Devoted game designers may feel like giving up the profession when they see the top entry on this week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by monthly active users (MAU). How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT, the entire aim of which is to type the ABCs quickly, may just be the simplest game since cow-tipping, with a similar lack of staying power after the few first moments of amusement.

That’s just our judgment, of course, and over a million people disagree, based on the proportion of five-star reviews the game is getting. And whatever its flaws, How Fast Are You?! does serve to illustrate one of the core precepts of design on Facebook: games can get away with a bare-bones interface as long as they pull off a single addictive feature well.

The addictive feature in this case is not typing the alphabet, it’s posting the time score to your wall — and all of your friends’ walls — to create a kindergarten-esque rivalry. Anyway, here’s the rest of the list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	How Fast Are You?! PROVE IT	1,915,222	+833,647	+43.53
2.	FarmVille	83,127,751	+561,878	+0.68
3.	My City Life	3,908,234	+537,319	+13.75
4.	Bubble Island	1,206,844	+477,796	+39.59
5.	PetVille	19,619,857	+475,914	+2.43
6.	Tiki Resort	1,349,205	+453,493	+33.61
7.	Ninja Saga	3,926,247	+453,121	+11.54
8.	MindJolt Games	19,925,788	+398,103	+2.00
9.	SPP Ranch!	2,574,025	+322,755	+12.54
10.	School of Wizardry	2,489,563	+314,209	+12.62
11.	My Town	3,310,758	+285,824	+8.63
12.	Zoo World	20,312,073	+250,609	+1.23
13.	Glamble	360,767	+247,387	+68.57
14.	Jeux Gratuits	242,236	+242,176	+99.98
15.	MMA Pro Fighter	526,034	+226,629	+43.08
16.	Roulette Madness	953,828	+220,823	+23.15
17.	Texas HoldEm Poker	27,280,073	+213,572	+0.78
18.	Country Life	8,558,831	+208,351	+2.43
19.	Bejeweled Blitz	10,492,337	+197,576	+1.88
20.	Towner	447,330	+186,006	+41.58

Through the entire list, MAU growth is about half of what it was last week. FarmVille, which has led the rankings for several weeks, has finally dropped down to number two with only half a million new users.

Third is My City Life, which has done quite well since we reviewed its new class of SimCity-style games in mid-February. It’s followed by Bubble Island, a Wooga game that adds social features to the classic bubble-blasting concept — if you lose a life to falling bubbles, it can be regenerated by getting your friends to play.

We’ll pass over the next few places to land on MindJolt Games, which offers users a large catalog of licensed games, at number eight. As we recently reported, a team of ex-MySpace execs bought MindJolt for an undisclosed sum in the tens of millions range. Judging only by MindJolt’s current numbers on Facebook (there’s also a website), the acquirers paid over a dollar per user.

But it’s also interesting to see that MindJolt, which had not gained many users for a few months before the deal, began growing again shortly before the acquisition. Now each week it adds a couple percentage points to its total fairly reliably. Chances are, a new growth strategy was put in place before the acquisition was announced — and whatever it is, it’s working.

Mochi Media, the Flash gaming platform company that sold to China media giant Shanda Games for $80 million earlier this year, is continuing to focus on social. It’s announcing new tools for developers today, allowing them to provide ways for users to play games against friends and share activity to their social networks. It’s also offering a new $10 million fund for Flash and social games, in conjunction with its new corporate parent, to help finance promising new ideas.

The company worked last year to apply concepts from free-to-play social games to the Flash widget games on its site, introducing a platform-wide virtual currency, Mochi Coins, and a way for users to find friends from social networks and share things like high scores with them.

Mochi had begun live providing ways for developers to integrate pre-roll and other advertising into their widgets. Developers can then let anyone embed their games anywhere the web, and make money for themselves (with Mochi also getting a cut). On top of this, Mochi provides game analytics tools so developers could track usage and figure out where to improve their products. The company now says it reaches 150 million monthly active users, who play 15,000 games on 40,000 different web sites.

The Social API (application programming interface) lets users sign in to play a game via their identities on Facebook (using Facebook Connect), MySpace or Twitter, then play friends from across these sites and and access each site’s communication channels — say, posting a big gaming win to your Facebook wall.

