Digital Chocolate has been building games since 2003, but it has mostly focused on mobile and PC desktop platforms — until it decided to focus on Facebook, last fall. Having launched four games on the platform already, the company is now planning a big new concept called NanoStar, starting with a game launching tonight called NanoStar Castles.

Big picture, the company is already seeing some good traffic results from its Facebook efforts so far and, if everything continues as planned, the company has a better-than-average shot at becoming a social gaming market leader this year. More on that, further down.

The NanoStar concept is not straightforward to explain, but it’s intuitive when you see it in action. The idea is to create characters that players can purchase and then use across games, with the character getting special abilities depending on the game. Characters can be unlocked in various games or bought in packs, and traded.

This is in contrast to buying virtual goods like seeds for a virtual farm or food for fish in a virtual aquarium, as Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins tells us. The relationship players develop with character-driven virtual goods in new contexts over time will make the investment — and Nanostar — more valuable.

NanoStar Castles is the first game to show the concept off. Based on a standard deck of 52 cards, you and an opponent take turns drawing cards and trying to obtain the highest score by the time the 10-round game ends. Each player has four cards, graphically displayed behind a virtual castle wall. The front two cards are face-up, and viewable to both players, while the back two cards are face-down and hidden from view. In addition, each player draws a “Noble” at the beginning of each hand — essentially, a separate deck of cards that can be used to modify the main deck. These characters come with a wide range of special abilities that can affect the outcome of the game, like stealing the other player’s cards, blocking them, giving your own cards a boost, etc. Players continue drawing cards and battling each other with Nobles until the game concludes, and points — based on the card ranks from the final decks — are tallied.

We’ll save the rest of the game’s many details for a full review, but here’s an example of how the NanoStar concept comes in to play. The company has a long-standing title called “Crazy Penguin Catapult,” available on desktop and mobile devices, that has players fending off polar bears by using a catapult to shoot penguins at them. The penguin character from the game is a “Noble” in Castles. Players who draw the card can use it to remove Nobles from the other player’s hand, an action complemented by a penguin-catapult animation.

Hawkins, who among other experiences founded gaming giant Electronic Arts, tells us Castles concept has a diverse range of inspirations, from classic card games like Texas Hold’Em poker, to Pokemon, to Magic: The Gathering. Poker combines luck, strategy and communal play. Magic goes further, as its players spend hundreds of dollars collecting more powerful characters and decks — each additional purchase adds perceived value to what they’ve already bought. And as Pokemon showed, both kids and adults are willing to pay good money for digital pets, in the right circumstances.

As Zynga’s Texas Hold’Em has shown, poker is one of the few games to have stayed popular this long on the platform. If Castles can get a strong core audience, it will likely be around for awhile, too. While most social game developers have been focusing on building simulations in the last year or so, Zynga and Playfish are intriguingly the only other good-sized developers we know of besides Digital Chocolate to launch a social card game in recent months. Playfish launched a stylized poker game, Poker Rivals, last December. Zynga launched a stripped-down version of hold’em, called Poker Blitz, just last week. Those companies are apparently thinking about the long-term potential of card games, too.

Meanwhile, Digital Chocolate has a second game planned, called NanoStar Siege, that will further build on the NanoStar effort. It’s scheduled for launch tomorrow, and patterned after the Tower Defense genre — but with offensive capabilities. As Hawkins recently wrote in his company blog, “the penguin turns into a unit called Bandits that unleashes a group of Skirmishers at any spot on the battlefield that you choose, as if they parachuted in … no, I guess they probably got there by catapult!” We’ll be covering it shortly, as well. And, expect many more NanoStar-themed games to hit Facebook this coming year. Eventually, Hawkins also says that the company will bring them to the iPhone as well.

Digital Chocolate’s Shot at Social Gaming

But hold on. Lots of ambitious gaming veterans have been trying their hands at building social games, and struggling. What is Digital Chocolate going to do to make its big plan work? Whatever it’s doing seems to be working alright so far.

So far, it has launched MMA Pro Fighter, Tower Bloxx, NanoTowns and Safari Kingdom. None have been breakout successes, but they all have a decent number of monthly active users (MAU) and daily active users (DAU). Growth on both counts has been looking good in the past month, with MAU climbing from 566,000 nearly a month ago to 1.49 million today, and DAU going from 37,000 then to 153,000 today, according to our independent AppData analytics service. We don’t have a perfect window into why growth is happening, but it appears to be because people enjoy the games enough to share them — rather than spamming them. We’ve reviewed three of the games so far — role-playing game MMA Pro Figher, city builder NanoTowns and animal-raiser Safari Kingdom — and all favorably. Of course, the games also have gotten a little boost from Facebook advertising.

The short-term growth of Digital Chocolate’s Facebook games is encouraging; Hawkins points out that the games are some of the fastest-growing ones among social game publishers building around virtual goods. But there are particular questions around Castles. Explaining a new card game is never simple, although the game’s tutorial seems pretty straightforward. Gamers who are not familiar with Digital Chocolate’s existing games portfolio might not care about all the tie-ins with its existing characters. And, Digital Chocolate doesn’t have tens of millions of users on Facebook that it can instantly cross-promote the new title to.

