Yoville Needs To Die

So my wife loves this ridiculous online / Facebook game called YoVille!. It’s basically a silly point system tacked onto a chat room. Even worse, it’s formal equivalent would be Animal Crossing, which I shelled out like 70$ for when it first came out. Sadly, the new Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Wii was a port of Animal Crossing on the DS which was basically an update to the original Animal Crossing on the GameCube (which we already own). My wife grew bored with it pretty quick, and thusly attached herself to YoVille!. Let me get back onto the topic at hand, my wife’s laptop was fairly dated at this point, 1.2GHz Intel Celeron with a laughable 512MB of RAM. I was noticing she was rebooting the computer an awful lot due to freeze ups (something she could handle w/o a reboot if she’d be willing to embrace Linux and let me teach her how to solve her problems). So I decided to buy her a new computer, especially after the recent “YoVille! stopped working” scenarios. Oh I didn’t mention, not only is the game stupid (take that with a grain of salt, I love me some MobWars) but it’s always having issues. Zynga, Inc. knows how to market the hell out of disposable games, but they really don’t know how to build solid user experiences. That all being said, YoVille! stopped working, and my wife is now the proud owner of a shiny new Dell Vostro 1510, with a Intel Core 2 Duo T5670, 1.8GHz proc, with 3GB of RAM and I even sprung for the larger battery for extra wireless time on that damn game. I’m actually a bit jealous, it’s not quite as beefy as my desktop rig, but it’s pretty sweet. So at this point, I’ve wiped Windows Vista off and installed Ubuntu 8.10 (actually, I contemplated a XP / Ubuntu dual boot scenario, but my wife’s not really the dual boot type). Firefox is installed by default, so I made sure that Flash was installed, loaded up YoVille! and tried to log in. Son of a bitch! All this machine, and it won’t load. Let’s fast forward a few hours. I’ve tried Googling around, installed different builds of the Flash player that are “proven” to work. Tried different versions of Firefox, tried this, tried that, tired of trying. Sadly, I learned something very important. Apparently there’s a lot of other husbands out there with wives that insist on playing that infernal game, and they too have been trying to fix a myriad of issues, most of which seem to be issues with the Flash movie that Zynga, Inc. has released. Sadder still, I finally gave up after many many many package installs, reinstalls and removals and did something that I normally wouldn’t do to solve a “Linux” problem. I installed the WINDOWS version of Firefox, installed the latest Flash player. Sure as shit, it works, and my wife now has an icon on her lovely Gnome desktop labeled “Windows Firefox”. Sickens me, but at least this brand new laptop wasn’t purchased in vain.