets, because it’s easily one of the best around.


Happy Aquarium

How Many Happy Aquarium Guides Do You Think We’ll Get?

There are a lot of good reasons someone might need a Happy Aquarium guide to help them out with the biggest and best fish raising game on Facebook. But, after I saw Happy Aquarium Secrets the other day, I started to wonder just how many of these guides we’d really need if they started hitting the market all at once. I figured it would probably have more to do with how good this one guide was, so I decided to check it out and see how it performed.

The first thing I noticed about Happy Aquarium Secrets after picking it up was that it was very well written. I’ve been through a lot of game guides in my days and gamers, god bless them, are not always the best writers in the world. Half the time, they spend their efforts trying to find bigger and better things to do, but they don’t really pour the same energy into writing it all up in a way that is even semi-easy to understand.

So, when I started reading Happy Aquarium Secrets and noticed that it was written in a very simple, straightforward matter, I was pretty happy.

But a good writing style is useless if there isn’t information in there to back it up. And, thankfully, Happy Aquarium Secrets is loaded with good information. From the earliest information helping you get started in the game to the more complex, high level content that shows you how to develop your tanks and choose the perfect fish for each possible time frame you might be playing, this guide has it all.

To put it bluntly, there is very little chance that you’d ever need another guide beyond Happy Aquarium Secrets. It has everything that you could possibly think of for the game. Any other guide would just be a pale imitation.


Happy Aquarium

Making As Many Happy Aquarium Coins as Possible

In a game like Happy Aquarium, the goal becomes almost immediately to gain as many coins as you can as quickly as you can. The higher level fish cost an arm and a leg, but they also reward you for your efforts many times over. If you’re serious about getting those high level fish so you can upgrade your income levels though, you need to spend some time developing your coin count so you can upgrade tanks, buy your three sub-tanks and get all the fish into them you need to keep exploring the upper reaches of the game.

The Role of Happy Aquarium Coins

The coins in Happy Aquarium are designed to help you buy just about anything you need. You’ll get the coins for clicking on your treasure chest each day (and there is a chest in each tank), for selling your fish, for running through the training course and for selling items that you get as gifts or that you don’t need any more. As a result, you will be able to get quite a few good coins for your efforts if you are willing to do as many things as possible each day when you login.

Getting as Many Happy Aquarium Coins as Possible

There is no daily maximum in coins on this game. If you have a lot of friends for example, you could get 20 coins per visit to each tank of your friends. That can add up very fast. The totals will start to rise towards 400 and 500 coins a day if you have enough friends and that is being rather conservative. Toss in the fish you can sell and you can make upwards of 2,000 coins a day there plus the coins from training and beyond.

The real question on your coins is how many you need. For the most part, the decorations you buy will not matter so much as being able to buy higher level fish and upgrade your tanks as you get to higher levels. Once you hit Level 42, you’ll want to be able to buy the high level 1000+ coin fish that will resell for a 100 coin profit each time.

The thing about Happy Aquarium coins is that they are not necessarily hard to get. But, to get the amount you need to be truly successful in a game like this, you need to spend some time and energy developing the right strategies, choosing the right fish, and logging on each day to complete the laundry list of tasks set to you by the game. This is a chore in and of itself. If you can master it, you’ll be well on your way to success, but only if you can do everything correctly.


Happy Aquarium

Getting More Happy Aquarium Neighbors

It’s no secret that most Facebook games are very heavily intent on having you get as many neighbors as possible. Happy Aquarium is no different, so any serious players out there should spend some time developing as many strategies as possible to go out and dig up a good chunk of friends. These Happy Aquarium neighbors allow you do everything from getting faster routes to more tank space and fish to loading up on free gifts and items that can be resold for a solid profit. In short, if you want to level up fast and get some solid coins, you should have as many Happy Aquarium neighbors as possible.

