The search continues for a role-playing game that brings something new to the table, but sometimes the dish is best when familiar and served with a few new toppings. A while back, a little cops-and-robbers style Facebook app called Bad Boys’ Game came to our attention. Finally getting a chance to take a look, it turned out it’s a bit more gruff and gritty than the children’s game you played all those years ago –  but easily just as much fun.

The game is, in many ways, like your typical Facebook RPG. In traditional Mafia Wars-style, players play through a text-based interface, completing missions, buying land, upgrading stats, and purchasing new items to make their character stronger. However, this is where things start to take a different turn. Rather than simply forming a mob, players join up with one of two factions: The Police or The Criminals.

Each group has its own set of goals and ladders to climb with your typical mob-style set up (Teams) for friends, but what is interesting is that the two sides can actually defend or attack key areas such as the LA airport. While this does feel a little like random fights in other RPGs, holding these areas tend to be bonus hotspots. They can provide various benefits such as travel and even part-time jobs for some extra cash flow beyond missions. Furthermore, different locations within a city can be traveled to, which actually takes a period of time. The best part is, the designers were intuitive enough to have purchasable items, like cars, affect how fast you can go.

Rather than just buy items that give stats, this game actually gives you an avatar that is physically upgraded, visually, with every purchase. Granted, this is in other RPGs as well, and the avatar is a little overly gritty with a desperate need to shave, but it is a nice addition, nonetheless.

All in all, this RPG feels cleaner, crisper, and significantly deeper than most others that we’ve seen as of late, even though it has a small 10,000 monthly active users. Once a new player gets a handle on all the new elements, it is easily just as entertaining as Mafia Wars or any other RPG for that matter. The separation of two competing factions alone adds enough to the game to make it worth playing. Sure, there are some flaws – leveling is a little slow at first if you want to nitpkc – but overall it really feels like the developers thought this game through quite thoroughly, and have successfully created something that feels both familiar and fresh at the same time.

For one reason or another, lots of people has at least thought about opening a bar at some point in their life. The nightlife is an alluring one, and a fairly new app from Cross Coast Interactive is attempting to give players the tools to do just that with the Facebook game, Build-A-Bar.

If you haven’t figured it out by the name, your objective is to build the biggest and best bar in the country. Players start out with a fairly run-down “Dive Bar” and work their way up the ladder to a Las Vegas or European “Super Club.” In theory, this sounds like a fantastic idea. The game is advertised as being able to customize a personal space with money earned from other visiting players. In a manner of speaking, yes, players can customize their own bar entrance, dance floor/interior, and the bathrooms. However, this really only consists of uploading a new picture from your hard drive…. Not exactly the most creative means to build a virtual space.

This isn‘t to say that the upload element is “bad,” but it is easily the biggest disappointment within Build-A-Bar. In the past, something along these lines would be interesting, but with virtual spaces evolving to the level of games like Restaurant City — where you design every detail of your own virtual restaurant –  there is a lot to be desired from this app.

Customization notwithstanding, the game does have some decent ideas including a list of playable music, purchasable drinks and items to increase bar revenue (cover fees), user comments on the bathroom wall (of all places), and even an alcohol meter feature to measure virtual drinking levels that is similar to older games like Pass A Drink (though you buy the drinks yourself rather than send them to friends). Players can even throw a party within their virtual bar, but unfortunately, and once again, the feature is left wanting. Throwing a party really only seems to consist of sending out fancy looking invitations to friends and doesn’t do much but earn a few extra dollars for your bar. Party King makes for a much better example of this idea. That game has a complex, realistic way of modeling parties: Y0u need to gain a great reputation to attract more people, then have to deal with upgrade costs to accommodate the growth.

Frankly, Build-A-Bar has a lot of good ideas, it’s just that they aren’t quite executed too well. Virtual spaces are an excellent means to express oneself and can have an extensive lifespan when it comes to replayability, but while this particular app advertises such, the real customization just isn’t there. Could Build-A-Bar become something great? Absolutely, but in its current state, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to take the same idea and rebuild it from scratch.

PaymentPin is a phone-based payment service, out of Montréal, Quebec, that is aiming to take on larger companies including Zong and Boku in the market for in-game payments for virtual goods. All three offer a way for users to buy items in applications through charging their accounts with their phone service providers. But PaymentPin has a twist that others don’t, at least at this point.

It lets users bill to their landlines and on voice over internet telephone (VoIP) services, not just through mobile devices. While neither of these features is impossible for competitors to duplicate, PaymentPin is one of the first services we know of that has made them available to gamers. But wait, given the fact that more and more people are ditching their landlines, why focus on anything but mobile?

