Over the past couple of months, SGN has released its series of Wii-like sports games for the iPhone: iGolf, iBowl, and iBaseball. The quick success of these three applications has effectively entrenched the company as the leader in the remote-controlled sports space.

For those that are unfamiliar with SGN’s family of iPhone applications, the 3 aforementioned titles emulate their Wii Sports counterparts with simple motions that turd the iPhone into virtual golf clubs and baseball bats – and basically act like a Wiimote.

iFun actually turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a controller for your PC or Mac at home. The first game to use the app is iFun Golf, and you play the game as if you were playing a golf-based game on Nintendo’s Wii, except now the phone is the actual controller.

The setup is not too difficult either. All you have to do is log on to the game in your browser and load up iFun on your iPhone. So long as you have a wireless connection, the two should sync up automatically and you are ready to play.

It’s nice that a number of game elements are on the iPhone itself as well. From your makeshift Wiimote, you can select your clubs, options, and adjust your shot angle, thus adding a nice convenience factor to game play (as apposed to pointing a Wiimote at a screen). As with iGolf, you swing the iPhone like a golf club to hit the ball and your actual swing affects the shot in game. The control is very smooth and intuitive; which is to be expected considering the three games that came before it.

Here’s a full demo from Shervin Pishevar, CEO of SGN:

SGN says they may license other online games to add to the iFun platform. Furthermore, they also plan to release an API for other developers to create their own titles on iFun as well. Will this be a new movement in mobile games? One can only hope.

One of the prime elements of any game, application, website, or, well, any other product in the world is the question of who it is for. No matter what you are producing, you have to carefully consider the audience for which it is intended. Normally, most developers look to encompass as wide an audience as possible, but there are others that look for more specific groups.

Recently, Digital Playspace, launched Digital Dollhouse and marked its entrance into a social kid’s space. Unlike other titles of similar nature (Stardoll, for example), Digital Dollhouse focuses more on the world rather than more traditional, doll dress up.

Within the dollhouse, players are able to decorate to their heart’s content using various items that they purchase using what is called “Dollhouse Dollars.” The currency is easy enough to acquire through activities on the site itself, but users also have the option of purchasing select amounts either via subscription or direct from PayPal.

What is interesting (and seemingly counterintuitive), however, is that the application is not so much being labeled as a “virtual world,” as it is an online “playspace.” Supposedly, this is in an effort to differentiate Digital Dollhouse from the growing number of developers within the virtual worlds space.

In light of this “differentiation,” and the fact that the game is designed specifically for young girls, Dollhouse is much lighter on interaction than its counterparts. The site is devoid of chat systems and the common advertisers one would normally see, but that doesn’t mean there are no social features.

The game still contains a friend list and lets users share each other’s creations and trade items back and forth. Furthermore, there is a nice little feature dubbed the “Dollhouse Cam” that can actively show works in progress to anyone curious to see it. Not only this, but the game actually has some minor educational value in the sense that the design elements (i.e. furniture) are not made up but come from legitimate artistic periods in human history.

According to CEO and founder, Jesyca Durchin, “Digital Dollhouse was created as ‘wish fulfilment for girls…. I wanted girls of all ages to have a realistic interactive environment that they could design and control, rather than a cartoon-like technological world that was controlled for them.” Suffice, to say, this goal was met quite well, and hey, it’s a lot cheaper than a real dollhouse. Isn’t it?

[via Virtual Worlds News]

In order to mitigate the risk of “bad” user generated content these days, developers must limit the amount of freedom users have and guide them in a specific direction. This subtle control gives the users a feeling of freedom, when they are in fact quite limited (more limitations are not bad, just safer).

Currently in beta is PhotoGrab by Amy Jo Kim’s Shufflebrain. This new Facebook application is an excellent example of a user-generated content tool with well executed limitations and a simple core game mechanic. PhotoGrab plays as a photo recognition game meant to train visual acuteness and mental awareness.