How to Find New Happy Aquarium Neighbors

The first step in finding new neighbors is to exhaust your current friend list. It might seem like a stretch, but you never know when you might find someone that will be interested in playing the game with you. Most people play at least one Facebook game. You would be surprised how easy it can be at times to go out and find someone that is willing to join up with you in the game.

If that doesn’t work, don’t forget that you can go out and find someone willing to swap neighborships with you so that you can both benefit from the relationship. Many people will gladly add people to their friends list for the benefits of a neighbor without actually knowing them. Just make sure that these people are willing to add you so you don’t get refused by a lot of the request you send out – you could easily end up getting yourself banned if you don’t ask first and make sure to mention the game in your requests.

What Your Happy Aquarium Neighbors Can Do for You

Neighbors are a huge part of the game. They let you get more coins from treasure chests, load up on new content from your fellow players in the form of free gifts, and get more XP by cleaning tanks all over Facebook.

Any player out there who wants to rise to the top of the game needs to go out and find as many Happy Aquarium neighbors as they can. There are limits of course to how many you need. Usually, with most games, if you have 25 friends, you’ll be pretty solidly on your way to the upper reaches of what you need from the game. If you cannot find that many players to work with you, don’t fret. Time and persistence will almost always pay off with these strategies.


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The Key to Leveling in Happy Aquarium

There are a lot of different things you’ll need to focus on as you play Happy Aquarium. The one thing that many players get stuck up on early though is leveling in Happy Aquarium. The game is a tough one to level up in if you don’t utilize all the tools that are given to you. Since there are new levels being added to the game seemingly every week too (right now it’s at 42), the game just continues to go forward, forcing players to find new ways to snag the XP they need to progress. If you’re one of those looking for tips to help with leveling in Happy Aquarium, here are some tricks you can use to help you out.

How Leveling in Happy Aquarium Works

The leveling track in Happy Aquarium works very similar to the rest of the Facebook games. You will gain XP for every action you perform – from buying and selling a fish to cleaning your tank. You will then need to get about 200,000 of those points to reach the upper levels of the game. As a result, it takes only a few days to reach level 10, but can take an additional few weeks to get to the top of the game when you don’t have the necessary tools to speed up the process.

Fast Tracks to Level 40 and Beyond

There are a few ways to speed up your leveling. To start with, you can go out and find new friends. Each friend will gain you XP when you visit them each day to clean their tank, snag coins from their treasure chests or send them gifts. You will also gain a lot of XP from buying and selling items in the store. Since the resale rate when returning items you already bought is 80%, you can make a nice big profit from reselling items that you might not need or that you just want to flip for easy XP.

If you’re interested in leveling in Happy Aquarium, you need to spend a few minutes developing strategies that will allow you to play the game as fast and as effectively as possible. Don’t waste time on fish that you can’t get back to soon enough to feed and make sure you have lots of friends you can utilize for XP boosting activities. Train your fish, mate your fish, and sell them quickly. These are all things that will boost your XP gains and help you reach level 42 faster than you ever thought possible.


Happy Aquarium

Getting All the Happy Aquarium Achievements

Like any good video game, Happy Aquarium has a lot of fun diversions that allow you to engage with different aspects of game play on a competitive level. One of the more fun ways to do this is with Happy Aquarium achievements – the small medals you get for completing high level tasks that other players will look at with awe. You’ll find in many cases that the quick route to Level 40 is littered with things you can do that will reward you for your efforts – from mating to training to spending extra coins on all sorts of items for your tanks. Here are some tips to landing those elusive Happy Aquarium achievements.

What Happy Aquarium Achievements Are There?

There are currently twelve different achievements in Happy Aquarium that you can collect. Each achievement has four different levels – bronze, silver, gold, and star. These come in the forms of medals that you can collect and show off to your fellow players if you know where to put them. Many of these medals are relatively easy to get.

Most of them relate to just spending you coins. You’ll get medals for buying items for your tank, buying fish, buying different kinds of fish, buying gifts for friends and so on. You will also gain medals by mating your fish, training your fish, rescuing turtles and squid, and getting different kinds of fish up to adulthood. Basically, everything you already do in the game will be rewarded, but you have to do it all a LOT to get the medals for it.

