Facebook Arcade

Facebook Arcade lets you access Facebook games in an environment tailored to them.

The goal of Facebook Arcade is to take advantage of Windows to create a more robust and stable gaming environment. Apps often tailor experiences to mobile devices, so why not a program that tailors them to Windows? It’s worth noting that this program is essentially a very focused Web browser, and that ensures that it can provide access to all existing Facebook games and all games to come without modification.

For the person who plays Facebook games or a particular Facebook game often on his or her PC, Arcade is pretty neat and an experience worth checking out. Game experiences are in many cases better. The program also consolidates all of your favorite games in one place. You can customize this My Games section as well as peruse the Facebook games library more easily.

In addition to perusing and searching the collection, the program helps you find new games by providing lists of recommended games. One list is based on games your friends play. Another is based on your genre preferences and similar games, and there are also lists for newly available games.

Perhaps one of the most useful features that Facebook Arcade provides is the ability to create shortcuts. If you have a particular game that you play regularly, you can create a shortcut to it on your desktop. Once you click that shortcut, it will launch Facebook Arcade with that game loaded and ready to go. This program also gives you more convenient access to each game’s settings, and if you make changes to those preferences, they’ll be reflected from your phone or from wherever else you connect to Facebook.

This is a beta program. There’s no word on when the full release will come, and while it’s quite stable for a beta, crashes and odd behavior can happen. Another issue is that this program doesn’t address any of the privacy concerns that keeps some people away from Facebook games and Facebook in general.