However, the company is set for the long haul of social game development. It has raised $44 million to date, and Hawkins tells us that it has been profitable for a couple years already by syndicating its many other games across other platforms. It currently has around 400 employees spread out in studios around the world, half of whom are now focused on building Facebook games. Beyond its unique catalog of games, it also has a number of patents, including one for the cross-game character cards system used in NanoStar. So even if Castles doesn’t take off right away, the company has all sorts of resources it can bring to bear to keep tweaking it until it works. By getting NanoStar off the ground now, it can continue tying in existing and new games into the system, and start realizing the benefits of the concept.

In sum, the company is making the right sorts of experiments on Facebook, and it has the experience and resources to persevere until it figures out exactly what works. Despite many short-term questions, we think it has special potential to be a big success.

The folks over at the quasi-social gaming portal, OMGPOP are looking to tap into 80′s nostalgia with a remake of an old Atari title, Missile Command — but with a few social additions.

Perhaps the premise of Missile Command should be dubbed “remake,” with an emphasis on the quotations, because the core of the game is no different from the 1980 original. As a matter of fact, neither or the visuals, really. Okay, yeah, they have better color. But otherwise the game essentially has flat, simplistic missiles falling from the sky, on a single-gradient background, striking a flat gray ground. As for the game play, the object is to shoot down these falling enemy missiles with your own missiles, launched from a static, but rotating, turret.

As players proceed through a level, the missiles gradually fall faster and more frequently, until it becomes a frantic shoot out of nuclear proportions (yes, there is a nuke). Upon destroying each missile, the occasional energy boost, a triangle-shaped thing, drops, and a simple mouse-over will pick it up. This energy is then used to upgrade various elements such as reload rate, missile speed, blast radius, etc.

Now this is where the game starts to get interesting. As the player reaches new levels, more than just missiles attack you (odd looking spaceships, for example). Obviously, if the missiles hit you, you lose health, and in higher difficulties this can happen extremely fast. To mitigate this, players can use the OMGPOP Coins to instantly reload all of their missiles (otherwise, the game gradually reloads one missile every second or two), nuke everything on screen, or heal yourself to full. These each cost 20, 500, and 1000 coins respectively.

Frankly, this is a brilliant idea. While coins can be earned through playing games or answering questions on the site, they are also the primary monetization method for OMGPOP — purchasable via PayPal, offers, and so on. Yes, they are used to buy virtual goods for users’ profiles and whatnot, but in the middle of a frantic game, users don’t have time to think about spending these coins. The average train of thought is going to be along the lines of “I’m about to die!” and they will simply react. Furthermore, the “reload” for missiles is the spacebar, so it’s even more reactionary, as with most games on the computer, the two most commonly used buttons for non-movement are left-click and spacebar. Hitting it is reflexive, so spending those Coins is, too.

What also makes the game more interesting, and further plays into this reactionary spending, is that games can have up to seven individuals playing together. Obviously, this adds to the chaos, but it is a lot more fun to play with friends and defend your base together. Furthermore, more chaos means less thought, and more reaction, thus leading to more spending. The only problem is, that with more people, and higher levels, there are so many things happening on screen that some people’s computers might lock up and not allow anything.

Unfortunately, the game itself, while amusing, gets old pretty fast. Missile Command was made during the 1980s, and frankly, this version still feels about the same. The use of the OMGPOP currency in this game is smart, but it’s not clear what will keep players coming back time and time again.

Educational games have long been an untapped market. There have been a number of attempts to teach people meaningful information through video games, but more often than not, they have come off as boring. There hasn’t been much beyond Brain Age on the Nintendo DS that truly has hypnotized players since Carmen Sandiego. However, with new media comes new attempts, thus the guys over at Appbird gave it a shot with their iPhone application, BrainBox.

The game is a compilation of six mini-games meant to train your mind on the go. The focus is on mathematics, memory, and vocabulary. When players start it up, they are prompted with a login for Facebook. Seamlessly, BrainBox connects you to your account, and it’s time to play.

Greeted with a bubbly, up-beat tune that sounds like something from the Roaring 20’s, we had high hopes for this title, and dove right into the word games, Wordsort and Worldbuilder. The former is pretty basic, in which players are given a period of time to tap words in alphabetical order. Tap one wrong, and the iPhone vibrates and you move on. The lists become increasingly longer and more complex as you proceed, and at the completion you are given the stats on how many you got correct and your score.

In terms of social elements, these scores can then be posted to your feed, and you are also capable of sending direct challenges to your Facebook buddies. Additionally, the scores are all tracked individually – for each mini-game – and you can see everyone’s ratings, via a leaderboard, for each game as well as everything cumulatively.

As great as the Facebook Connect system is, Wordsort is still a bit boring, so we moved on to Wordbuilder, which consists of a grid of random letters and the task of making as many words as possible. Well, if you are the voluble type, this is actually kind of fun, but the game tends to squawk at you whenever you use some plural forms. Visually, it is about the same as a giant calculator pad, only with letters.

