Apparently, the end of the world isn’t going to be a nuclear war, the rise of Skynet, or even a biological weapon that turns us all into zombies. No, evidently the end will be cybernetic cats and radioactive elephants. Well, at least that’s the image that Islamabad-based social developer White Rabbit paints with Feline Frenzy: Robot Wars.

The game is a quirky, simple, arcade-shooter that has cyborg storks dropping cyborg cats onto the flanks of a simple hut with a giant cannon on the roof. Using the arrow keys and space bar, players rotate the cannon right or left in an attempt to shoot the balloons that are floating the cats down to safety. Unfortunately, your ammunition cache is comprised of mere boots, so hitting the balloons and sending the evil felines plummeting to their doom is all that will work. However, four reaching the ground safely on either side spells failure for the player.

The goal of the game is to last as long as you can, and brag about it to your friends later. As players shoot the various storks and cats, they score points (which of course means there is a leaderboard system), with more being earned the quicker they hit the target. However, the catch is that for every shot fired, it costs points, so it is prudent to be accurate. It is possible, though, to get some free shots by inviting friends.

To a degree, this is quite useful in racking up higher scores, as some of the unlockable ammunition – better shoes, of course – have higher point costs to use, but extra benefits. As a general example, the Cowboy Boots are larger, so they cover more area, while the Khussa Shoes are small, but ricochet. Each piece of footwear acts as a makeshift achievement as well, since they are not all unlocked the same way. Some are unlocked by reaching a new level during a game, which is basically symbiotic with your score, while others require you to win gold medals in the app’s eight mini-games.

In fact, these games do make for an added bonus as they are all more curious adaptations to the main shooting concept. Some are merely survival games, only giving the player two cats on each side before losing, others have tiny balloons, while still other involve a deluge of radioactive, nuclear elephants.

This actually leads to a major complaint with Feline Frenzy though. The controls feel extremely sluggish, for it seemingly takes forever to rotate the cannon from one end to the other. It isn’t too much of an issue for the storks and cats, but these blasted elephants come out of nowhere from the top of the screen and fall faster than the cannon can turn. As an example, if your cannon is aiming far left, and one falls from the right, they will hit you, and when they do, it’s game over. Period. Obviously, it is frustrating to be able to see, it coming, but it is not possible to hit.

Overall Feline Frenzy is a moderately amusing game, but once the novelty of the cybernetic cat invasion has worn off, we wonder how many players will keep coming back. The name suggests that we will be seeing more Feline Frenzy titles in the future. The title has been growing steadily over the past week and a half since launching, with about 2,700 monthly active users to date.

MySpace is giving social gaming a big upgrade today, adding a new set of features, and partners, that intend to make third-party gaming apps a prominent part of the service.

The integration of games into MySpace’s core interface could specifically give game engagement a big boost. “Games” has replaced “Apps” as a tab in the site’s top navigation bar. Click on it and you’ll see a revamped page called “Games & Apps,” that contains a number of new features for games. Users’ home pages also now include a “Featured Games” window on the right-hand side that shows you games that MySpace staff has recommended. And, more updates from apps will now appear within users activity “Stream” of updates, including when friends score an app from 1 to 5 stars.

Meanwhile, the “Games & Apps” tab has gotten more features intended to help users find and engage with games. On the top right-hand module of the page, you can see your friends latest activities in apps. Another part of the page, “Featured,” shows games that are handpicked for quality by MySpace staff. “Suggestions” uses an algorithm to figure out which apps might appeal to each user the most, and includes a way to sort by only game apps. These suggestions are based on factors like which kinds of games users have already played, which ones their friends have been playing, and how well the apps are ranked by users.

Developers who have built apps for MySpace already will appreciate these changes, as the company previously gave games minimal attention. Some game actions showed up in users’ streams, and games appeared within a simpler apps page. That was it.

