Happy Island sees release of Spooky Quests just in time for Halloween

It may be an incredibly late addition, but CrowdStar has added a series of Spooky Quests to Happy Island, allowing users to win four Halloween themed rewards.

These quests will have you ghost hunting and treat collecting. Meet us behind the break for more details of how to complete these spooky quests.

The first quest you can come across is Ghost Bustin', which has you busting 10 Ghosts (simply click on them). These ghosts can be found floating around your island, but you'll need to be fast at catching them, as each ghost goes in and out of transparency at a pretty fast rate, meaning that you won't have long to click on each ghost before it disappears again. Your reward for this quest is a Spirit Stone decorative item.

The second and final quest is the Trick or Treat quest. This quest asks you to travel to your neighbors' islands and search for candy. You'll need to find 20 pieces of candy in all, which is actually much easier said than done. The quest description itself even says that you'll need to "visit lots of Neighbors and Islands," with this being due to the fact that when you visit a neighbor, lots of candy items will appear on the beach, but most of them will be fake, trick items, and only a few (one or two, or more if you're extremely lucky) will be treats.


Luckily, you can visit each neighbors' island more than once, and see that the candy pieces have re-spawned on their beach. This means that any player, so long as they have a single neighbor, will eventually be able to complete this quest, but it will be a time consuming process either way.

Once you have collected all 20 pieces of candy, you'll be rewarded with the other three themed rewards - two decorations and one attraction: a Cat-o-lantern, Haunted Pumpkin Stack, and Wicked Wagon, which are only available to earn through this quest.

Happy Island goes medieval with Knights of the Round theme

In addition to the Halloween celebration currently taking place in Happy Island, users can also travel back in time, way back to the time of Arthur and the Knights of the Round, via the addition of a 20+ item theme, containing both attractions and decorative items to round out the theme.

The attractions are items like Sir J. Harris, a jouster on horseback (we're assuming he's an attraction as your tourists would be able to watch him joust), Drake's Roost, and Sir R. Dawson's Place (an English cottage in appearance).

Meanwhile, you can pick up a whole slew of decorative items, ranging from street lanterns that cost 1 Facebook Credit (10¢ each) and tents of many colors, to a whole series of Medieval Wall pieces, allowing you to construct an entire fortress around your other themed decorations and attractions.

Of course, you can also purchase the Round Table itself, which functions as a decorative item, available to purchase for 7,500 coins. Really, most of the items in this theme are pretty affordable, at least in terms of decorations (the most expensive costing 15 Facebook Credits, or the equivalent of $1.50). Some of the attractions do cost a few dollars each, but with so many items available to choose from in this theme, you could probably skip them altogether if the price was too high and not lose out on any of the fun of the theme. We definitely can't complain with that.

It Girl maker CrowdStar looks beyond Facebook for 1 billion players

At last month's HTML5 Dev Conference in San Francisco, CrowdStar CEO Peter Relan (pictured) said, "We want to create the game that reaches a billion people." The company has announced just how it plans to make that happen: Project Trident. CrowdStar revealed its plans to create a global, mobile platform and recognizable gaming franchises. Of course, CrowdStar will still hang out with Facebook--let's just say "it's complicated."

TechCrunch reports that, as part of its plan to diversify beyond Facebook, CrowdStar will launch It Girl (and Top Girl for iOS) franchise in Asia across Japan, Korea and China. Starting with NHN Japan, the company plans to introduce both It Girl and Top Girl to five Asian social networks in Q4 (October through December) alone. According to TechCrunch, Top Girl has already been downloaded from the App Store 4 million times.

In addition to launching It Girl on five Asian social networks before Dec. 31, CrowdStar reportedly plans to release another three games before year's end across Facebook, mobile and global networks. That amounts to more games released in the end of 2011 than CrowdStar put out in all of 2010.

It looks like the maker of hits like Happy Aquarium seeks to make a comeback, and according to TechCrunch, one of those eight games will hit this weekend. (We'll have more details on that soon enough.) But this comes just as competitor Zynga announces its own pseudo-independent social game platform and a ton of games. Anyone else feeling a bit ... claustrophobic?

What do you think of CrowdStar's plans to gain financial independence from Facebook? How do you plan on finding the time to play all of these new games that are likely to hit before the holidays?