Speaking of calculation, the two math games were about the same level. Fastmath is solving simple, elementary equations as quickly as possible and Fifteen is to line up numbers sequentially (again, quickly). Truth be told, these are fantastic for learning basic math, and not a bad thing to have around, if you have kids. But it feels a bit bland for adults.

The last two games are Sequence and Sudoku. Sequence is a memory game where you have a few seconds to memorize where randomly place letters or numbers are and tap where they were in the correct order. This one is actually extremely challenging, but once you get to around seven to nine letters/numbers, it is literally impossible for the average human being to remember it. Short term memory just doesn’t remember that much. Sure, you could write it down, but doesn’t that sort of defeat the point?

Sudoku, however, was actually a lot of fun. Oddly enough, Appbird assumes that everyone knows how to play Sudoku, and no directions are given beyond choosing a difficulty level. For those unfamiliar, the basic premise to the game is that players are given an 9×9 grid, divided into 3×3 grids called “regions.” The idea is to fill each region with numbers 1 – 9. However, some numbers are already filled in and you cannot place the same number more than once in any row, column, or region.

What made Sudoku fun, however, was that it was actually a game. Everything else in BrainBox is more or less the same as a text book. There is no style or flair to the app, and nothing really to attract the player and keep them interested like in Playfish’s Who Has The Biggest Brain? or wooga’s Brain Buddies. Granted, it is a fantastic application for training your brain, but it is hardly worth the $2.00 if you’re looking for something entertaining.

Country Life, the first and only game by a developer of the same name, has beaten out Playdom’s new star Social City to top this week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining Facebook games by daily active users (DAU).

That’s a small surprise, because city building games are the hot new thing, while farming simulations aren’t growing much — with the exception of FarmVille and, apparently, Country Life. But the latter has deviated from the normal practice of adding a lot more monthly active users than DAU. Over the past few days, Country Life’s DAU as a percentage of MAU has in fact shot up five points to 34 percent.

Such sudden growth in DAU may have something to do with Country Life’s latest upgrades and improvements, which allow players to build houses, greenhouses and mills in “yards” of various sizes, as well as add new decorations. The additions (perhaps along with an outreach campaign) may be bringing lapsed players back to check out the game.

Or the growth may be a temporary blip; next week we’ll know for sure. Here are all 20 on the list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Country Life	3,021,571	+443,866	+14.69
2.	Social City	2,851,283	+375,781	+13.18
3.	Zoo World	2,523,588	+372,851	+14.77
4.	Café World	9,183,779	+286,873	+3.12
5.	Mafia Wars	6,823,340	+270,936	+3.97
6.	Bubble Island	832,712	+252,350	+30.30
7.	Poker Blitz	234,680	+234,642	+99.98
8.	PetVille	5,151,262	+211,919	+4.11
9.	Happy Aquarium	4,779,802	+165,151	+3.46
10.	Tiki Resort	706,868	+116,583	+16.49
11.	Happy Pets	1,865,998	+103,881	+5.57
12.	Animal Paradise	1,006,343	+98,890	+9.83
13.	MindJolt Games	3,420,044	+90,876	+2.66
14.	Ninja Saga	800,045	+83,769	+10.47
15.	Pet Society	4,535,872	+78,899	+1.74
16.	(Lil) Farm Life	674,087	+65,549	+9.72
17.	開心水族箱	1,520,120	+56,139	+3.69
18.	Bejeweled Blitz	2,852,154	+53,272	+1.87
19.	Glamble Poker	162,337	+47,354	+29.17
20.	Country Story	1,120,329	+44,920	+4.01

Social City, the number two entry, has finally lost some DAU as a percentage of MAU, although it is still gaining DAU overall. Last week we pointed out that an improbably high 44 percent of Social City’s players were returning daily. That number has now fallen to 34 percent. That’s no skin off Playdom’s back, though, as the game’s overall numbers continue to shoot upward.

Zoo World, Café World and Mafia Wars are all older RockYou and Zynga games that may only be checking in temporarily. Bubble Island, though, is definitely gaining both new MAU and DAU. It just passed Wooga’s other game, Brain Buddies, in MAU, and has almost quadruple its DAU, making it the European company’s first big success.

We’ll round out the commentary with number seven, Poker Blitz. This is Zynga’s latest game, and as you can see, it has gained all its 234,860 DAU in a week — actually, in just five days. We recently reviewed the game, which is basically a dumbed down version of Texas HoldEm Poker with the addition of power-ups and other video game mechanics. So far, it looks like a winner.

Sony has been experimenting with Facebook integration, last fall introducing a way for users to share Playstation 3 game information to Facebook, like trophies, purchases, and in-game events. But you had to do it from within the main interface. The company yesterday released what it says is the first way to share to Facebook from within a game, specifically its Buzz: Quiz World game.