Getting All the Happy Aquarium Achievements Quickly

To get the first level of achievements – the bronze accomplishment – you don’t need to do very much. Most bronze requirements can be reached before you hit level 10. However, the silver and beyond get much harder and the star level still has not been cracked by most players. So, you’ll need to be very dedicated and be able to complete as many tasks as possible each day when you login to the game.

If you’re interested in getting a large number of Happy Aquarium achievements, make sure you spend a great deal of time focusing on all of the aspects of the game. If you just buy and sell the same fish, you’ll never get the collection and mating achievements that should be relatively easy to snag. So, instead of lasering in, make sure to have some variety, getting as many fish as you can, mating them when you can and getting them all to adulthood without forgetting to feed them. You’d be surprised how fast you can get all the achievements you need.


Happy Aquarium

How Many Happy Aquarium Pearls Do You Need

Like every other Facebook game on the market, Happy Aquarium has its very own special currency that is hard to get and can help to buy some very rare, high level items and upgrades for your account. In this case, you’ll be trying to get Happy Aquarium pearls. These pearls are not necessarily as hard to get in Happy Aquarium as they might be in some other games, but they are still tough and can be quite expensive if you decide to start buying them instead. So, to help you decide when and where to use them, and whether you need to buy any Happy Aquarium pearls, here are some tips.

What Happy Aquarium Pearls Are Used For

There are a lot of different items you can buy with your Happy Aquarium pearls. To start with, you can buy some rare and fun high level creatures and fish that would not otherwise be available to you. These creatures vary between those that can be resold for a decent profit to those that are just simply there – the same as a decoration (such as your Mermaid or Scuba Hamster).

Other items that you can pick up for a good chunk of pearls include the high level backdrop upgrades along with the different decorations that are rarely found in the game other than through the pearl interface. These decorations range from real world monuments to strange and rare items that perform fun little tricks.

What Can You Skip?

For the most part, you don’t need anything that you can buy with pearls. They cost a lot of real world cash (12 for $1) and can be pretty much ignored if you’re not intent on getting the highest level items in the game. The upgrades to your tank and your subtanks are all paid for with coins, so generally speaking, if you focus on your coins, you’ll be able to get almost anything you need from the game.

The goal of Happy Aquarium pearls is to give the truly hardcore players of the game a fun, additional way to engage with the content. From the Scuba Hamster for 150 pearls to the little mermaid or the rare backdrops and additions to your tank, you can have a lot of fun tacking on new aspects to you tank. But, you need to be willing to spend a good chunk of real world cash to get those things because the number of Happy Aquarium pearls you’ll get for free is often quite limited.


Happy Aquarium

How to Adopt a Baby Sea Turtle in Happy Aquarium

One of the things that players of Happy Aquarium want more than anything else is to adopt a baby sea turtle. These cute little creatures are not only a fun addition to the game, but the fate you end up saving them from when you adopt them is almost too cruel to repeat. But, to get your very own sea turtles, there are a few hoops you need to jump through. Here are some things to consider when you start trying to adopt a baby sea turtle and how you can speed up the process.

What Do You Need to Adopt a Baby Sea Turtle?

To adopt a baby sea turtle, you need to go out and find some neighbors. You cannot get your own sea turtle in the game. Rather, what will happen is you will get a notification that says a sushi chef has found a turtle and is about to make it into soup. You can then choose to post the notification and save the baby turtle from its fate before it gets skewered. Then, your friends can choose to adopt the turtle. The first friend to click on the newsfeed item and adopt the turtle will get the turtle in their tank.

It takes 72 hours after you get the baby sea turtle to raise them to adulthood and sell them. The total profit is a little over 100 coins and you can have more than one baby sea turtle at a time. All the more reason to have as many friends as possible.