But the API goes beyond what the company launched last fall, as vice president of product management Ryan Nichols tells us. It’s a layer on top of these other networks, and mimicks Facebook’s API so a social game developer on Facebook could easily port their game to it. Once a user adds a friend on Mochi from one of the social sites, that person becomes their Mochi friend — if Facebook goes down, for example, Mochi can still maintain its connection between the two people. The API =also includes a way for developers to message all users on a game, regardless of which social platform they are on.

This is a smart idea, but one issue is that many social gamers prefer playing games on social networks. Why? Many don’t even realize that they’re playing “games,” per se, but rather passing the time doing something entertaining with friends on the site.

The $10 million fund, meanwhile, “will be managed by members of the management team of Mochi Media and Shanda Games. Through participation with the fund, developers will gain access to technical, design and testing resources from Shanda Games, as well as a host of development tools and distribution….”

The big picture here is this: Shanda Games, a publicly-traded company controlled by Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd., wants to compete outside of China. Mochi offers distribution and monetization services that allow it to do so; the social features are another step in that direction. The fund is, too. The other interesting angle we’ve been hearing is that netbook usage is exploding in China, and the lightweight devices can’t handle the processing power required for many of the downloadable and massively multiplayer online games popular in the country. The company has organically gained millions of users in China — people who have just found Mochi-powered games on their own — so Shanda is aiming for Mochi to bring its 15,000 games to bear on the Chinese market.

Over the weekend, popular developer CrowdStar released a brand new Facebook app, Zoo Paradise. However, this one isn’t following the recent trend of city-builders. Rather, it’s an iteration on the “tycoon” concept. After the successes of RockYou’s Zoo World, who could blame the developer, as the zoological wonder not only reached #8 in this past month’s Top 25 Facebook Games, but is one of the contributors to the developer’s current popularity.

Nonetheless, Zoo Paradise is a lot like its predecessor in the core sense. The idea is to build the best looking zoo one can while coaxing the little computer-player patrons to spend as much money as they can.

The game is actually simple enough that there is no real tutorial, merely a giant purple arrow above the “Shop” icon. From here players can purchase animals, habitats, concessions, and decorations for a very reasonable price. However, based on the player level, only a limited number of these (save decorations) can be purchased at any given time.

As for the level itself, it seems that most of the experience needed to increase it is done by buying and placing new items. Periodically, players must also feed their animals and even water certain decorations such as a handful of trees. Also, all habitats and concessions seem to be upgradeable.

Unfortunately, Zoo Paradise is a bit of a slow burner. When first starting the game, players are able to pick up coins that were presumably dropped by customers. Nonetheless, no new ones were ever dropped during play, when we played and not once did a customer buy anything from a concession stand. Likely, since the game is in beta, this is merely a bug, but if it isn’t, then it certainly is a significant turn off to the game.

Thankfully, the lack of new income from the in-game currency (Zoo Coins) wasn’t too terribly hindering, as the game’s decoration’s panel in the shop has a fairly sizable collection of plants, bushes, rocks, and so on, that only cost anywhere from two to 15 coins, making it easy for the player to get started aesthetically.

This is a good thing too, as the game actually looks very nice. Everything has a sort of overly cute and saturated look to it (complete with great big watery eyes for the animals). All the habitats are animated as well as the animals who move about in a fairly believable fashion, for a Flash game anyway).

Of course, all this movement also corresponds to the zoo visitors as well, and while their wandering presence makes the game feel like a bustling park, their pathfinding AI isn’t exactly refined yet. These guys constantly walk out into the middle of nowhere, including through decorations, and at one point, every single one got stuck in the entrance and couldn’t enter. As a side note, multiple animals in a habitat seem to get stuck, too. Again, all are just beta bugs, but something to be aware of nonetheless.

Another curious point, is that this CrowdStar title actually doesn’t use its own virtual currency. Instead, it makes sole use of the Facebook Credits system, directing you to a Credits purchase screen if you try to buy the currency. Only a low percentage of items require Credits currency – about one-third of each section. That said, however, there isn’t exactly a large selection of items yet, so it is currently a bit limiting. For example, there are only three habitats – jungle, savanna, and polar – and the savanna costs 67 Facebook Credits, leaving a player that doesn’t want to spend money with very few style choices.

