Compression, from Little White Bear Studios, is an iPhone title that combines game play elements from Bejeweled, Dr. Mario, and Tetris, with a few social features thrown in — and a new, free, Lite version. But just how did this game compare?

It works around the ever-common core mechanic of placing three or more objects of the same color in a vertical or horizontal line to remove them, albeit using iPhone’s touch feature to let you manipulate blocks. As you match blocks, you score points, with extra bonus for combos (removal of blocks caused by the prior removal of another set). Obviously, this is reminiscent of Tetris and Bejeweled, and thus, to be different, the developers had to add a few new ideas.

This is where the Dr. Mario and Tetris elements come into play. Blocks slowly fall toward a field of already placed hollow blocks (that become more abundant and intricate in harder levels). They can be moved via dragging, rotated by tapping, slowed by holding, or placed quickly by flicking. Frankly, such features worked well with the classic games, and they work more or less as well here. However, that still leaves some innovation to be desired.

In order to accomplish this goal, Compression does just what its title suggests. It compresses. If you’ll notice from the screenshots, there is are metal borders surrounding the playing field. Every few pieces that drop, the board will shrink slightly, based on the location of three white dots (i.e. if they are at the bottom, the bottom border will move up). This, of course, moves all of the blocks currently on the board, or even removes them if there is no room left for compression, and can drastically change any strategy the user previously had in mind.

As one might surmise, a level is won when all hollow blocks have been removed. Upon completion, the score is further enhanced by how many empty squares on the game board remain. Since the app is powered by OpenFeint, the scores are then uploaded to a trio of leaderboards (Highest Score, Blocks Destroyed in a Single Game, and Combos Made in a Single Game), adding a little extra competition to this puzzle title. Furthermore, for those that enjoy them, the OpenFeint integration also adds for seven or so achievements, plus the other social features that come with using the platform.

Despite the developer name of “Little White Bear,” this game is very dark looking. While all three of its benchmark titles (Bejeweled, Dr. Mario, and Tetris) are colorful – as are most other puzzle games – this application has a very mechanical and industrial feel to it. It doesn’t look bad, by any means, but begs the question as to whether or not it will discourage the more casual gamers from playing.

As far as real complaints go, though, the only significant one is the issue of originality. Frankly, the game does create an interesting hybrid of classic game features and the compression element is very nice, but it still just feels like a compilation of games that did these features before and did them better.

In the end, Compression isn’t a bad game, but it will likely be very hit or miss whether a new player likes it or not. The game itself costs a mere $0.99, but a recently added, free, Lite version now allows players to see for themselves whether or not Little White Bear’s industrial-looking title is right for them.

Virtual goods are still emerging as a meaningful method of advertising. In a creative and large-scale new test of the medium: Electronic Arts and soft drink maker Dr. Pepper announced a campaign today where EA game players can find promotions for virtual items on more than 500 million Dr. Pepper bottles and fountain cups.

The idea is that you’ll want to buy Dr. Pepper more if you know you can redeem part of your purchase within your favorite game. For the rest of 2010, at least, the codes found on Dr. Pepper containers can be entered in at the Dr. Pepper promotions web site. Once you’ve provided the beverage maker with your personal details, you’ll be taken to your EA account (you need one of those, too), where you can choose from a selection of items.

Currently supported titles include Battlefield Heroes, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Mass Effect 2, The Sims 3 and Spore, although EA plans to expand the promotion to more. In online team shooter Battlefield Heroes, for example, the code can provide up to four unique sets of clothing for players’ avatars.

The two companies aren’t saying how revenues are being split. Presumably, Dr. Pepper is paying EA some amount that roughly equals the cost of virtual items in the game?

Users are already going offline to get access to in-game goods. Major online games have been selling pre-paid gaming cards for virtual currency at convenience stories and other chains, with a big surge in 2009. Today, everybody from social game developers like Zynga, Playdom and Playfish to massive multiplayer games, virtual worlds, and others sell currency offline. 7-11 recently said it had doubled its card sales and as a result it is doubling its card inventory to include more titles.

These cards — and most likely, this promotion — are targeted at teenagers who play online games, and who can only pay in cash. This demographic also likes soda and the other sugary items that 7-11 sells. It’s pretty easy to imagine a kid going to 7-11 and using their cash allowance to buy some junk food, a game card and a Dr. Pepper (so they can get even more points), then settling in for a well-financed afternoon of online gaming.