There are more than 100 million land line owners in the US alone, PaymentPin chief executive Malik Yacoubi tells us. His company is making $16 per land-line user versus $6 per mobile user. Overall, half its revenue are from land lines and half from mobile, even though only around 25 percent of transactions are derived from the former.

The company has developed its expertise in land-line billing over the last four years. It started out offering a web-based service for a Quebec reality show — to see what was happening the attic of the reality show, viewers had to go to a web site and pay. PaymentPin was the land-line billing option; it offers its own 1-900 number service, billing by charging the user for the call. The company has since expanded in the US and Canada.

And in North America, it has a few things going for it. For example, in the US, billing amounts are limited to $10 for mobile but $35 for land lines. Fees can also favor land-lines. Publishers can only take home around 50 percent of revenues through mobile payments in the US, but up to 72 percent from land lines.

VoIP, another option the company offers, has not to our knowledge been a common way for people to buy things like virtual goods. But perhaps, as more and more mobile phones enable VoIP, this will change.

Overall, for gaming companies with a lot of users in the North America, PaymentPin is an interesting option, even though it overlaps with some of what its rivals already offer. It works with many of the same payment processors as Boku and Zong, for example. Perhaps the additional phone lines can mean more revenue? The company also offers a dashboard for publishers of revenue coming in from its various types of phone billing, so one can compare how mobile is stacking up against the other options.

PaymentPin started looking into social gaming around a year ago, and has since cut deals with gaming network MochiMedia, dating site LavaLife, and social network Tagged. It only offers the land line service in Canada and the US, although its mobile service is also available in Europe and Australia. On Facebook, it is beginning to work with AdParlor, but Yacoubi adds that many more deals are in the works.

One of the few full-fledged MMORPGs on a mobile device, TibiaME is a fantasy title wrought with all the magic and knights that are reminiscent of so many mainstream games. Built by ClipSoft, the massive multiplayer online role-playing game has been seeing strong growth over the past year.

TibiaME runs on any Java enabled device, so gamers can potentially play it on many different models of phones around the world. This platform choice also means catering to a rather low common denominator as far as technology is concerned. The game is… simplistic-looking, to say the least.

Despite graphical limitations, the game has everything a PC-based massive multiplayer online game has: Leveling, dungeons, social play, and so on. However, having been around since 2003, it does seem a little dated. Nonetheless, the first half of 2009 has proven to be exceedingly fruitful for TibiaME. It has pulled in over 10,000 subscribers. According to Benjamin Zuckerer, Product Manager for TibiaME, the growth has been “exponential” since 2008.

The growth is due, greatly in part, to international expansion. Though having a game, especially an MMO, stretch overseas is not uncommon, the situation here certainly proves how lucrative such a move can become. It was last year, that ClipSoft launched its game over in Indonesia leading to an impressive 105% jump in its subscriber base.

Thus far, TibiaME now has an active player base of roughly 40,000 players. According to Andreas Weikl, Marketing Manager for ClipSoft, TibiaME is now, not only the first mobile MMO, but also the biggest, worldwide.

Muggmaker is a profile avatar creator, with newspaper-quality animated caricature styles that users can use to create images of themselves. While the app is tiny, with only a couple thousand monthly active users, it’s worth a closer look.

Created as a side project by Jon Keegan, a long-time print illustrator for clients such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, US News & World Report, and HarperCollins, Muggmaker is a 2D avatar creator for Facebook containing a level of detail reminiscent of mainstream games’ avatar creators such as City of Heroes or Elder Scrolls. Okay, before people get all in a huff, no, it is not anywhere near as complex as the said examples, but for a flat Flash creation, on Facebook, it is quite impressive and those are the titles that come to mind.

Limited to only a bust, users are able to modify a great deal of facial features such as eyes, ears, nose, and upper body. Each feature has a fairly large list of feature types ranging from pointy to bulbous noses, for example, and these are then further customizable with rows of slider bars that adjust height, width, rotation and so on. Moreover, you can even click on the feature to move it, manually, around the face, so unlike the mainstream examples, you could make something with a bit more of a Picasso-feel to it. Unfortunately, you can’t move features around enough to make a true Picasso, but it is fun to try.

Of course, colors and clothing can also be changed, and users are even able to grant their new avatar with some equally adjustable animations. Again, it is 2D, so they are a bit simplistic but are still fairly amusing. Top this off with a collection of backgrounds and your Muggmaker avatar is ready for profile publication. It’s a very unique and stylized addition to your Facebook page, as long as millions of other Facebook users don’t start using it.