In regards to social ramifications, the game is typical of about any CrowdStar game, or any other virtual space type of app, for that matter. Players can send each other gifts, publish feeds to adopt rescued animals, send gifts, and visit each other’s zoo (to help out) via a leaderboard system. Nothing out of the ordinary, but why fix what isn’t broken?

Overall, Zoo Paradise isn’t too shabby. Especially considering its traffic — somewhere in the neighborhood of 112,000 monthly active users already. The game looks good, and it plays well (even if it is a bit slow). Moreover, despite its initial bugs, it was actually thoroughly enjoyable. We look forward to seeing a cleaned up version in the near future.

Inside Social Games extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Social Games. Check them out below!

6waves is an international publisher and developer of gaming applications on the Facebook platform.

SponsorPay is a virtual currency monetization platform focused on Europe.

Sometrics is a provider of virtual currency monetization solutions for social app and game developers.

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Surfpin is a provider of mobile and landline payments for game and application developers.

Social Gold powers payments, subscriptions, and virtual economies for online games.

Kontagent is a developer of analytics solutions for social application developers.

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

MTV Networks’ AddictingGames is a destination for online casual games.

SoftLayer provides managed hosting services for social application and game developers.

AdParlor is an advertising network designed specifically for social networking sites.

Gate2Shop is a provider of global and localized payment solutions.

Aurora Feint Generates 5 Million iPhone Game Downloads – Distribution has always been a problem for iPhone developers, but in an effort to improve the odds on this problem, Aurora Feint created a special promotion on its OpenFeint social platform. The experiment was called the “Free Game of the Day Promotion,” and over the past four weeks has generated 5 million free game downloads.

The success has led to the launch of FreeGameoftheDay.com and will put free game offers at the forefront for a stated 15 million users. To draw a parallel on the success, an Aurora Feint partner in this endeavor, Origin8 creator of Space Station: Frontier, saw 160,000 downloads in a single day, and 1 million overall.

iPad Coming in April – We’ve talked a lot about the iPad in recent weeks, but now it looks like the masses will get to check things out for themselves soon enough. Apple announced today that the official launch of it’s new device is scheduled for April 3rd in the United States.

The Wi-Fi only model will be available first, with the 3G added later in the month. However, both will be eligible for pre-order come March 12th, with a cost ranging from $499 to $629, respectively for the 16GB version and $699 to $829 for the 64GB version.

Kwedit Raises $3.3 Million – Kwedit, the virtual goods payment site that allows users, 13 and up, to borrow money for virtual items and pay it back later, has, according to TechCrunch, gained another $3.3 million in a second round of funding led by Maveron. The company says it has signed six new merchants including VoIP provider, PokeTalk, an unnamed MMO, a test prep service, and a credit record protection service.

Peanut Labs Gets New Partners – Earlier this week, ad offer network Peanut Labs announced not one, but three new partnerships including the virtual world Meez, massively multiplayer online game publisher IGG, and virtual currency payment service Zeevex.  Each of the three are slated to integrate the networks collection of products in the near future.

Meez Promotes the Red Cross – One of Peanut Labs new partners, Meez, had news of its own, as the browser-based virtual world announced its promotion of the Red Cross throughout the month of March. The teen-oriented realm incorporates a virtual blood bank where avatars can visit and donate virtual blood in order to receive a limited edition Red Cross t-shirt in-game. Within the digital donation destination, however, will be links to the Red Cross website where they can learn more and even find out how to make real donations.

Assassin’s Creed II Multiplayer Comes to iPhone – Previewed, briefly, in early February, Ubisoft has finally released, according to appadvice, Assassin’s Creed II Multiplayer for the iPhone. Essentially a game of deadly hide-and-go-seek, players sneak about trying to kill each other over a Wi-Fi connection. Sadly, this means the game is not 3G compatible (yet), but as a launch promotion, the game is currently free, so that is quickly forgiven. The promotion was only slated at 48 hours and the game was released early in the week and is still free as of Friday. So… yeah, download it for free now while you can, as it will cost $2.99 soon enough.