Given the ubiquity of quiz apps on Facebook, the choice of title here makes sense. Users like to ask each other questions, see others’ results and scores. Our question here: will easier sharing from the PS3 to Facebook spur more interest in the console’s games?

In any case, PS3 owners first need to sync their Facebook accounts to their console identity, then select the option to share in-game events. We haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, but the company blog says that after synching: “you’ll be offered the option of posting stats like what place you finished in and what buzzer noises your friends used, once you’ve completed a BUZZ! Quiz World PS3 game. All you have to do is hit the red button on your BUZZ! Buzzer to accept and these fun stats from your game will be added to your Facebook wall.”

Key social gaming mechanics — free games, viral growth, virtual goods — are still being figured by mobile app developers. But social monetization company Offerpal is trying to get a jump on the market with its purchase today of mobile developer TapJoy, as Offerpal chief executive George Garrick tells us. Like others in mobile and social gaming, he sees virtual goods monetization on mobile devices being at the same place as it was on social gaming a couple years ago — there’s a lot of room to grow. And, to avoid further issues around questionable offers and other forms of online advertising, the company also just released a set of mobile advertising guidelines.

Although Tapjoy began life building games like TapRevenge, it has morphed into providing services to other developers. These include a software development kit (SDK) that provides a virtual goods storefront, including processing for virtual goods purchases, a few types of advertising services, and e-commerce analytics.

Offerpal is best known for providing offers to social gaming companies that it gathers from third-party online ad networks; however, a substantial part of its business includes providing a customizable offer wall for games  that also includes various direct payment options, and alternative payments like pre-paid cards. And, it already provides additional services, like analytics. Although it has been running mobile offers already, the product has been more of a test so far.

So, overall, the fit between the two companies is pretty clear.

But the advertising, in particular, has a few key differences. Incentivized advertising offers have until now not been a significant portion of developer revenue on the iPhone or other mobile platforms, while they were a formative and still-substantial way for developers to monetize games on Facebook and other social web platforms. Social game developers typically make between 15% and 20% of their revenue from offers, with the rest being direct payments, as we estimate in our Inside Virtual Goods report. Offer revenue in mobile apps is still small for most developers simply because they are not widely used.

With a big caveat — as with social games, mobile developers have found it valuable to buy ads based on a cost-per-install (CPI) basis, or sell space in their apps so other developers can reach their users. Tapjoy has turned this form of advertising into incentivized ads on mobile ads, meaning a user could install a free app or three in exchange for virtual goods, such as a song download in one of Tapjoy’s games. This appears to be where it makes most of its money. Companies like RockYou have led the CPI model on Facebook, and Offerpal has focused more providing incentivized ads from ad networks. Tapjoy’s service means it will be getting deeper into CPI for mobile.

Mobile Advertising Issues

The norm, for mobile, is traditional online banner advertising. A wide variety of companies, including AdMob, Quattro, Greystripe, Adfonic and others run ads directly from brands and agencies, or provide them through third-party online ad networks, or let advertisers run their own, self-serve style. However, Apple and other mobile platforms do not appear to be regulating these ads for quality.

Progress has been made on this issue on Facebook, and mostly because Facebook itself has made a series of changes to weed out various forms of deceptive advertising over the past year. Today, Offerpal, and basically all of its offers competitors, as well as banner ad networks on Facebook, are forced to comply with Facebook’s rules prohibiting deceptive or otherwise inappropriate ads from third parties, or risk being banned themselves. MySpace has pushed similar requirements.

The situation is murkier on mobile platforms. Many of the leading advertising service companies do not appear to be monitoring the quality of their ads, as TechCrunch reported last week; the result is that some of the same type of deceptive advertising that has been removed from Facebook is appearing on iPhone apps. Indeed, Tapjoy, which has been testing out offers from Offerpal for months, was running questionable ads for mobile quiz subscriptions until the report, and similar ads can still be seen on other networks. Offerpal suspended those ads pending review, after the report, but the bigger question is how the mobile ad industry plans to regulate for quality.

Offerpal says is trying to get ahead of the issue. It released an extensive set of mobile advertising policies yesterday, clearly stating that it will pre-screen advertisers and ban them if it spots bad behavior. It also says that it is in direct contact with Apple about maintaining quality on the platform. Presumably, the many other companies that serve ads in apps from third parties are working hard to do the same, lest they face public disgrace and platform punishment.

Regulations around mobile offers will still ultimately depend on the particular mobile platform, of course, as it does on the web. As Garrick tells us today, some social platforms — whom he didn’t name — are less restrictive on quality than Facebook and MySpace. The result is more questionable ads, potentially higher-short term revenue for developers, and longer-term user and advertiser dissatistfaction, and eventual self-destruction for the platform. Apple and other platforms will need to do a better job of clarifying their advertising policies. For example, some platforms may be okay with a small 9-point font for disclosures about ads for mobile subscriptions, while others may demand a clearer 12-point font.