Though Muggmaker may not be a mainstream game’s level of customization, it would be difficult to deny that it has taken, at least, a step in that direction. With the level of detail available to users on such a small and simplified scale, imagine the possibilities when adapted to a larger Facebook game for a company with significantly more resources. With current avatar customization for most games consisting of merely pre-set clothing and faces, this level of user expression could do wonders for the social space – a space in which user expression and uniqueness is one of the most sought after commodities.

Casual multiplayer site OMGpop.com has been busy with its mainstream mimicking titles — like its Hover Kart version of Nintendo classic Mario Kart, released earlier this year. Its latest one, called Hit Machine, follows a similar, pattern.

Released earlier this month amidst the multimillion dollar games of The Beatles: Rock Band and Guitar Hero 5, like the Facebook app RockRiot, it intends to capitalize on the popularity of virtual music-playing competitions. Hit Machine is online, free, social — and complemented by a good choice in music. It’s worth trying out, despite some shortcomings, if you’re into these sorts of games.

Hit Machine plays like its mainstream brethren, with players using the A-D and J-L keys, in a piano-like fashion, to hit falling, multi-colored notes as they reach the bottom of the screen. Players compete in real-time against other opponents, with each of their scores viewable during play. Looking away from the notes is not highly recommended.

With all music games of this nature, it is the track selection that really makes the difference, and surprisingly, the music — of the underground sort — is not too bad. While there aren’t any major names on the song list, the songs are pretty good, play well, and are even coupled with corresponding music videos. Best of all, for the artist, is that their CDs are linked at the end of each song for anyone interested in their music. It’s another outlet for an up and coming musician.

Unfortunately, not all is perfect in the game. While the synchronous, competitive multiplayer style is nice, and the music videos amusing, there are two glaring complaints. One, there doesn’t seem to be any real, noticeable, fail mechanic for missing a note, other than some text that says that you missed. With games like Guitar Hero, a miss equated to a cacophony of squeaking and the note in the music track did not play. That is not the case here. The music plays regardless — apparently to allow for the multiplayer competition — but the immersion of being a “rock star” is lost.

Moreover, and perhaps most obnoxious, is that you have to finish a song on a lower difficulty setting before moving on to a harder one. Not all players like to start on easy, and frankly, easy tends to be a bit boring. Why on earth would you not give the player a choice in their personal difficulty setting?

Overall, Hit Machine isn’t too bad. With simple, yet familiar, mechanics, the game is heavily the underdog when compared to the console releases this month, but its online, free, and social capability features help to make up for some heavy short-comings.

Riot Games is planning to launch a new game in October, called League of Legends, that combines hardcore gaming with casual online features. Today, the company announced that it has raised $8 million from leading Chinese social media company Tencent and existing investors Benchmark Capital and FirstMark Capital.

In Legends, players are “summoners” — wizards that summon “champions” to fight each other in battle. You can have up to six people per team, earn skill that you can carry across battles. My former colleague at VentureBeat, Dean Takahashi, has more on how the company plans to make money:

The game is a free-to-play game, meaning players can start playing for free. If they want to decorate their characters or buy time-saving features, they have to pay. Riot was able to set up the virtual goods system in a deal with Fatfoogoo, a virtual goods and electronic commerce platform maker. With Fatfoogoo, the company was able to add two kinds of currency: one that you can earn through experience, the other that you can buy with real money. Games with these dual currency systems are considered more fair, since rich players can’t entirely buy their way to victory. Players can spend the currency in the game’s store, where they can buy a variety of items.

League of Legends will first roll out in the U.S. and Europe, and later expand to Asia. Tencent, notably, plans to carry the game to its hundreds of millions of users in China.

Always, it seems, that the standard social role-playing game has us playing the mafia thug, the shining knight, or some sort of Transylvanian denizen. Granted, some games do the formula up from time to time, like Zynga’s Fashion Wars. But all in all, new RPGs follow one of the above themes regardless of what platform they’re on.

So, it’s interesting to see a rather different theme brought to a tired genre: Medicine. More specifically, this fairly new iPhone game called Swabs Online has players playing some real-life good guys in a bustling MMO-style hospital.

Swabs Online puts players into the “Sisters of Murky University College Hospital (SOMUCH),” and while the primary enemy should be disease, you are also put against other players in the hopes of reaching the top leaderboard.

Players can pick from a small variety of character types such as a Surgeon or General Physician, but in all reality, these are the same as “classes” in any mafia-style game that merely grant players an advantage in one specific stat (i.e. energy, stamina, or cash flow). Beyond this, the core game play is more or less the same: Challenge other players, complete tasks, earn cash and experience, upgrade your hospital, and build up your medical prowess.