Promotions for virtual goods are only one way that advertisers are trying out the medium. Other examples include branded clothing in virtual worlds like IMVU, branded pokes in Facebook app SuperPoke, and branded seeds in FarmVille.

The new year is well underway, and all signs of holiday-themed games has disappeared from our weekly list of top games by monthly active users (MAU). But although the holidays have passed, the farming and animal raising trend continues, with many of the top spots filled by games in that category.

Here’s the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Pillow Fight	12,081,145	+2,488,511	+20.60
2.	Tiki Farm	3,631,691	+2,023,720	+55.72
3.	Happy Island	7,516,717	+1,649,209	+21.94
4.	Zoo World	12,044,503	+1,548,891	+12.86
5.	Texas HoldEm Poker	23,581,467	+1,097,176	+4.65
6.	Country Life	6,693,223	+676,886	+10.11
7.	Bubble Popp	3,130,426	+595,666	+19.03
8.	Garden World	636,676	+480,521	+75.47
9.	Tarjetitas	4,325,827	+406,140	+9.39
10.	Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009!	677,398	+366,449	+54.10
11.	FarmVille Gift Sender	540,429	+358,677	+66.37
12.	MindJolt Games	15,157,422	+332,739	+2.20
13.	what are you born to do?	1,259,722	+259,546	+20.60
14.	My Town	470,012	+236,112	+50.24
15.	Island Paradise	6,520,626	+232,327	+3.56
16.	Wild Ones	623,697	+229,876	+36.86
17.	Ninja Saga	2,051,659	+184,461	+8.99
18.	Bite Me	583,849	+158,222	+27.10
19.	Happy Hotel	892,347	+154,707	+17.34
20.	IQ test	1,145,035	+150,928	+13.18

We cover Pillow Fight, which is more of a poke-style app than a game, over on Inside Facebook. Here are some others that caught our eye:

Petville — This Zynga game is notable for its absence. Last week it still had the number two position (beneath Pillow Fight), with 12 percent growth to 18.5 million users. But this week it’s in negative territory, having lost 3.5 percent of its users.

It could be that Zynga simply scaled back its marketing over the holiday, but Texas Hold’em has continued its steady growth. The loss could also be a momentary blip, or a sign that Petville doesn’t have as much potential as other Zynga titles.

Tiki Farm, Happy Island and Island Paradise — This appears to be the week of the island refuge, as these three games have a rather similar Pacific island theme. The focus in each is a little different, between farming and amusement-park building, but all appear ripe for micro-transactions from users eager to fantasize that they’re somewhere warm.

Garden World — Resurgent with the new year, this long-dormant title has been growing strongly, although it’s too early to tell where it will end up. A typical farming theme, with an interesting twist: You can cross-breed your plants and name your new creations, making it a can’t-miss for Gregor Mendel fans.

Three Kingdoms Online — As this game notes in its description, it’s based on the famous Romance of the Three Kingdoms, an ancient Chinese history. It also bears what’s more than a coincidental resemblance to the SNES hit of the same name, though likely not enough to get it in trouble. Note that this game bounces you out of Facebook to its own Facebook Connect site when you start playing.

Farmville Gift Sender — This sneaky app rides on the coattails of Farmville, but isn’t actually associated with it. And as of this writing, it has been banned for its infringement, leaving room for something new next week.

BonusLevel’s iPhone app, Blockoban is a puzzle game released a couple of weeks ago that does an especially charming job at wasting your time, and maybe your friend’s time, too.

The game is simple enough. Players are presented game board with the sole objective of getting colored block A to same colored tile B. Here is the trick: This game board has a rather low amount of friction associated with it so once you slide a block – using the touch screen, of course – it keeps going until it hits something or flies off the edge (which is, obviously, a bad thing).

As the levels proceed, more and more blocks are introduced and the levels become more intricate. In fact, at later levels, such precision is needed that the initially moot feature of pinch zooming becomes critical, and the always wonderful “Undo” command a godsend. And, with new difficulties also comes new obstacles and blocks. These include elements such as sticky tiles that stop a sliding block in its tracks, circular “blocks” (for lack of a better term) that stop blocks but move when hit, and grouped blocks – represented by a rainbow (don’t ask) in the same corner – that all slide together.