MySpace has still been the de facto place for social game developers to go besides Facebook. While many applications have gained millions of users — see our most recent list of top 25 MySpace games for more on that — a main way to gain an audience was through advertising within MySpace’s apps page. The company’s goal with the launch today is to have social games help increase the number of users and their engagement.

It already has around 100 million monthly active users worldwide, although this number has been falling in the past year. Of its users, 28 million use apps every month, and more than half of those play games; 56% female, and 44% male. With the updates today, co-President Mike Jones says the company is aiming to get half the site’s users gaming every month.

Social games launching on MySpace today include:

• Fish Isle (IGG)
• Hoop Fever Live (TheBroth)
• Kingdoms of Camelot (Watercooler)
• Paradise Paintball (CMUNE)
• SPP Ranch (Slide)
• Warlords (BitRhymes)
• Wild Ones (Playdom)
• Zombie Revenge (DeezGames)

The company is also announcing a couple other new, related projects today. One is an iPhone app called Neon, designed for games. You can log in with your MySpace account, see notifications and app invites from friends, and respond. While you can’t play games within the app, your responses will be recorded within MySpace. For example, MySpace’s Mobsters role-playing game might tell you that you’ve gained a free gun in the game, and you can click to approve this. When you accept friends’ invites to apps, MySpace will install the app on your profile on the site. This is not the only MySpace iPhone app planned, by the way — it also has more coming for the main site, as well as for other areas it focuses on, like music and entertainment.

It also has a few service partners it’s announcing: game development tool Unity, cross-platform social feature provider ScoreLoop and cloud gaming service Groovy Cortext.

MySpace’s gaming efforts have also included more fundamental changes to its developer platform, recently coming out with an analytics API, for example, that helps developers better track user metrics. The company has, as many readers know, been going through bigger changes. The News Corp.-owned company’s chief executive, Owen Van Natta, was let go last month; with Jones and another executive, Jason Hirschhorn, becoming co-presidents. All of these executives came on less than a year ago, replacing the company’s founding executive team. The company has spent much of the last year talking about how it’s going to become more of an entertainment service, but up to this point it has been focused on other areas, like music. Games are now front and center.

Overall gains in daily active users (DAU) have recovered after the dip we noted last week, led by FarmVille and Playdom’s new game, Social City. This is our weekly AppData list of leading Facebook games by growth in DAU.

FarmVille has shown steady growth in monthly active users for several weeks, but its DAU gains have been unsteady. The Zynga game still hasn’t reached an all-time high in DAU, but it has returned to the point it was at a couple weeks back, with over 30 million DAU.

Here are the rest of the list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	30,806,872	+2,103,410	+6.83
2.	Social City	1,239,331	+1,239,240	+99.99
3.	Restaurant City	3,670,846	+358,434	+9.76
4.	Pet Society	4,304,155	+310,402	+7.21
5.	Bubble Island	504,192	+259,995	+51.57
6.	YoVille	2,132,214	+191,937	+9.00
7.	Tiki Resort	427,563	+178,463	+41.74
8.	Jeux Gratuits	166,892	+165,108	+98.93
9.	Happy Aquarium	4,693,053	+155,957	+3.32
10.	Texas HoldEm Poker	6,305,568	+128,394	+2.04
11.	Zoo Paradise	122,571	+117,895	+96.19
12.	Farm Town	2,455,361	+91,518	+3.73
13.	My Town	801,063	+91,023	+11.36
14.	Mahjongg Dimensions	195,090	+74,702	+38.29
15.	Sunshine Ranch	560,495	+60,194	+10.74
16.	Towner	127,192	+47,490	+37.34
17.	Fish World	1,095,925	+39,763	+3.63
18.	Wild Ones	321,013	+34,496	+10.75
19.	Live Games	40,721	+33,849	+83.12
20.	Country Story	1,110,220	+30,612	+2.76

Social City’s DAU gains are impressive, although the stat is likely inflated by brand-new players. But the new Playdom game, isn’t alone, either; two of its peers in the SimCity genre, My Town and Towner also made it into the top 20 this week. As a category, these games have been taking off since we wrote about them three weeks back; we also reviewed Social City last week.