Other Ways to Get Sea Turtles

To get the original baby sea turtle, you must click on a friend’s notification. However, you can also buy special limited edition sea turtles from the shop using your pearls. There is a pink one in there right now and there have been others in the past of different colors to enjoy. Ultimately though, the easiest way to get your sea turtle is to just have a few friends and be online for a good chunk of time each day.

The key to success in any Facebook game is to have a lot of neighbors. In Happy Aquarium,that holds doubly true. Don’t underestimate the importance of going out there and finding people who are equally as interested in this game as you are. You will gain far more benefits than just a simple baby sea turtle. However, you can’t over state just how cute and fun it is to have that sea turtle floating around in your tank.


Happy Aquarium

How to Train Your Fish in Happy Aquarium

With a game like Happy Aquarium, you’ll find yourself frequently stuck in hard places where you must determine how to progress. From the way you choose your fish to the different levels you’ll be driving towards, you need to be sure that you can maintain your strategies over a long period of time. One of the fun things that CrowdStar has made easy to integrate into these strategies is to train your fish. If you are one of those people who love to train your fish but are having trouble doing it, here are some tips to help make the process much easier.

The Key to Train Your Fish

To train your fish with any kind of alacrity, you need to be sure that you spend as much time as possible doing it each day. You can only train a fish every 4 hours, but if you do it every four hours, you’ll be able to get most, if not all of your fish set up with the full range of 7 tricks that are available in the game.

When it comes to actually training the fish, the training runthrough may seem tough, but it’s really all about timing. Pay close attention to the way the game runs as you go through that obstacle course each time. Some of those obstacles need to be clicked on immediately while others need to be waited on until you are right in front of them. Watch how they open and close and how quickly they reset to build your timing up.

The Volume Limits When You Train Your Fish

When you run the training route, you get 3 tries before the timer is reset for 4 hours. This is a way to keep you from just doing it over and over again for more XP and coins. However, you can always run it with other fish and help to get all of your many fish trained in all four tanks. The XP gains can be significant and it’s a fun way to spend your time when you logon each day.

If you train your fish in Happy Aquarium early on, you will be able to more easily feed those fish, gain some extra XP and coins every few hours, and ultimately have more fun with your fish. Along with naming and mating of those very same fish, this is a tool that will allow you to engage with those fish on a much more personal level. Don’t miss your opportunity to push your game play to another level.


Happy Aquarium

Mating Fish in Happy Aquarium

In a game like Happy Aquarium, you need to be aware of all the possible benefits the game has put into place. Mating fish in Happy Aquarium is one of those things that has been made available to help you save coins on buying new fish and ultimately make a larger profit on each fish sold, but only if you develop a steady process that minimizes waste and ensures the fish are fed on time each day. Here are some tips to help with mating fish in Happy Aquarium.

How to Mate Your Fish

To mate your fish in Happy Aquarium, you will need to start out getting two fish of the same species – one female and one male. Make sure they are both full grown adults and then make sure your tank is nice and clean and the hunger and cleanliness meters are full. Only then can you start sending your fish out to mate.

Click on either of the two fish and then choose to mate them. You can only mate any two fish once every day, so you won’t be able to do this again the same day if they fail. There is a 20% failure rate for the fish as well, so you may not necessarily get the fish that you thought you would when you do this.

What Mating Fish in Happy Aquarium will Do For Your Bottom Line

Despite that failure rate, mating in Happy Aquarium is still very popular because it comes out about 15% better in terms of profit potential than normal fish raising. Because it costs 60% of the total normal cost of buying a fish to mate one, the failures are offset by the profits you gain from the successes. Generally speaking, if you mate a fish rather than buying it and wait the extra 50% of the time it takes to grow the fish from an egg, you will always still benefit from the mating over the added cost it took to do it.

As you can see, there are a lot of benefits to mating your fish. They will be easier to control, you can maintain steady populations in each of your tanks, and you will spend less coins to get your new fish. However, you need to be able to balance all those benefits against the risks that are inherently related to the task. This can be hard if you don’t take some time to plan your mating strategies, so be sure to balance it all out ahead of time.