Mobile Advertising Opportunities

Aside from the nature of offers, monetizing virtual goods on mobile platforms has a few key differences. With Apple, for example, the company wants direct payments for virtual goods going through its own iTunes payments system — a reason it introduced the possibility of free-to-play games with virtual goods sales, last fall. Big developers, like Ngmoco, are already seeing success here, as we’ve been covering. An equivalent platform payment service does not exist on Facebook, at the moment, so direct payment options in offer walls, like what Offerpal has, are the main way that companies make money. The difference, at the moment, is that Apple takes a 30% cut of revenue while third-parties like eBay take much less. Facebook takes a 30% cut from its Credits virtual currency, but does not currently make Credits the mandatory direct payment option, and Credits do not otherwise have the market penetration that iTunes has with users.

So, direct payments per se are not where Offerpal’s opportunity is. Instead, it’s what the company can do in terms of optimizing everything else for developers. Can its virtual goods store and analytics system — a simple set of e-commerce stats — make more money for developers? And what can it do with ads?

Garrick says the company wants to do things like targets ads based on specific information like a mobile user’s GPS location; locally-focused ads can be quite valuable to users, and could mean higher payouts to developers. He also believes that new mobile devices, like the iPad, could bring in a lot more subscription money for media publications. These companies are also starting to experiment with virtual goods monetization concepts. Perhaps we’ll see iPad owners taking offers to gain a New York Times subscription, one day soon?

For developers looking to try out Tapjoy, the company typically takes around 30% of revenue, Garrick says (a norm for App Store services, although Offerpal doesn’t necessarily take as big of a cut from its social gaming partners). The company already works with more than 1,000 developers and reaches a total of 25 million users, so it is likely making good money for itself and partners. Tapjoy founders Lee Linden and Ben Lewis will be joining Offerpal, and helping to lead its mobile efforts. Look for Offerpal’s resources and know-how — and new mobile market presence — to help make it into a bigger competitor in the emerging market for mobile virtual goods monetization.

Also, be sure to check out our Inside Social Apps 2010 conference happening next month, where Garrick and other industry leaders will be discussing the future of virtual goods monetization.

Oh, the role-playing game. As the name would suggest, it is the ultimate means to be something that you are not; leveling up your prowess, collecting wealth, and conquering the weak. Whether you wish to be a mob boss, a gallant knight, or a swashbuckling pirate, there is something for everyone. However, a German developer by the name of Farbflut Entertainment has taken a different approach to this genre. Why not make the user… a bum? Thus, we now have the premise for the Flash-powered RPG, Street Rivals.

Truth be told, the concept, for some, is certainly borderline offensive, but about 520,000 monthly active users don’t seem to mind so much. Perhaps that is because the concept of the game is playing on the struggling global economy in a hyperbolic fashion.

The player is given the role of someone who has lost their job, home, and just about everything else and must find a way to survive on the streets. The idea is to slowly work your way out of the proverbial gutter and back to glory… or at least to the top of the bum rankings, if such a thing exists.

At its core, Street Rivals is your basic RPG. Players do missions, earn better gear, fight other users, etc. However, there is nothing glorious about this homeless concept. Everything is themed to the user having nothing. They start in a subway station with X amount of energy and zero money. From here, they are granted two choices: Complete missions or collect bottles.

Missions tend to be the more cliché things such as dumpster diving or pick pocketing a wallet. Each one takes a small bit of energy and earns some marginal income as well as experience and a chance at equipable items. By marginal, we mean only a few dollars at best, and as for “items,” well, this more or less consists of dirty, rotting clothing. Furthermore, the more “rewarding” the mission, the longer it will take to do. Dumpster Diving, for example, will only take a minute or so, while a later one might take five, 10, or more minutes.

Of course, the time it takes to do a mission isn’t really a big deal as each specific one looks to only be doable once per day anyway, with more unlocking as the player increases their level. However, if one is a truly entrepreneurial bum, they can set out to collect bottles.

Players can set the game to collect these bottles for a period of time ranging from about 10 minutes to 12 hours, with an increasing energy cost the longer you go searching. Obviously, this is something that will run in the background, whether the player is playing or not, and when the search is complete it’s time to clean and sell the findings.

Unfortunately, it is very possible to break your findings while cleaning them, so it is prudent to invest into a statistic called “Agility.” No, this isn’t the deft, elven type of agility in a fantasy game, it just merely helps reduce your chance of breaking stuff you find. In fact, aside from attack and defense, the stats are all a bit… different.

For starters, there is luck, which gives you a greater chance to find items on missions. There is music, which allows you to play a musical instrument of the bum variety (i.e. a blade of grass) to earn money, and pitifulness that allows you to receive greater donations from Facebook friends.

This is actually an amusing element to Street Rivals. You can actually make posts to your Facebook feed, or send a link directly to a friend “begging” for money. If they click it, you get some free cash — atruly funny way to spread the game virally.

As another social element, and fairly standard at this point for RPGs, players can also battle one another, at the cost of energy, to earn some extra rewards and experience as well. Street Rivals also states that players are able to build up their own hobo gang, however, if this feature exists, we have yet to find it.