When you play, you are presented with an image and in the bottom left, a detail of that image. The player must then click on the portion of the larger image in which that detail originated from using a circular mouse cursor. The closer you get, the more points you earn, and this continues for three pictures with 24 seconds spent on each of them. Upon completion, your score is compared to your friends that have played the game and the app then compares your visual recognition skills to animals that reflect that level of sight. This is the game play that is used for every game, and the tool couldn’t be simpler.

Whenever you start the application, you have the option to create your own PhotoGrab game and upload three images from their Facebook photo album(s). Once selected, you make your detail selections (these selections are the details that the player will be provided with when they play your game). You do this for each of your pictures, save, and voila, anyone can play your very own PhotoGrab game.

The combination of these simple tools and Facebook’s own album limitations not only allows for low risk UGC, but makes it easy for virtually anyone to create their own game. Furthermore, considering that Facebook is the biggest photo sharing site on the web, an application that allows personal creation of interactive albums compounds the social implications beyond most other games currently in circulation. Bottom line, the application is easy to learn and entertaining to play due to personal investment, and really adds a fun flavor to one of the primary uses of Facebook.

Whether or not you are a fan of golf, it’s unlikely you’ve never gone to a miniature golf course. Most everyone has played minigolf at some point, be it for a birthday party, a date, or just something different to do. Regardless of the reason, it’s always an enjoyable experience with the creative courses and a good group of friends behind you.

Well, the latest title from Playfish, Minigolf Party brings that experience to Facebook. Okay, so it lacks the teasing you get from your friends when you shoot 20 over par (at least in the conventional sense), but the game itself certainly captures the quaint creativeness of minigolf. Long story short, this game is fun. No, not just a little fun, a lot of fun, and is arguably the best Playfish title to date.

The game combines the 3D style of Bowling Buddies with the caricature look of Word Challenge and Who Has the Biggest Brain to create a whole new look and feel. You start off as a male or female character, but you can’t really do too much yet with the look until you can afford new clothes and items. First, you have to start golfing.

Playfish has done a great job of making the core game play fantastic. You can choose to golf one hole or all nine, and each course has a different theme from an international location and creates unique obstacles that reflect that theme. The game is also very easy to pick up, as you intuitively aim your character’s shot and power using the mouse and let the ball fly (in some cases, quite literally).

This is where earning money comes into play. Littering the golf courses are coins that if you touch with the golf ball, magically enter your wallet. This creates an interesting challenge in order to gain money. Where other games just gave you money for repeating the same exact thing, Minigolf Party gives you a choice to either go for coins or increase your score (yes, eventually it will get repetitive, but at least it isn’t after the very first try). If you’re good enough, you can do both, but considering the difficulty of some shots, you will have to be very good due to the difficulty curve.

The difficulty of the later holes is a refreshing, yet frustrating love-hate relationship. Most Facebook games are far too easy to play through, but Minigolf Challenge has a nice difficulty curve to it. It doesn’t get distinctly hard until the last two holes and their plethora of water hazards, but while quite tough the first time through, there is a feeling of satisfaction when you finally make par (something that cannot be said for most Facebook titles).

Once you have finished a round of golf, you can use the money you earned in order to buy new clothes and items to further customize your character. Also, as expected, the game utilizes the familiar Playfish social elements of friend (or world) rankings, challenges, and achievements. While this is nothing to write home about, the achievements are more interesting than previous games, as it employs a more Xbox 360-like approach such that when you earn an achievement it pops up during the game and you find out what it is you finish a hole (i.e. hitting a water hazard over five times in a row).

Ultimately, Minigolf Party is a phenomenally fun game. It looks wonderful, it’s easy to learn and play, and it’s longer lasting than a lot of games on Facebook. The game does still call itself “beta,” so one would wonder what else is going to be done. Most likely, it is just some bug fixes here and there, but hopefully, in the future, more holes and course will be added, because as good as the current nine are, players are definitely going to crave more.

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Social Gaming Network (SGN) is a leading global development platform for social game distribution.

Offerpal Media is a leading managed offer network for social applications and online merchants.

Zynga is a leading developer and distributor of social games for platforms like Facebook and MySpace.

Cafe.com is a leading developer and distributor of social casual games.