Restaurant City and Pet Society, both from Electronic Arts, are both well-established, slower-growing games that are showing recent bumps in DAU. It’s hard to tell at the moment, but they may lose some of their gains by next week. YoVille, by Zynga, also shows a bump in DAU, despite its ongoing loss of monthly active users.

Bubble Island and Tiki Resort, by comparison, are both more recent games, from wooga and Playdom respectively. They’ve also both hit this list more than one week running, driven by strong growth and good player retention. We’ll expect to see these two in coming weeks, as well.

Finally, skip over the next four games to Farm Town, the Slashkey game that started the Facebook farming craze. It’s interesting to see it appear here; Slashkey has been losing players since Zynga showed up with FarmVille. But although it’s continuing to shed occasional players, the game appears to be shoring up its regular player base.

The number of big social applications that use Facebook’s virtual currency, Credits, continues to rise. The latest is Zynga’s smash hit farming game, FarmVille, the largest application on Facebook with nearly 84 million users a month.

The integration is pretty straightforward, as you can see from the screenshot below. Credits is shown as the first of several payment options — others include direct credit card payments, PayPal, and a variety of other payment services, including prepaid cards and offers.

Zynga has previously been running Credits in some of its smaller Facebook apps, like role-playing game Pirates: Rule the Caribbean. Credits is now also appearing on some of its other big applications, like pet-caring title PetVille. However, it’s not on others, including Café World.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak on “The State of the Social Gaming Industry” at GDC in San Francisco. It was awesome to see the level of excitement in social gaming from developers and entrepreneurs across the gaming industry – much more than last year. Lots of people are now working on “social” projects, and larger players are preparing to throw a lot more weight in this direction over the coming year.

For those interested in checking out the slides, they are embedded below.

Topics covered: Social games, Virtual goods, Facebook, Zynga, Playfish, Playdom, PayPal, MySpace, Twitter, Social networks, Gaming portals, Payments, Monetization, Mobile, Offers

Japanese internet company CyberAgent is bringing its popular virtual world, Ameba Pigg, to the U.S. market, and to Facebook, as Ameba Pico.

Ameba Pigg has gained around 2 million users in the last 11 months, making CyberAgent one of the larger Japanese companies of its ilk. Here’s our look at the new app.

At first glance Ameba Pico does not look like much. It has a very simplistic art style, and a stiff, child-like, and limited set of animations for the avatar. But the variety and activity within this virtual world bring it to life.

Essentially, the world is broken up into various chat rooms. Each one has a distinctive theme, and since this is a western, U.S. version, they are all parts of New York City. Players are capable of visiting downtown NYC, the Statue of Liberty, Central Park, the New York Academy, and so on. These areas are more than just aesthetics as well, for players can actually shop at stores in these rooms that contain themed furniture and clothing based on the area. New York’s downtown, for example, sells fedoras while a more creative room, like the Stone Age (which you need to by a “Time Machine” to visit) sells… cave man stuff.

As with most virtual worlds, these purchases go into decorating your own virtual room and avatar. There’s actually a pretty hefty selection too. For the former, users select a base theme (we went with traditional Japanese), and build from there. From the room, players can order new, non-themed, items from a catalog and move, rotate, and remove items from their space. Unfortunately, placement is based on an invisible grid, that has a snapping mechanism similar to Adobe products like Photoshop or Flash. Trying to get a small, single grid-space, item into place is frustrating because it constantly snaps to where you don’t want it.

Clothes, however, work much better. It isn’t that they look better, by any means, but you obviously don’t have the snapping issue, and you can throw on as much clothing as you want. Basically, this allows users to create their own look, to a limited degree, with layers of their own choosing (i.e. a jacket on top of a scarf, on top of a shirt) rather then just have a single slot for one top item, or one bottom item.