Frankly, this makes the game most challenging later on, but truly adds a great deal of depth to the puzzles. What is even nicer, however, is that the game has per puzzle challenges to earn gold and silver stars by completing it in X amount of moves or less. This is further added to by the fact that this game has social integration with ngmoco’s Plus+ platform.

With Plus+ comes the ability to share achievements, and there are a fair amount, including said stars. Moreover, competitive leaderboards are associated with each of the game’s play and difficulty modes (i.e. Big Maps, Kickoff, and Time Attacks).

Beyond making use of Plus+, BonusLevel does something else that is even more curious. Blockoban is actually completely free… to try. However, don’t let the term “try” fool you. The developers actually grant the user both the tutorial and a pack of 100 free, “Kickoff,” levels. Once players get a feel for the game, and are hopefully addicted, they can, through an in-app purchase, buy an additional pack of 820 levels for $1.99. Intelligently, BonusLevel also has the option to buy a $1.99 solutions pack for all the levels as well. Go figure: an in-app strategy guide.

Honestly, the only complaint that can be had with Blockoban is that it is a little slow at loading initially, but considering the vast amount of content, that is hardly a big deal. In total, there are 920 puzzles. To add more to that, each has five different difficulty levels and there is even a map generator to randomly create new puzzles. Heck, there’s even a level editor on BonusLevel’s website to submit user creations for review and a chance to be put into future level packs.

Blockoban is a wonderful free app for any iPhone or iPod Touch owner. Everything is beautifully done, and is truly designed with the user in mind. Not only does this refer to the game play usability, but even when purchasing the full version (the extra level packs). Unlike other “Lite” games intended to demo a paid game, Blockoban really does a fantastic job at showing the user what they will be paying for, rather than grant five or so minutes of play time. If you like puzzle games, with thousands of potential puzzles and Plus+ integration, Blockoban comes highly recommended.

Gaikai Raises $5 Million – Another startup, online gaming company Gaikai, has also raised funding. $5 million, to be exact; also according to an SEC filing. Headed up by former Acclaim chief creative officer, David Perry, the company has made no comment regarding the funding. All the same, VentureBeat has previously reported that Gaikai is “planning to create a service that can deliver games on demand without the need to install or run software on a computer or game machine.” Instead, games will be cloud-streaming.

Video Games May Save the World – Despite the common complaints about violence in video games, Time Magazine looks to some of the more positive elements of this growing medium. According to the article, the past decade has had many pivotal success with games educating the masses of real world issues with titles such as Darfus Is Dying from MTV in 2006. The goal was to help refugees find water, and it had reached over 700,000 players in one month, leading thousands more to email and petition government officials about the pressing issues. Along with games such as Food Force, Half the Sky, and the myriad of recent Zynga charity benefits in games, hundreds of thousands of people are being educated and moved with games which Alan Gershenfeld, former vice president of Activision, describes as “powerful tools.” Certainly, it is an article best read in full here.

MySpace to Host devJam Event – A few weeks ago, MySpace announced the MySpace Developer Challenge. Well, now the social network is hosting the devJam event in San Francisco on January 14th in order to offer a place where developers can not only meet their development team but get started on their submissions. With multiple coding sessions for each of the contest’s categories and updates on all new MySpace APIs, the general hope is to help developers have Challenge-ready submissions by the end of the day. Further details and RSVP links can be found here.

World of Warcraft China Punishment Coming Soon?  - According to a report from Pacific Epoch, the massively multiplayer online RPG, World of Warcraft is going to have a more settled fate. The game has been had trouble with the country’s competing regulators, China’s General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP) and Ministry of Culture (MoC) — however the game license-holder in China, Netease, has been operating it since September. The regulators have reached a “consensus over whether NetEase [Chinese operator of World of Warcraft] is operating… in contravention of regulations, and plan to announce punishment in mid-January.” Hopefully, for the estimated 5 or so million Chinese players, “punishment” will not mean more downtime.

YoVille Widget Factory Returns – September of last year played host to Zynga’s removal of, what was called, the “Widget Factory” from its social, virtual world, YoVille. In its place came the new Sweets Factory, but as a primary source of virtual income in the game, the loss of the Widget Factory led to a long and arduous protest from some of the player base. 53,000 protesters joined the virtual cause, eventually coaxing Zynga into bringing back the Widget Factory for the holidays. However, whether or not it is back permanently is yet to be determined.