Advertising is everywhere, so it is not too surprising to see a Six Flags game appear on Facebook. For those that may not know, the Six Flags Parks is one of the world’s largest chains of amusement parks and theme parks. The company holds 21 locations around North America that consist of theme parks, water parks, and family entertainment centers. In 2007 alone, the cumulative properties played host to around 24.9 million guests, making it the forth-most popular theme park in the world.

Suffice to say, Six Flags has the money to put into games that advertise their parks. The Six Flags game is a collection of carnival type mini-games that you would find inside most game areas while at any major theme park. Currently there are three games to be played: Block Buster, 3-Point Challenge, and Balloon Pop. Block Buster consists of throwing baseballs to, well, knock down blocks, 3-Point Challenge is a basketball shoot-out, and Balloon Pop is dart throwing.

All of the games are easy to learn and master, and do provide some quality fun that can, in fact, become addictive. You play by aiming your mouse where you want to shoot/throw and hold it down to generate power, then let go in order to release whatever you are throwing. With the exception of the dart game (which doesn’t let you generate strength when you throw), all three games use the same mechanics in similar ways.

Perhaps the best part about the game, however, are the rewards for playing. Every week, the top scoring players are eligible to win Six Flags tickets. Suffice to say, this is certainly one of the better player rewards out there. Furthermore, this provides a competitive aspect of the game, displaying the top leaderboards as well as past winners, thus giving players an idea of how much they have to score to earn those tickets.

Unfortunately, this is really the only significant social feature in the game. Beyond this competitive aspect of the game for high scores and tickets, the only other social aspect is a built in chat system. Sadly, the chat tends to be rather barren most of the time.

Overall, the Six Flags mini-games are not bad at all. They are fun and provide players with great prizes. These prizes alone add a great competitive aspect to the game and in fact does increase social usage, but beyond the display of the top scoring players, there is not much else to the social features (save the infrequently used chat system).

Despite the social short-comings, the games are still easy to learn and master, and can quickly become addictive. If you find yourself with some extra time or you want a chance to win tickets to an awesome theme park, then Six Flags comes well recommended.

Zynga, one of the biggest developers of social games today, is announcing today the launch of “Live Poker” for the iPhone, thus making it the first truly live game on the iPhone platform. The game is a mobile version of the highly popular Texas Hold’Em application and has effectively turned the iPhone into an always-on social gaming device.

With Live Poker, players can compete with any of the 1.4 million daily web players at any time from anywhere with an internet connection. Finding and joining buddies or selecting tables is even easier than the Facebook version, and it’s not just limited to Facebook. Users can now connect and play with friends from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, or Zynga’s own account system.

Table selection has also been simplified, and there are always games going on. You can easily see when your friends are playing, or join in with users of any level.

Live Poker is also the one of the first applications to make use of Facebook Connect, thus deepening the level of social integration for the iPhone platform. With Facebook Connect, Live Poker can allow social information (such as photos) to be displayed in-game.

It’s also worth mentioning that Zynga has created a 2^nd app that is advertised in the free version as “buy 40,000 chips,” and costs $9.99. This upgraded version of the free rendition (and other paid versions at different prices) circumvents the lack of any virtual goods infrastructure on the iPhone, and allows users to buy more poker chips whenever they want. It also gives users access to various poker tournaments.

“We have seen the creation of the next important social gaming platform, thanks to ‘Live Poker,’” said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in a statement. “Delivering the first social game on the iPhone is a logical extension for us. Social gaming continues to grow, and this is another giant step towards taking it to the mass market.”

Like its web predecessor, Live Poker has great design, its fun, plays well, and works impressively fast considering it is a live multiplayer game on a new mobile platforum. The game is available on any iPhone with 3G or Wi-Fi access, as well as the iPod Touch. It can be downloaded at the iTunes store here.

In many ways, the gaming industry and gaming culture are far more advanced in the east than the west. And in the same way that social gaming attracted gamers and non-gamers alike in the United States, it has also captivated the greater population of China as well. With an all ready fervent populace playing MMOs, it is not surprising that even more would be attracted by the simple and casual games found within social networks.