Lord of the Rings Online Links Up to Facebook – Looks like the MMO Lord of the Rings Online is following World of Warcraft’s footsteps out of Middle Earth and into Facebook. Through a basic Facebook application, LOTRO Player Feed, users will be able to sign in using their My LOTRO account information and track/publish accomplishments to their feeds. This includes level ups, rank ups, quest counts, deed counts, and so on. It even tracks when you log on and off (don’t worry, it waits a while after each as to avoid spam). Also, all of the automatic publishing for each in-game achievement can be toggled on or off.

Exponential Entertainment Raises Funding for Hollywood Games – Earlier this week, Exponential Entertainment raised a round of funding from angel investors totaling $700,000, VentureBeat reports. This amount is in addition to another $1 million in convertible debt, but according to to Chief Executive Dave Long, the company is already in talks to raise a total of $3.25 million. Already, the company has Hollywood trivia games on HollywoodPlayer.com, Facebook, and the iPhone.

Heatwave Experiments with Platinum Life - Heatwave Interactive launched and interesting beta test on Facebook Wednesday. The game is called Platinum Life Web Edition and incorporates the music life into a role-playing title where players move from a nobody to a platinum hip-hop star. However, according to Anthony Castoro, the end goal is to create a massively multiplayer online version of the game with the ideas and lessons earned through the social network – and later MySpace and Twitter as well – being applied to the final rendition.

Booyah Introduces Location-Based Virtual Goods – Location-based iPhone app MyTown, from Booyah, has seen a tremendous amount of check-ins and claims more registered users than its competitors. Now it’s partnering with the Swedish clothing chain H&M, and it will be offering users location-sensitive virtual goods. When a users is near an H&M store, they will not only be able to buy unique virtual goods in the MyTown Store, but if they check-in, they’ll even get discounts and promotions for the actual items on sale in the store.

[via VentureBeat]

Zynga filed 21 trademarks in December, which helped give the company the most out of any social gaming company, according to a review by the site Inside Trademarks (no relation to Inside Network). Here’s more.

Overall, only around 10% of social game developers seek trademarks for game titles and logos; they are typically the most successful developers, with the highest user engagement ratios.

Zynga filed a total of 26 trademarks over the course of the fourth quarter, 2009. The developer has more than all of its rivals combined, or 38% of all social gaming trademarks from large developers, according to Inside Trademarks. Playdom comes in second, at 14%. Combined with Zynga, the two comprise more than 50% of all social gaming trademarks.

It’s not clear if owning trademarks gives companies a clear edge in the market as game mechanics, graphics and other aspects of a game can easily be imitated. While the industry saw a number of intellectual property lawsuits last year, we haven’t heard of anything significant lately. Obtaining trademarks appears to be more of a defensive move at this point.

If you have a hit social game, in other words, you don’t want other developers ripping off the name and trying to trick your users into joining their apps. We’ve seen a number of people introduce FarmVille-themed applications, for example, that promise to let you do things like exchange FarmVille gifts — Zynga has managed to get those applications shut down, it appears. Although the latest ripoff is gaining fast, as we noted earlier today.

[Pie chart and graph via Inside Trademarks.]

Despite our title, the actual top app on this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook games is Mafia Wars Weekly Loot Collection, a parasite on Zynga’s Mafia Wars. As we mention over on Inside Facebook, this isn’t the first time a Zynga ripoff has been so successful, but we don’t expect it to last for long before getting shut down.

Following Loot Collection, there are several very solid up-and-coming games to look at. Here are all 20:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Mafia Wars Weekly Loot Collection	948,844	+881,596	+92.91
2.	Towner	374,480	+300,446	+80.23
3.	Roulette Madness	941,105	+266,594	+28.33
4.	Glamble	330,973	+235,535	+71.16
5.	Poker Madness	870,977	+233,957	+26.86
6.	MMA Pro Fighter	500,745	+233,384	+46.61
7.	Capitales del mundo!	620,756	+203,713	+32.82
8.	Jewel Puzzle 2	463,724	+155,232	+33.48
9.	Mahjongg Dimensions	551,115	+151,073	+27.41
10.	Okey Oyna	755,140	+139,714	+18.50
11.	Funflow	694,495	+132,088	+19.02
12.	Jumping Dog	501,583	+126,951	+25.31
13.	VIP Challenge	483,558	+126,618	+26.18
14.	Farkle 2	535,710	+119,575	+22.32
15.	Youtopia	669,005	+113,245	+16.93
16.	Puzzle Bobble	287,013	+97,631	+34.02
17.	Armies	545,526	+96,658	+17.72
18.	JibJab	305,395	+96,609	+31.63
19.	Yes Or No ?	225,329	+89,703	+39.81
20.	Ciudad en el Cielo	750,575	+84,762	+11.29