The biggest difference is that the game is on the iPhone. Currently, it does make use of Facebook Connect to publish in-game achievements to your wall, but that is about it for the time being. Though more specifics haven’t been forthcoming from the developer, greater Facebook functionality is likely coming out soon. The game also makes use of the iPhone 3.0 operating system Push Notification feature, so you can get immediate text updates from the game. But, considering the overall lack of integration with Facebook it is sort of a let-down.

Swabs Online only works on 3.0 or higher. Suffice to say, not everyone owns an iPhone or iPod Touch, and not everyone of them has OS3.0. Beginning to see the trend? Swabs has effectively cut a significant number of its potential users. Nonetheless, that issue has not gone unnoticed. The game’s developers have stated that an upgrade is due in the App Store that will add support for OS2.2.1

Overall, Swabs Online is indeed an interesting concept, and certainly a different spin on a very overdone genre. It doesn’t particularly bring anything significant to the table, but its Facebook integration and Push Notification capabilities does at least add a little bit of flare to the game. More than anything, it’s the lack of backwards compatibility that holds the game back, but once this is updated and so long as customer feedback and commentary is being listened to, this iPhone RPG could grow beyond its current limitations.

Social media company IBT Games, creator of sports games like Twenty20 Cricket, Street Football and Slam Dunk Basketball, and a FBfund finalist, has created two new developer products to help smaller applications get better distribution on Facebook.

Currently, larger gaming companies are seeing more growth because they are able to cross-promote new games on older, popular games as well spend more money on advertising.

Though still in beta stages, the two new products, Trackr and Notifyr. The former tracks advertising campaigns while the latter makes sending Facebook notifications a little bit easier.

Of the two developments, Trackr seems to be the more powerful. In a nut-shell, it tracks all of your media campaigns, blogs, and viral channels. However, the tool is actually cross platform; working in whichever social space the developer chooses. Delving more deeply into its analytic capabilities, Trackr is able to report on each of the following:

• Install conversion from Facebook Ads and other networks.
• Traffic from invites, feeds, emails, notifications, and bookmark links.
• Number of installs, unique users, clicks, and geo-reports.
• Traffic from an external sites using Facebook Connect.

Essentially, the program is a more social network oriented analytics system, but if you don’t have one in mind all ready, Trackr is, actually, free to use. In fact, it takes about 15 minutes to set up. Its developers are also offering a $50 Facebook Ad credit for new users. Of course, if you don’t need another analytics tool, you don’t need one.

The second tool from IBT could also prove useful to Facebook developers. Requiring zero programming, Notifyr is meant to be a solution for all notification sending within any of your Facebook applications. Described by IBT as “your personal Facebook notification sending assistant,” this useful little tool only requires the integration of an iFrame. Once done, it’s only a matter of loading up an existing userbase and sending out the notice. All notifications sent are completely customizable through HTML formatting and targetable to different audiences. Furthermore, all messages can be A/B Tested, saved as templates, and even scheduled for release at specific times.

Though these products are not the end-all-be all solution to the rigors of product distribution, they are certainly something that could help. Interested parties are able to sign up any time at the BrainwaveU.com.

While many social games and apps have drifted to the U.S. from Asia (farming games such as Happy Farm, for example), it looks like a hint of the reverse has occurred recently. California-based social developer, FooMojo, Inc., the creator of popular virtual pet game, FooPets has made the move over to China, becoming playable on two of the region’s more popular social networks, Kaixin and RenRen. Operated by Oak Pacific International (OPI), new users to the networks will actually be encouraged to add a personal FooPet to their account upon sign up.

For those unfamiliar with FooPets, players are able to “adopt” and care for a highly realistic and animated 3D pet such as a cat or dog. Within the simple world, users are able to entertain their virtual pet with mini games (like fetch), take pictures, feed them, and buy various virtual items for a little spoiling. In fact, many of the virtual goods are branded, consisting of advertisements from 20th Century Fox, Purina and Pedigree.

These elements are preserved in the new Chinese version (save for maybe the American advertisements), but by the looks of things, FooPets will not be limited to just China. It will be expanding into other areas of the Asia Pacific market with a new regional subsidiary, FooMojo Asia K.K. Based in Tokyo, Japan, the company will focus on business relationships and marketing strategies in Japan, China, Korea, and other Asia Pacific regions.

According to CEO and Chairman of OPI, Joe Chen, virtual pets have long been an influential and popular concept in Asia, so the new partnership with FooMojo makes for quite the synergistic marriage. Not only will FooMojo gain access to a booming regional industry, but Chen states that the partnership will also allow them to “tap into the growing use of social games and applications that is spreading rapidly throughout Asian countries.” As Virtual Goods News points out, this marks one of the first Western expansions into the Asian market, but likely, it will not be the last.