A recent article in Gamasutra notes Facebook and Xiaonei have been operating in China for a while now. However, it took quite a while to translate Facebook into Chinese, and Xiaonei hasn’t had the platform to properly support social gaming until recently. As such, the social gaming space was left a vacuum until it was filled by Kaixin001 in April of 2008.

Sure enough, Kaixin001 began to skyrocket in popularity as China’s billions of citizens gravitated to this new form of social, cheap, and entertaining media. The growth was so substantial that the majority of China’s game studios and networks began to implement social capabilities into their products.

The combination of games and social networks is further highlighted by the growth 51.com – which has also become a social network that supports gaming. Unfortunately, you might need to learn some Chinese in order to understand it.

The real question now is to whether or not the rise in social gaming will last in China. Based on the relatively low cost of doing business in this space and social gaming’s tremendous growth, things are looking good.

Sony doesn’t seem to be doing so well in the current console races with the Playstation 3. Market share for the PS3 is coming in at around 22%, and for those who have been living in a cave, that 22% makes Sony in third place below both Microsoft and Nintendo. Nintendo is in the top spot with nearly 50% market share and 34 million consoles sold worldwide.

Sony refuse to give up its fight however, and during a London conference last month, Jamie MacDonald, Vice President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios, was adamant that games like Buzz and Singstar were as popular as ever and still hugely successful.

When asked his thoughts on other companies such as Activision and Nintendo putting out titles like Guitar Hero and Wii Sports, both of which have been widely regarded as ‘casual games’, MacDonald told Videogamer, “I personally am really pleased to see the success of Wii Sports and Wii Play and Guitar Hero and Rock Band in a sense that it’s expanding the market for everybody and it’s expanding the appeal of video games.”

With more social and casual games becoming top sellers, Macdonald went on to say how Sony is at a perfect place to take advantage of such changes: “I think we’re incredibly well positioned in the sense that we kind of, it would be a bit arrogant of me to say we invented, but we were an early pioneer certainly and we continue to be very successful in that space.”

LittleBigPlanet, Sony’s newest and arguably biggest social game is set to give Sony the edge over the competition, as well as the much anticipated application Home, which uses rooms and 3d spaces around a social network. But can these two new social ‘games’ make up for the lacklustre showing thus far? LittleBigPlanet is off to a good start with 165,000 copies sold in the US alone in its 1st week of sales, but with Home lacking a solid release date things might not go as smoothly as hoped.

Macdonald still stands resolute however saying: “I think with things like LittleBigPlanet, with PlayStation Home, with the continuing success of SingStar and Buzz! on PS3 and the things that we’ve done to the experiences that take advantage of the connectivity of the PS3, the rich media capabilities, I think personally we’re very well placed.”

With well over 17 million users every month, Top Friends, by Slide, has made itself one of the more dominant applications on Facebook today. In addition to the core Top Friends functionality, users are able to completely customize their profiles with music, videos, and skins. Moreover, you can even show your mood as well as track the things your friends do. Everything is very personal, and gives users the ability to really show who they are.

Nevertheless, as popular as Top Friends already is, it has recently added a new feature that called “Ownd,” which, as one might expect, is more or less identical to its social game counterparts: Owned! and Friends for Sale.

Just like in the actual game, Slide has created a means for you to buy and sell your friends, put yourself on the market, and see what you are “worth” to people. With this new feature you can see who owns you, how much your profile costs, and how much cash you have, but there isn’t really too much beyond that.

Is this a step for Slide further into social gaming? Definitely. Although at this point, this is just a simple test to see how much this improves the user experience for Top Friends’ users. Is it a game? No, not quite yet: It is game-like, but this is a feature that is still a smaller part of a greater whole. Could it be turned into a game? Yes – Owned and Friends for Sale, while not much deeper, are fully designed around the concept of buying and selling your friends.

Ultimately, this is not a bad idea. Even if Slide chooses not to go further down this road, they can at the very least, expect to see increased traffic coming their way soon. And if you believe that games are “somewhat” recession proof, it is a pretty wise investment as well.

[via Bret Terrill]