As for the purchasing itself… this gets a little interesting. The earnable in-game currency, called Gummies, is not used at all. Purchases can only be done with the buyable virtual currency, Ameba Coins. Traditionally, this is a cardinal sin for a virtual world, but it is mitigated by a third currency called Tokens.

Now, tokens can be used to buy anything in the game, and it only takes one. When the user starts, they are given five, but more can be won in a game called Gacha. For 300 Gummies, users can press “Play,” and it will spit out a random prize, which could be a token, furniture, clothing, etc. And before anyone thinks 300 is a high price, you get Gummies constantly through daily logins, receiving “Pico Props” (a button players can press when they click on your avatar), or accomplishing achievements.

Of everything Ameba Pico offers, however, the best element is not in the game features at all. It’s that the game is global and linked between a stand-alone site, using Facebook Connect, and Facebook. So far, we have seen English, Japanese, and French in those seas of chat bubbles. Heck, there have even been people from Australia and the Philippians walking around. It is very cool to talk with them, if you can, or even play mini-games such as Match Card or Reversi.

Despite a rocky first impression, Ameba Pico turned out to be a wonderful little virtual world. Aesthetically, it certainly won’t appeal to everyone, but as soon as you log in, you can immediately immerse yourself within a highly populated and global realm. Quite frankly, however, it is the latter that makes this Japanese title stand out, and a little taste of other cultures is something we all can always benefit from.

Currently, Ameba Pico has already gained more than 104,000 monthly active users.

Monetization service providers that first got traction on Facebook are continuing to diversify, with the latest example being offer company Super Rewards. It has just launched a new version of its offer wall, intended for Flash game developers who distribute their creations across the web. The service is basically the offer wall that Super Rewards already provides, but available for developers to embed within their Flash game interfaces. Advertising offers are performance ads, drawn from various ad networks and advertisers, and users can participate in the ads in exchange for virtual currency in games.

Super Rewards is letting people who play Flash games that use virtual currency take these offers and earn the currency without having to leave the game page. In this example, you can see how it works: Click on “get more coins” and you’ll see the offer window appear overlaying the game. Then you take the offers, get the currency, and buy virtual goods within the game.

While the company offered a way to add offer walls via an XML integration, the new service allows developers to do so in what it says takes less than an hour. Developers can check out the implementation information here. Other companies that provide in-Flash payment services include Jambool and its Social Gold product. We should note that social games on Facebook that use Flash normally include offer walls on separate pages within applications.

Super Rewards, a part of online advertising company Adknowledge, hasn’t announced any developer partners yet. But the service is live, so we expect implementations to start popping up soon.

Offer quality has been an issue for basically all offer providers on Facebook, and Super Rewards has been trying to improve what offers appear where. Here’s what the company tells us about its efforts for Flash developers: “All the functionality of the core SuperRewards product applies to this including the industry’s first white and black listing functionality. We work as closely as we possibly can with both platforms and publishers to ensure that our offers meet both the letter and the spirit of platform guidelines as well as more specific controls that the publisher wishes to apply.”

All sorts of gaming veterans have been moving to social and mobile gaming recently, and now, a new group of them is forming a startup called SiXiTS. The goal? Through an exclusive partnership with Sibblingz, a cross-platform game technology company centered around social games, the startup is seeking to create “persistent social game[s]” that can be played on Facebook, the iPhone, and even the iPad.

Located out of the San Francisco Bay area, the company consists of individuals with well over 16 years in visual effects experience. According to the company’s new website, team members include CEO and Creative Director Euan Macdonald, COO and Creative Director Nathaniel Hunter, VP of Business Development Mary Butler, VP of Technology Chris Wilson, and CFO Sherry Wangenheim.

The team’s experience stems from such places such as Electronic Arts, Nokia, Disney’s ImageMovers Digital, Lucasfilm Animation, Industrial Light and Magic, Pixar, Mondo Media, Motorola, and 3DO. Some examples of past work include The Mask, The Matrix Reloaded, Jurassic Park: The Lost World, Monsters Inc., Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace – there are many more.