Happy Aquarium

How to Feed in Happy Aquarium

With any game that has you raising creatures – whether it is chickens in Country Story or a pet in Pet Society – you need to remember to feed your little buddies. Without food, they’ll get sick and in some games they can even die. So, learning how to feed in Happy Aquarium is a tremendously important task that cannot be overstated. You should learn how to do it on day one of playing the game. But, it’s just as easy to overfeed as to underfeed, so let’s take a look at some of the strategies you can use to make sure your fish stay fed but you don’t waste too much coin in doing it.

The Key to Feed in Happy Aquarium Successfully

To start with, you need to make sure you have enough food. The food can be bought from the store, but it can also be given and received as a free gift from fellow players. This is a great way to get food as they will send you 20 at a time and it costs them nothing. This is a primary reason why it is good to have as many friends as possible. You can load up on as much feed as you need in the game from their free gifts and never need to worry about getting to the higher levels and paying for it directly.

Additionally, you need to create a schedule that will make feeding a lot easier. Don’t just assume that it will happen on its own volition. If you forget to login and feed your fish, even if they are full grown, they can die after 6 days of starvation. So, you’ll need to develop a good strateg and timeline here to keep everything fed.

What Happens if You Don’t Feed in Happy Aquarium on Time

If you do not feed your fish on time in Happy Aquarium, you will have 3 days until your fish get sick. After they get sick, you will have three more days until they disappear completely by dying. This is a major problem for a lot of players, but if you plan it properly, you won’t have any such issues. Just be sure to login at least once every 3 days to keep everything alive. Make sure you get food to every fish in the tank though – it’s easy to miss them when there are 30+ floating around.

As you can see, feeding is a valuable tool that will help you speed up the development of your fish. The game is very forgiving to those players who forget to feed their fish, but that doesn’t mean you should take advantage of that leniency. A fish that would normally take 6 hours to develop might take as long 6 days if you forget to feed it for too long, so be sure to feed on time, regularly so you can trade your fish back in for a profit more frequently.


Happy Aquarium

Choosing the Right Fish in Happy Aquarium

With every Facebook game, there are a variety of details that players need to focus on that will make or break their game play style. With Happy Aquarium, those very details are going to be a tremendously important factory when you start creating long term strategies. In particular, the fish in Happy Aquarium will be very important to how your game progresses and how effective you are at making yourself into a high level player. If you are serious about being one of the gurus of Happy Aquarium, the first step in the process is to develop a good lineup of fish to raise and then how long to raise, train, and mate them for.

Choosing the Right Fish in Happy Aquarium

To start with, you need to develop a good schedule to help yourself in the game. If you know you can only be online every 12 hours, it will not do you any good to choose the 6 and 8 hour fish that will need to be fed more often. However, if you choose the higher level fish, you need to be aware that you still need to logon to feed them occasionally. A 3 day fish is not going to be ready to go in 72 hours if you only feed them once. The best way to handle these situations then is to either buy the 3 day feeders and use them to maintain a grouping of 3 day fish every week or to establish a feeding schedule that will allow you to jump onto the game once or twice a day to get in there and feed your fish.

Which Fish in Happy Aquarium Are Easiest to Maintain

The easiest fish to maintain are going to be those that take as little time as possible to maintain. Generally speaking, this tends to be the 10-20 hour fish. Goldfish in particular are a good option because they are at 20 hours the easiest fish to get to before the day is up. All you need to do is logon once every day and make sure they are ready to go. Overall though, you’ll need to spend some time developing a list of which fish are cheapest for you to level up personally.
As you can see, there are a lot of factors that will determine how the fish in Happy Aquarium will react and how many coins you can honestly make from them. If you’re serious about developing a long term approach to the game that will allow you to make real profits and level up fast, then you need to spend some time contemplating these issues.


Happy Aquarium