Towner, the number two game here, is a SimCity-style town builder. A couple weeks back we wrote about this new category of games on Facebook, but at the time there were only two that had achieved any measurable success, My City Life and My Town. They’ve since been joined by several more, including Towner, which is by an unlisted developer.

Numbers three and five, Roulette Madness and Poker Madness, are by the same developer and also appeared on this list last week. Sandwiched between them is Glamble, a Texas Hold’em game. All three of these are gambling games that give older successes like Texas HoldEm Poker in terms of their attractive design. All of them are also by independent developers.

MMA Pro Fighter has waited some time for its chance to break out; we first reviewed the Digital Chocolate game back in December. As we mentioned at the time, MMA Pro is a pretty basic Mafia Wars-style game, but the developer has added features to the basic mix, and appears to be continuing work to make the game better.

Jewel Puzzle 2 is basically Bejeweled, but that hasn’t kept the game from appearing on this list both weeks since its launch; the growth appears to be picking up. And finally, there’s Mahjongg Dimensions by Arkadium. The Flash developer’s partnership with Mob Science seems to be working out pretty well, as this 3D mahjongg game is growing steadily toward a million users.

A lot of city building titles have been popping up as of late, but a developer named Icebreak Games has just come out with a ranching title, Ranch Life.

We’ve done some looking around and Icebreak appears to be a part of China media conglomerate Tencent, which has been experimenting on Faceboook since last fall. And Ranch Life appears to be a Facebook version of Tencent’s QQ Ranch, a popular game in China.

The game is simple enough to learn as players walk through the basics with a flood of tutorial pop-up windows. Essentially, the idea is to buy and raise a multitude of different animals and sell whatever they produce for profit.

Each animal has four stages to go through: Baby, mature, production, and retirement (so-to-speak). For a nominal cost of the game’s in-game currency (there is not virtual currency, but you can buy more of the in-game version), players purchase the baby version of a rather wide variety of animals, and they will be immediately placed inside a fenced in area. After a few hours, they will mature and then be ready for production.

In order to produce, the player has to place them in a production area where they will create sellable, well, products after X amount of time. The value and type of items will vary from creature to creature, and while some are very obvious (chickens make eggs, cows make milk), others are either amusing (rabbits make… lots of rabbits) or aren’t clear (what does a monkey produce?).

After each production, the player has to wait a few hours, once again, before the process can be repeated, and eventually the animal becomes too old and has to be sold to market; for a decent price, of course.

As for what that income fetches, there isn’t a whole lot in the field of decoration here. Players are really only limited to upgrading their coop and stables. Though this does make the ranch look a bit better, they have no real control, and its purpose seems strictly functional – allowing the player to care for more animals at one time.

The care itself is the other money sink, as animals actually have to eat. As such, players purchase feed with up to 200 servings. Each animal will eat a set amount from the feeder every couple of hours, so it is prudent to check back and refill it at least daily.

Frankly, Ranch Life is exceedingly simple, but it is a nice little game for those that enjoy cute applications. Also, the number of animals, while limited to 15, are all very unique and include, in addition to the previously mentioned ones, pandas, swans, peacocks, and even kangaroos. Furthermore, each animal has sets of random, and entertaining commentary that they randomly spout out as they traipse across your ranch. According to the chicken, it was him that came before the egg.