Unfortunately, SiXiTS has yet to announce what their first social game will be. However, the company says it will be launching into public beta sometime this spring. Hopefully, we will catch a glimpse of what this creation will turn into before then, but considering the visual merits of the mentioned movies, you can bet it will at least look good.

Well, it looks like yet another big name developer is getting in on Facebook. This time around it is Sony Online Entertainment, as the game developer brings its popular turn-based strategy game, PoxNora, with a stated 2.5 million registered accounts, to the social network.

Despite a few hang-ups trying to use the game in Internet Explorer (text wouldn’t display properly), we were thankfully able to take a look using Firefox.The game actually proved to be extremely fun.

Okay, it’s fun once you get through the tutorial — which is terribly boring, by the way. Essentially, there are two players on a map, each with their own shrine. The objective of the game is to destroy that target. Of course, it’s hardly that simple. Each turn, the user is granted a resource called “Nora” – a sort of magic – which determines what they can deploy.

The deployed items cost X amount Nora, based on their power; as the game goes on, more powerful units become available, and are dubbed “runes.” These runes range from basic champions, to spells, to relics, and so on. Each has its own special abilities, and there are a lot of different runes, so the game gets strategic, fast. Some champions can only attack – some melee, some ranged – others can block incoming attacks, others heal, and so on.

The spells and relics also cost Nora but obviously do not always remain on the battle field. Relics, as an example, might give your champions extra health or damage so long as it survives, while a spell might heal, do area of effect damage, or hinder enemy movement.

This is where the next level of strategy appears. Each rune can only be deployed near your shrine – sans spells which can also be deployed near any friendly unit – or near a Nora Font. Each unit gains a set number of action points each turn and can move a certain distance on a grid based on those points. One grid space is one action point. However, these points are also needed to perform most attacks and special abilities a champion has, so budgeting them becomes very wise.

The Nora Fonts, or fountains, around the map are controlled by having only your faction adjacent to them. If there are no enemies near it, it will provided the controlling player extra Nora per turn. So, these are highly strategic locations to control.

Of course, PoxNora wouldn’t be much of a Facebook game without social capabilities. The game does allow for automatic feed postings, but it is actually turned off by default — an unusual move for an app. Furthermore, it doesn’t spam the player with “post this,” “share this,” etc. Actually, most of the social elements are within the game world itself.

Players are actually able to play synchronous multiplayer with one another. Even better than this, they can play in ranked ladder matches, unranked casual matches, unranked casual matches for those ranked under level 25, or just chat in “The Bazaar.” Moreover, if they just want to hone their skills, they can just play single player campaigns as well.

One issue, however, is that most of the biggest social games rely on asynchronous features. The point isn’t to have an immersive experience, but to do something simple — like watering a strawberry patch in FarmVille — a couple times a day, and communicate about it with friends. Many social game players don’t even think of themselves as playing a “game,” per se.

Regardless, virtual goods do a good job of complementing other features. In addition to just social play, users can also log on to the “Rune Trader,” and make requests to trade for runes they want or need. Consider it virtual card trading.

As a matter of fact, the game is even more like trading cards in that you can actually purchase packs of runes for Sony’s Station Cash (SC) virtual currency. The currency can be used to buy entire boxes of runes (around 3000 SC), new avatars, single player campaigns, and so on.

Artistically, PoxNora is a pretty nice treat as well. The artwork on the runes is fantastic and everything looks crisp and clean. That said, however, the movement and attacks of the champions in the actually battlefield look a bit uninspired by comparison. Nonetheless, this is just picking nits at this point.

PoxNora is certainly an in depth game, and one of the most strategic strategy game on Facebook that we have seen. It looks good, it plays good, and if you like strategy – and especially competition – then this is a game you will most certainly love. Additionally, Sony say that this title is only the first of many it has planned for the social network.