That’s really the chief complaint with this application. There is a lot that just doesn’t seem to work right. Frequently, we’d purchase items but the game would still say they had to be bought (the grass flute instrument for example), thereby disallowing us from using that feature. Obviously, we couldn’t find the ability to start a gang as the game’s fan page suggests, and when collecting bottles, we often got the same information block informing us about what was collected multiple times.

For the most part, bugs are bugs, and since the game is dubbed “beta,” it’s understandable. Really, the only other thing that is concerning is the premise of the title. Granted, it is interesting to rise from nothing to something significant, as that is what makes progression in any role-playing title fun. It’s hard to say whether or not Street Rivals takes it to too much of an extreme though. Sure, it is a little funny to see all the clichés, but when you consider how much of an issue poverty like this is, in reality, the humor does tend to stop cold in its tracks.

Tune Runner,from Appy Entertainment, has a new take on rhythm games for the iPhone and iPod touch, that makes good use of the devices’ touch controls, and music collections.

For the record, this is not a terribly complex application, but for the low, low price of “free,” it’s certainly a nice one to have. Players control — sort of — a music loving robot called Groov-EE. The objective is to reach the end of a song without him “dying.”

Essentially, players are able to pick a music track from their own collection of songs on their iPhone of iPod touch, and a level is generated based on the length of the track. From here, Groov-EE starts running and a handful of shapes will come scrolling off from the left. The idea is to draw the shape, using your finger, before Groov-EE runs into it. If the shape is drawn incorrectly or too slowly, the poor little robot will stumble and lose a chunk of health. If successful, he will perform a mini dance number, while running, and regain health.

Unfortunately, Tune Runner doesn’t seem to be a true, blue rhythm game. The approaching symbols just do not seem like they actually display with the beat of the track being played. Nonetheless, they do tend to increase in speed and frequency towards the end of a song or during a crescendo moment. Perhaps it is coincidence; perhaps not. Even if they do, the rate in which someone draws is different for everyone, so making that fall into the right beat is nearly impossible.

Regardless, each song creates a unique level and watching Groov-EE performing the worm or the moonwalk really does leave you with a smile.

In addition to the core play, each song has its own global scoring and leaderboard system, effectively adding a competitive element to a simple game. In fact, having individual leaderboards for personal songs significantly improves this feature, because it adds a bit of relevance to competing. Furthermore, since you can issue challenges directly to friends, it allows you to compete with songs you like, rather than songs that a game gives you or asks you to buy.

Of course, that isn’t to say that Tune Runner doesn’t ask you to buy songs. On the contrary, if you’re not looking to play one of your songs, the only free song it gives you is Hallucinations by Angels & Airwaves, and you will have to buy everything else you want to play. This is convenient enough, as you can make the purchases directly from within the app and can even see what songs are currently featured and which ones have had the most plays.

Using the OpenFeint social platform, Tune Runner also has a few more social features. There is another set of OpenFeint leaderboards based on your overall score, which is compiled from every level completed (at the end of each tune you gain X amount of points), as well as a ton of achievements. Unfortunately, most of the achievements are numerical in the sense that they ask for “Draw 5 Shapes in a Row,” then draw 10, 15, 20, etc.

The only real complaint to be had with Tune Runner is the lack of rhythm involved. Granted, the game is truly amusing, but there is something to be said about games like Tap Tap Revenge or Rock Band. These games play music in synch with each tap or hit note, thus making the player feel like they are creating the music. Furthermore, there are only four symbols to draw: O, Z, 7, ^. After a while, this gets a bit repetitive, and the game’s novelty does wear a bit thin.

Nevertheless, Tune Runner is a pretty interesting game and certainly worth a play. The cost is free, unless you want the version with no advertisements, so there is little reason not to. Also, the fact that it lets you use your music adds a very personal element to the game, and the combined leaderboard feature for each individual song lets you compete with friends over what matters to you. We can only hope, that more iPhone developers come up with equally creative concepts, in the future.

[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Metaplace.com founder Raph Koster. It originally ran on his personal site, and we're reprinting it here with his permission.]

The culture clash between social games and core gamers was on full display at the Game Developers Conference. I have been called a traitor to the cause of core gamers, even. At the awards show, when a Zynga rep claimed the social games award for Farmville and did a little bit of recruiting from the stage, he was not only booed, but someone shouted out, “But you don’t make games!” This is a common sentiment out there in the usual gamer haunts.

I have many, many thoughts on all this — and I have been posting some of them in various places when discussions arise.

Yes, Farmville is a game. It just requires fairly little skill compared to games for “advanced” gamers. But by any reasonable definition of game, it fits perfectly.

You have to make choices (they are strategic choices rather than real-time, but so what? Games have a long tradition of slower play). The choices require knowledge and skill (the skill is what gets derisively called “spreadsheet gaming” by the cognoscenti, but that’s a brush that EVE Online and other MMOs have been tarred with too). You have to prepare for the challenge. You can screw up. You get rewarded for doing well, etc.