Quepasa Parnters with Moblyng – Latin social network Quepasa.com announced a partnership yesterday with developer and cross-platform games publisher Moblyng. Through the partnership, Moblyng will make use of Quepassa’s implementation of the OpenSocial framework to make a myriad of its games available for the site’s users as well as through mobile phones. Thus far, eight games have been agreed upon for use including m:Poker Live, m:Vampire, m:Mafia, m:Racing, m:Zombies, Dungeon Quest, WordRacer, and Narcotraficante.

Xbox Live to get Virtual World Game Room - This week, Microsoft announced that it would be further socializing its Xbox Live and Games For Windows Live services with a virtual Game Room. Comparable to Sony’s PlayStation Home (though you cannot walk around yourself), the game room will allow users to interact with each other using their Live avatars in a classic arcade setting. The games will be a range of classic game titles such as Centipede, Sea Battle, and Asteroids. However, the key difference from Home is that this new launch will not feature the sale of virtual goods, but the arcade machines themselves for roughly 240-400 Microsoft Points ($3-$5). Furthermore, for a one-time fee, 40 Microsoft Points can be spent to to play a machine they do not yet own.

The new features were also previewed at the CES as well, which displayed multiple rooms; each of which were customized in different themes (via Kotaku). Moreover, Xbox Live offers two-player score challenges and local, live multiplayer. The service is expected to launch with 30 or so games later this year, and will be expanded significantly over time with an expected 5-7 games per week.

TOPPS Launches Virtual Card App on Facebook – UpperDeck isn’t the only card company making use of the web anymore as TOPPS has launched a new Facebook app called Wacky digibles that allows uses to buy virtual goods called “digibles” and send them to their friends. Currently there are 15 different goods that each sell for about $1 and are intended to be comical references to current popular media.

OpenFeint 2.4 Launches – Just today, Aurora Feint launched the 2.4 version of its social, OpenFeint platform. The new version comes with overall leaderboards, geo-location leaderboards, achievements, cloud storage for saved games, instant messaging, in-app forums, and more. Facebook Connect is also integrated allowing for photo imports and status updates. Other features include Twitter, social challenges, push notifications, cross-promotion, and social game recommendations.

Mystery Developer, DNA Games, Raises $2 Million – A developer by the name of DNA Games has been so under the radar that it doesn’t even have an official website yet. Nonetheless, paidContent.org reports that, via an SEC filing, the company has raised $2 million in funding with another million sometime back in early December. Unfortunately, all that is known beyond this is that DNA Games was founded by three former executives from Bazaar Advertising by the names of Jonathan Lee, Shaun Haase, and Timothy Stevens.

More iPhone games are taking advantage of social features provided by third-party platforms like Scoreloop, Plus+, and OpenFeint. One that has had some buzz around it lately, no pun intended, is the fly catching, spider-wielding, Peggle’ish title, Arachnadoodle from Connect2Media.

Players take on the role of a goofy little pink spider named Borris and it’s up to them to sate this gluttonous arachnid’s appetite for flies. The game plays, more or less, exactly the same as the game Peggle in the sense that the player makes use of the touch screen (controlling direction and speed) to launch Borris across the screen in the attempt to hit as many pegs as possible.

With each peg hit, a string of web is formed to connect them. The objective is to connect all pegs on the board with Borris’ webbing. If you don’t you will still submit a high score for that level, but you will not be able to continue to the next. Here is the catch, though: there are only a limited number of attempts that the player can use to complete the task at hand, so the game takes a little bit of thought to play well.

Early on the game is pretty easy, with the only concern being the pegs and hitting them all. Along the way, blue and purple flies also litter the screen, and obtaining them gives you bonus points and extra attempts. However, this simplicity is quickly lost as later levels begin to introduce obstacles such as furniture you can bounce off of, elastic pins that can change Borris’ trajectory, exploding bugs that destroy parts of your web, and electrified ones that can stop you dead in your tracks. Frankly, this makes the game most interesting, though the change in difficulty does hit the player rather hard and fast after getting used to the relative ease of earlier levels.

As for replayability, Arachnadoodle offers 32 levels but they do go by quick. Where the real magic comes into play is with the prospect of web strength. At the end of each level a horde of flies fly through your web, and the more interconnecting strings of web exist, the more you catch and the more points you acquire. So even if you finish a level, it is possible to spend a significant amount of extra time perfecting strategies and scoring higher.