Startup game developer Gravity Bear has roots in traditional gaming and big ambitions on Facebook. Headed up by Phil Shenk, one of the former lead artists for Blizzard’s hit game Diablo II as well cofounder art director for Flagship Studios, it has fully released its first game, Battle Punks. The preview last fall showed promise and from our experience it did not disappoint.

The game is an automated avatar fighting app, and is similar to past reviewed titles such as King of KungFu and Killer Toon. However, whereas those were done in 2D, Battle Punks is completely three dimensional, and does it look good. Okay, granted, it’s not PlayStation 3 graphics, but would you really want to download that on Facebook anyway?

The name of the game is character progression. Players create a very basic avatar, and start in an area of the world called the “Training Grounds.” This is the area for all new players, and users cannot proceed to another area of the map (which is concealed anyway), until they have leveled up enough to enter it. Using a combination of mafia-style role-playing and automated fighting game rules, users battle one another in order to gain experience, earn money, and claim victory.

Players start with 10 of the familiar stat, energy. Each fight will take three, with one energy replenishing every five minutes or so. However, players are free to send each other food, as gifts that can get an exhausted punk back on his or her feet. Within the fight itself, the player has no control, and simply watches as the players trade blows back and forth in a turn-based style.

Though it is automated, the fights are actually very interesting. There is a good deal of animation and randomness to each fight that makes it entertaining. Each avatar will generally do an attack one by one, either a single big swing, a miss, or maybe a combo. Beyond this, the avatars can also dodge, parry, initiate quick surprise attacks, counterattack, and even disarm each other.

The last of these is extremely important. Pre-planning comes in a great deal before a fight. When visiting the store, players can purchase different types of gear and weapons (as well as cosmetic items, of course). These can add blocking capabilities (shields), do more damage, attack faster, or even have a better grip.

Yes, grip. The better the grip on an item, the less likely you will be disarmed. So, as an example, a two-handed mace (which is owning everyone right now, by the way) has a very strong grip, so it will not be disarmed easily. However, despite its high damage, it is very slow, and doesn’t seem to counter often. Nonetheless, should you lose your weapon, then your battle punk will pull out another from their inventory (or just fight bare handed).

This is actually where Diablo’s influence comes into play. The inventory interface is actually the same as the game. Basically, players have a grid, and items come in different shapes and sizes. If you can fit something within the grid, then you can carry it into battle. It’s that simple.

Eventually, this will lead to strategic choices, as after each fight you are rewarded with gold, experience, and random items (more if you win). Obviously, this will stock up your inventory with many different things, leading the user to decided on speed vs. strength, grip vs. defense, and so on.

Also, with each level, comes a small bit of virtual currency, called Newtons. Unfortunately, we haven’t found anything yet that requires them, but you can at least convert them to in-game currency (gold). That said, however, once you can travel to new areas, new items can be bought there – adding a sort of adventure element to the app – so likely there will be Newton-only goods at higher levels.

The one thing that does come off as obnoxious though, with Battle Punks, is that one can only use so many items in a battle, and as players level up, the weaker ones become useless. This leads to an excess of unwanted goods, but it doesn’t seem possible to sell them. Also, many items in the store are a bit pricy, and the amount of gold earned per fight is a bit low (at least early on).

Beyond these minor annoyances, the only other complaint is that some of the animations and battle sequences for a few weapons is very, very dull. The one that stands out the most is easily the hand-to-hand combat. Okay, okay, so later one, you’ll probably have so many weapons it doesn’t matter, but until then all you see is the avatar jump toward the target, throw one punch, then jump away. It really feels lacking compared to everything else.

Regardless, this is certainly one of the most enjoyable fighting applications for Facebook. It is small, and not well known yet – only about 1,100 monthly active users thus far – but it will almost certainly catch on as people discover it. Battle Punks looks great, it’s actually a lot of fun for an automating fighting game, and it has very little to complain about. This is an app that comes highly recommended.