It may seem elementary to those who can juggle complicated business sims, but think of it as the training wheels version for novices to that genre, and you won’t be far off. I think people who didn’t play games in the early days forget that the level of complexity they enjoy today is a phenomenon of the last ten years, a symptom of typical genre development. Social games are more advanced than most of the games made from 1970 to 1988.

Yes, social games truly are social. They just work on somewhat different modes than real-time synchronous games do. Instead of rewarding real-time teamwork the way that group combat in an MMO, playing on a soccer team, or being a member of a chorus line does, they reward asynchronous behaviors.

Most specifically, there is a lot of exactly the sort of weak-tie social design that was intrinsic to Star Wars Galaxies and Asheron’s Call: stuff around gifts, networks of mutual benefit, etc. More, they are exploring some of these things in a deeper way than MMOs do (because MMOs fall back on the synchronous crutch). Which is more indicative of social ties, a user who logs in once a week for a raid, or a user who logs in every day to send every friend a gift? The answer is not straightforward, if you dig into social networking data.

Yes, it is arguably even an MMO. The core activity is single-player, but the features around gifting, fertilizing, helping build structures collaboratively, etc, are all massively multiplayer techniques. Oh, they are not yet truly virtual worlds, though some of them do feature real-time chat, and more will over time, because in many many cases it is a value-add of a feature.

Long ago, I posed the question of whether American Idol was an MMO. And in that post, I said

Well, here we are. Collective action is starting to matter in the social games, and it’s going to matter more, not less precisely because it is an assumed core premise of the genre.

No, social games are not what we think of as a virtual world. But as I said the other day, that definition is evolving.

Yes, social games make money. Do some Googling, people! And no, it’s not all from scams. Yes, there are shady practices. But not all games use them, and if they do, it is less every day as the market gets cleaned up. And even when they do, they are not the bulk of the money.

Social games are not just a fad. There have been a lot of comparisons to things like motion control, 3d imaging, and so on. But back in 2008 there were Gamasutra articles about whether retro-looking gaming was a fad; before 3d graphics got good enough, there were questions about whether it was a fad… the key thing to look at here is whether there are underlying technical and social factors that are pushing development in a particular direction.

In the case of retro looks (which are now a firmly established aesthetic), the answer lay in the somewhat complicated fact that a younger gamer sees all previous aesthetics side-by-side and does not judge their quality based on technology, the way that older gamers do. A push towards innovation and artistic intent in game design called forth the ghost of the 8-bit era, and the pixelated look became an identity badge. Tech helped this along — the rise of Flash as a common game development platform resulted in a “Flash aesthetic” driven by the display limitations that today we see in console games such as PixelJunk Eden and Patapon.

In the case of 3d, the march of technology simply made it work over time, and it evolved from gimmick to tool. This may yet happen with 3d displays as well, or motion control.

In the case of social games, you have to look at the overall context too. As I have been saying for quite some time, all games are becoming connected experiences. And it turns out that social networks are becoming the glue. They are sweeping away all the “gamer-only” networks that so many companies started.

The value in these networks lies in the connectivity to friends, the easy distribution of content across the social graph, the web accessibility, and so on. These are things that we now take for granted. The genie is not going to go back into the bottle.

Now, is the investment level going to change? Absolutely. The white-hot heat around the segment will definitely subside as everyone gets used to the fact that the market is here to stay.

No, social games won’t turn into core games. This is one of the misconceptions that AAA developers often have as they try to establish themselves in the market. It is absolutely true that social games are going to grow more sophisticated over time. But they will do so by growing further along the direction they have already been going.

If you look at the AAA game world today, you can trace just about everything in it to the early core gamer market. Video games got going with sports, dragons, robots, guns, jumping & climbing, and cars. Those were the first big ideas. And here we are now, decades in, and they are still the big ideas. Many other ideas have come along since, but somehow they have always been quirky, “outside the mainstream” — like, say, when Rollercoaster Tycoon, or Guitar Hero, or The Sims came along. The only way something like “playing house” can possibly be “outside the mainstream” is if there’s a subculture in charge.

Well, social games are here and they managed to get themselves established largely without reference to those tropes. As a result, they have a different set of starting premises. Many of the things that were “quirky” are “normal” and vice versa. Central design tropes include cooperation rather than competition; asynchronous rather than synchronous play; social dynamics; and a very different set of core cultural references. There’s more.

What will happen over time is that this new audience will grow in sophistication. They already take for granted all of the elements of a farming game, for example. You can think of the farming game as equivalent to any other genre, and replete with design tropes that are exactly equivalent to conventions like WASD, hit points, skill point allocation, rocket jumping, and tank-nuker-healer, if you like.

All that is going to happen is a recapitulation of design history, only with a new of new assumptions embedded in the games:

• a far broader set of cultural references.
• a new and different set of core artistic choices driven by different rendering technology
• a fresh and exciting set of design paradigms built around asynchronous sociability and large-scale weak-tie “guild” structures — hoo, is there a design essay lurking in the difference between a guild and a neighbor ring…!
• a whole new set of business models and practices

What this boils down to is that social games will grow along those axes, and not magically turn into what core gamers today consider to be core games. It’s a mistake to think that the game development industry is going to manage to magically make this audience fall in love with sports, dragons, robots, guns, jumping & climbing, and cars.