Since the game is powered by OpenFeint, it comes complete with leaderboards and achievements as well. Unfortunately, while the leaderboards do add  a sense of competition — and so a desire to play more — the number of achievements feels extremely low, at four.

Presentation-wise, the game is pretty easy on the eyes as well. Though Borris himself looks a bit… odd, the almost hand-drawn, cartoonish style is wonderfully done for an iPhone title. Coupled with quirky sound effects, equally bizarre looking flies, and ironically used epic music when the flies approach, the game does an excellent job at making a gratifying user experience.

Overall, Arachnadoodle is a very nice indie app. Costing only $0.99, it is well worth the investment. Granted, it is still lacking in achievements and the difficulty change is a bit jarring part-way through the game, but with the replayability and flat out being fun to play, these nits are quickly forgiven.

We’ve been taking a look at some of the many ninja Facebok games in the past couple of weeks. Ninja Saga is one of the biggest we’ve seen yet. With nearly 1.9 million monthly active users, it’s worth a closer look.

Ninja games are a common genre on Facebook due to the popularity of ninja animes, especially the Naruto series, in popular culture. And Ninja Saga, like many other games, has clearly been inspired by that Japanese cartoon; meanwhile, Crunchyroll has released the only official Naruto Facebook game that we know of.

Ninja Saga walks a razor’s edge when it comes to copyright issues. The art style itself is wonderful, but looks an awful lot like Naruto. Clothing, hairstyles, even ninjutsu (essentially magic) attacks, and architecture are taken, almost identically, from the series with only the most minor of details changed (like color). In fact, even the story of a nobody looking to become the “Kage,” or head ninja, is the same. Nevertheless, and issues of copyright aside, the game still proved to be fun.

Players are given a basic storyline and work through missions that vary based on the level and rank of your character. After a basic tutorial, the user is promoted to “Genin,” which is basically your bottom-rung ninja. As such, you are only able to do the most basic of missions, working your way up the ladder as you level up and earn some ninja prowess.

The missions themselves are fairly straightforward, but come with a turn-based combat like most RPGs. Players make an attack, it takes up X amount of time and “chakra” (mana), then the enemies attack. Repeat. Over time, users get more attacks, more items, and eventually, more party members leading to a fairly enjoyable and in-depth battle system.

Of course, this being a Facebook game, those other party members can be your Facebook friends. You can’t use them unless they actually join the game. However, the extra party members makes things a lot more interesting (not to mention easier), and more fun. Heck, you can even use what jutsus their character knows to teach your own avatar some new tricks. Furthermore, if you aren’t looking for teammates, you can always challenge said friends to player-versus-player bouts or pick fights with random opponents using the Ninja Saga’s “Live PvP” system in order to win .

As for other features of the game, it has all the basic elements of distributing attribute points when you level — buying new equipment, customizing your avatar, and training new spells. Also, once a player is strong enough (and high ranked enough) they can even purchase their own pets. Sadly, we didn’t get to see this as our virtual ninja skills are not yet apparently not up to the task. Nevertheless, and as with most Facebook games nowadays, this is all done with either the earnable in-game currency of gold, or the purchasable virtual currency, Saga Tokens.

Perhaps it is a good and bad thing, but this game was fun enough to really drive a desire to purchase said tokens. With the wonderful artwork, fun game play, and a story that looks to unfold through Flash animations, buying new stuff quickly became addictive as it would allow more of this ninja world to be seen. Unfortunately, the bad part of all this is that all this praise toward artwork and story are there because most of it is unoriginal and almost a direct copy of Naruto. This also means that sooner or later Ninja Saga could run into some legal trouble. Either way, the game is fun, and if legal issues are taken care of, it actually does the Naruto franchise justice.

The top 20 emerging games this week look to be made up mostly of classically defined games.

In first, however, is FarmVille add-on and gift creator, FarmVille Gift Sender, which breaks the trend and tops its first week out with 505,000 monthly active players. However, due to its intellectual property issues, we expect it won’t be around for too long, at least in its current form.

The emerging list is compiled using AppData and for the week ending January 7th. It shows titles that haven’t yet reached 1 million players, but are quickly gaining more monthly active users (MAU). This is a way to spot big apps before they get big.

Garden World, by Tall Tree Games, is back near the top of this list apparently due to its recent addition of neighbors/friends’ gardens being visible. While we’ve been tracking it since September of 2008, it has grown by nearly 99 percent over the past week to reach 439,000 MAU. It has the highest percentage gain of any title on the top 20.

Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009! has the most fortunate title of any Facebook app even if it is self-described. The game rose 44 percent this week, around 70,000 more than last week when it ranked in first place. However, even higher gains couldn’t fight the monolith that is FarmVille… Gift Sender.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille Gift Sender	504,499	+455,155	+90.22
2.	Garden World	438,570	+433,115	+98.76
3.	Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009!	460,090	+202,415	+43.99
4.	My Town	320,996	+176,592	+55.01
5.	Bite Me	510,929	+124,920	+24.45
6.	歡樂癲地 Funland	587,289	+94,413	+16.08
7.	Warstorm	313,678	+92,698	+29.55
8.	傾城 Online	166,927	+89,381	+53.54
9.	COLLAPSE!	839,342	+79,828	+9.51
10.	Nindou International	312,612	+76,209	+24.38
11.	Doorbell	811,198	+72,372	+8.92
12.	Friend Block	862,149	+58,860	+6.83
13.	Ninja Warz	612,074	+51,184	+8.36
14.	Dogbook	852,493	+50,058	+5.87
15.	Gift Creator	747,035	+45,143	+6.04
16.	Poll	805,455	+36,275	+4.50
17.	麻將─GodGameMJ 神來也麻將	962,493	+28,156	+2.93
18.	點歌零距離	198,415	+26,215	+13.21
19.	IQ Test	366,904	+24,108	+6.57
20.	SCRABBLE	589,966	+22,948	+3.89

The Sims-lite game, My Town, rose to fourth place, but gained over 177,000 players this week compared to last week when it added 63,200 monthly active users.

Three Rings‘s tamogochi-for-vampires, Bite Me has been a consistent emerging title all December and added another 125,000 players this week for fifth. Other long-emerging titles includes sixth place’s carnival-building game 歡樂癲地 Funland and Warstorm at seventh.

SCRABBLE has seen a bit of a renaissance thanks to Facebook and an environment that has proven to be the perfect form for the game. Developed by Electronic Arts, this version of the classic has drifted on and off the emerging list.

Overall a pretty standard and uneventful week for the emerging lists. Five of the “games” on this list aren’t really games — FarmVille Gift Creator, Gift Creator (15th), Poll (16th), 點歌零距離 (“Zero Distance Song”, 18th) and IQ Test (19th) — they just show up here because their developers mark them as games in Facebook’s app directory and we use that designation in AppData. This is fewer than the 8 non-games that showed up on last week’s emerging list.

Social game developers have a strong tradition of closely imitating, er, flattering each others’ titles by using similar mechanics, themes, graphics, currency pricing and most everything else. Well, here’s a new game from Chinese developer Boyaa, called Happy Baby. While we have only recently discovered it, it’s hard to say that it is truly “new.” Anyone that’s been on Facebook a while is will aware of Playfish’s popular top title, Pet Society, and that’s what this game is: Pet Society in Chinese.

Pet games are still popular even though they’ve been around for a long time — indeed, pet games were big in Asia before they were elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, Happy Baby has gained more than 200,000 monthly active users so far. Not bad, although not nearly as much as the gains that big Facebook developers Zynga and CrowdStar have seen with their new pet games, PetVille and Happy Pets.

Happy Baby starts the player out with the creation of their own, animal-like avatar. With flat colors and simple shapes, it should be something familiar to Pet Society players, because, frankly, the avatar could fit right in with the Playfish title and few would be the wiser. The game’s simple 2D house has a familiar user interface, as well. As a matter of fact, the only “significant” difference was that the bottom menu bar was in color.

Okay, so it looks the same, but so how does it play? Well, it does a good job at teaching the ropes, using achievements and objectives to show the player how to feed, clean, and brush their pet. Then it shows them how to place furniture, interact with it, and leave your home. It is all very simple and intuitive, especially considering it’s all written in Chinese and we don’t speak Chinese. Then we went outside.

Lo and behold, it also looks like the Pet Society world. Even details were preserved, such as the shaking of trees for random coins, or the racing of other players at a stadium for money. Want to meet random people? Go to the coffee shop? Want to skip straight home? The game will teleport you right there. All features from Pet Society.