But there’s hope for core gamers nonetheless: These games are the new home of “worldy” games, in some ways. And they are bringing neglected genres back to life.

Social games are going to push boundaries in design areas that are currently neglected. A renaissance in simulation and strategy games is likely, and I don’t think it is an accident that so many prominent AAA strategy game developers are in social games now.

If what you have craved is greater user agency and impact on a persistent world, a greater sense of community and economic interdependence — those are features that are intrinsic to this new market. As an example, I would point out that there was a core MMO game that many of the readers of this blog loved that had a farming game where you had to check in every few days to collect your stuff and decide what to try to harvest next. And it’s wasn’t Farmville. It was Star Wars Galaxies. In many ways, the features that were seen as oddest or least “gamer-like” in the worldy MMOs are going to be among core features in the social games: housebuilding, shopkeeping, farming, dancing, dress-up, even hairdressing. Right now, these are one-to-a-game. But one possible direction of development is that they not be.

I have thoughts on what all this means for the core games we know and love, but I’ll leave those for another day.

Though there may be a lot of urbanization going on lately with the growing number of Facebook city-building applications, Digital Chocolatelooks to be getting back to nature. After the release of their Facebook application, NanoTowns, the social developer is now taking users to Africa where they become part of the circle of life in the animal husbandry game, Safari Kingdom.

Lion King puns, aside, this is a fairly simple, slow burn title. Players are granted a six by six grid of space within an African savanna, with the sole job of caring for and raising various forms of wildlife until they are ready to be released into the wild.

Raising the animals is fairly straightforward. On one of the grid spaces, users build a simple nest and choose from a variety of indigenous animals to care for. This ranges from meerkats, to flamingos, to even lions and giraffes (eventually). From here, they will appear as an egg, hatching a minute or so later. Depending on the type of animal, it will take anywhere from five minutes to a day or more to grow into adulthood.

As time passes, these highly saturated, cartoon-like animals will grow larger and change between stages of Baby, Teen, and Adult. Periodically, they will need to be fed, and until such is done, growth will halt. Furthermore, each of the creatures needs a bit of love too, but this is merely accomplished with a simple virtual pat on the head. Once an animal has reached adulthood, it is released into the wild for a sum of money and experience.

The leveling system in Safari Kingdom is the traditional gating system for these kinds of games: As players grow in level they are offered new animals to raise, and of course, new decorum for their little patch of land (which can also be expanded for a hefty sum).

This is the second aspect of Safari Kingdom: Decorating your own African habitat. Within each grid space, players can place various forms of trees, fauna, terrain tiles, as well as some safari-themed vehicles, fences, and buildings. Most of the items are reasonably affordable, though the collection of off-road jeeps and tents are a bit pricey. Nonetheless, if one doesn’t have enough money in game, they are always able to pruchase a relative equivalent (as well as a few fun extra items such as mandolins, flags, and fire pits) with the buyable virtual currency, Safari Cash.

Frankly, all of the decorative items are great to look at, but the biggest complaint comes with the fact that everything has to be placed within a very distinctive grid layout. Literally, you can see the grid lines even if they are “grass.” It really takes away from the immersiveness of the game, and feels a little bit limiting. Granted, there are many games that do the same thing with an invisible grid, but with a game that is simulating something natural like Safari Kingdom is, having everything laid out in such a precise and mechanical way, just feels… off. Luckily, as players level up and earn more money, the ability to add different floor tile decorations becomes available and that beginning grid gradually fade away. It is still there, to some degree, but hardly as glaring and noticeable.

Socially, the game makes up for this short-coming a bit. This isn’t so much in the way of social features, as these are primarily the same as any other game that uses a virtual space. Essentially, it boils down to visiting other friends’ safaris and helping to care for their animals, earning a bit of coin for your troubles. What is interesting, however, is how you get friends to actually play in the first place.

Rather than spamming the user with prompts that say “Invite your Friends!” the game has random non-player characters walk into your safari. These characters are linked with random Facebook friends, indicated by the name above them, and when they get to the border of your grid space, a nice big question mark appears.

Right off the bat, the user has an innate reaction to click on this giant icon above their friend’s head. Doing so, brings up a prompt for you to send a message/invite from Safari Kingdom, asking them to play. It’s quite ingenious really, as many Facebook users have reached a Pavlovian level of clicking “Skip” to get through all the invite messages at the start of the game. Here, it is initiated on the players’ terms in a way where they feel compelled to investigate, rather than through obnoxious, brute force methods.

In the end, Safari Kingdom is nothing terribly huge, yet. It only garners around 6,500 monthly active users, but then again, it hasn’t been around that long either. It’s certainly a game that takes time to get all the good stuff, so it isn’t going to be some massive boom like FarmVille. However, its simplicity and slow-placed play, coupled with an attractive visual style, makes this app a nice quietly good game that is likely to gradually grow in popularity.