So, other than aforementioned interface colors, what is different? There are some extra mini-games in the stadium such as javelin throwing that make use of a sort of quick-time event coupled with timing to throw farther, and there is also a mall of sorts that has a row of shops you can walk past (though you cannot visit them at the movement). Other than these, the only noticeable differences were that there are less stores in town, total, and trash can pile up in your house over time and you get money for cleaning it up (similar to Restaurant City).

When broken down, Happy Baby isn’t a bad game, but, then again neither is Pet Society, so how could it be? It is, however, a blatant rip-off, and while we have seen a myriad of clones on Facebook before, Happy Baby might as well be a Chinese language version of Pet Society.

Traffic Marketplace is another big advertising network getting into the offers business. It’s doing so in hopes of using its relationships with brands, agencies, and other advertisers, along with its targeting technology, to try to make developers more money — and to broaden its core business.

Today, in terms of social networks, TMP both provides ads from its network to other offer companies and sells ads within its own social ad network and offers services. Right now, it is focusing on providing a new feature: an offer window that can be added within applications. The window provides a few offers in the usual offer-wall style, but also includes display ads. It is already live on “a couple dozen apps,” the company claims, and is currently reaching around 40 million monthly active users. While TMP isn’t providing names of clients at this point, it also plans to launch the window with a dozen developers within the month, some of whom are quite well-known, according to Sheldon Owen, the company’s general manager of TMPSocial and performance advertising.

And, the company’s targeting tech is working well so far, he claims. The window is seeing “greater than 10x performance levels” within applications versus traditional display ads it has run in the same location, according to Owen.

TMP itself has been around for years, it’s the result of a variety of mergers and acquisitions in other parts of online advertising and its main business is targeted display advertising. Like rival Adknowledge, it has recently been buying and partnering its way in to the social advertising business. While Adknowledge has been on a social buying spree spanning years and culminating in the purchase of Super Rewards this past summer, TMP made its first social purchase (that we know of) last March, when it bought social ad network fbExchange. Then, in September, TMP launched TMPSocial, a set of services for advertisers and developers that includes “a display banner network, custom widget and application development, app link exchange and alternative payment solutions for social applications.”

This is all an extension of TMP’s existing business. It offers a wide range of ways for advertisers to reach potential customers.

The public is not too familiar with many big ad networks, although the average web user has surely seen remnant ads running on content sites, or landed on a content-like page full of ads, or received an advertising email. The industry has long attracted some entrepreneurs who among other things perpetrate email and search engine spam, provide adware, or induce users to buy or sign up for services using deceitful offers. The last item, unfortunately, was a significant component of most offer companies’ inventories until recently. This sort of advertising, as a concept, is fine, but the quality ranges from Netflix subscriptions all the way down to scammy mobile ringtone quizzes.

TMP currently provides advertisers with the following range of ads, according to the company web site: display, email, lead-generation and co-registration, custom marketing and hosted solutions, search, rich media, and mobile. It is pointedly trying to increase the quality of its social ads by working with advertisers, as Owen explains — don’t expect it to run any mobile quiz-style ads, for example. The company’s sales team is larger than many of the entire staffs of some of its social rivals, as he describes it, and already works with many major brands and 90 percent of advertising agencies across the country.

The other component of TMP’s differentiation is also interesting. It targets ads based on “consumer interest, behavior, demographic and psychographic information and data from more than 600,000 proprietary websites, publishers and market research providers.” While there is increasing scrutiny around online advertising industry data sources and targeting practices, TMP says that its practices fall within the guidelines set by the Network Advertising Initiative, a self-regulating online ad industry cooperative. What’s interesting is that TMP has so much experience in collecting and targeting ads based on user data, and is now attempting to apply it to social offers. (Also, to be clear, the company says it will not be using Facebook data to do any targeting.)

TMP, like many other companies in the online ad industry, has received almost zero press coverage, yet has built itself into one of the largest independent advertising networks, and now appears in comScore’s rankings of the largest ad networks in the United States. Overall, it says it reaches 142 million unique users ever month through 30 billion advertising page impressions, and “delivers more than 20 million leads and customers a year.” The parent company, Connexus Corp, also owns FirstLook, a company that specializes in “domain traffic optimization and monetization” — the business running ads on generic domain landing pages, basically.

In sum, the combination of size, advertiser relationships, data and targeting make TMP an interesting new competitor to Adknowledge, Offerpal and the range of other companies in the offer and social advertising business. These competitors have long-standing relationships with social game developers and other advertising clients, and now we’re getting a chance to see if veteran advertisers can fight their way in.