As simple as the game is, there isn’t a whole lot to do early on. Once you have friends, you are able to go about and help clean up their ranch by swatting flies and cleaning up droppings (which can be sold… as fertilizer, hopefully), but after that, it’s pretty much a waiting game. That isn’t a bad thing, of course, as most social games are only designed to be played for five or so minutes at a time anyway, but it can make it a little difficult to get a new player hooked. Other than that, the game is a bit heavy on the spam side early on. Beyond the tutorial, its share this, post this, congratulations that, invite your friend, bookmark me, etc. Granted, a lot of games do this, but most of these are at least spread out to some degree. In Ranch Life, they are all done in the span of about 60 seconds.

Nevertheless, if you can get through the initial bombardment of feed postings, the game is still a cute and amusing game for those that like that sort of style. Furthermore, it goes to show, once again, that a game needn’t be complex to be entertaining, just have a strong central mechanic and a good sense of style. As it stands, the game is currently earning 25,000 monthly active users.

Yesterday we reported that a team of former MySpace execs, along with Austin Ventures, acquired MindJolt Games, the publisher of some 1,300 independently developed casual games. With its mostly new management, the company (which will keep the MindJolt name) appears to have a strategy of acquiring and partnering with others to build a new social gaming juggernaut.

Most of the attention around the deal seems to be on MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, who is heading the team. But MindJolt has been quietly growing for some months without attracting much attention to itself, so we went to take a look at exactly what the company does.

Besides maintaining a website that gets several million visitors a month, MindJolt is also one of Facebook’s biggest apps. It comes in at number 14 on AppData, our application traffic measurement service, when measured by monthly average users. Someone visiting the Facebook app for the first time might be forgiven for feeling like they just walked into a aging pack rat’s basement: What the heck is all this stuff, anyway?

The question is impossible to answer in any concise way, besides to say that many are Flash-based casual games that you might also see on many other sites around the web. The concept of asynchronous gaming is what drives many of the biggest social games. People can just pop on to Facebook for a few minutes or more per day, and do a couple simple things, like water their plants then check out their friends’ plots in FarmVille.

But while casual games typically haven’t gotten as big and profitable as socially-driven ones on social networks, MindJolt’s massive accumulation of mostly synchronous titles means it can bring in the traffic, too. The result is an intriguing platform for the MySpace team to build on; broadly speaking, they have experience with this sort of thing, as they leveraged MySpace out of other internet properties. For more, read this great article by Jay Weintraub (a speaker at our Inside Social Apps conference in April) about DeWolfe and MySpace’s rise.

Here are a few top-listed games within MindJolt’s Facebook app:

Bubble Spinner — Bubble shooting games never get old; in fact, MindJolt also lists Bouncing Balls, a straightforward ball-blaster, among its top apps. Bubble Spinner is a bit different. The bubble “gun” is at the top of the screen, while all the bubbles are in the center, on a wheel that rotates in response to each shot.

Crazy Cabbie — This is essentially a coordination game, in which you either dodge cars or hop over them in your own bright-red taxi. It’s extremely simple, with only a couple of sound effects and no real penalty for crashing. Incidentally, this game might be modeled off the taxi scene in Dubai: desert surroundings, high speeds, and a suspiciously expensive-looking taxi.

Tower Stack — There’s even less to say about this game than Crazy Cabbie. Blocks swing down from the left side of the screen; you click on the block when it appears to be in about the right position to make it fall atop the last block. The aim is to build a never-ending tower, but there’s no physics or balancing involved.

Warzone Tower Defense — An alternate on the popular tower defense theme, Warzone offers a variety of pre-set maps that enemy waves move across. Your part is to place automatically-firing towers in strategic locations, where they can snipe off passing fighters. Like other defense games, it offers players the chance to use some real-time strategy.

We’ll stop there although, of course, the above is but a small sampling of MindJolt’s offerings. The rest fall among six major categories (action, puzzle, strategy, shooter, sports and the catch-all “other”) and include pretty much any simple game concept you can think of. There is a type of game you probably won’t find on MindJolt: one that’s exclusive to the app, and not also hosted somewhere else.

But that’s also not the point. What MindJolt has done that’s unique, and that other Flash publishers like Kongregate have not yet accomplished, is find success on a social network.

At its core, MindJolt works best with a kitchen-sink strategy in which individual games don’t matter that much. While the Zyngas of the world seem to be focusing ever more resources on a few giant hits, MindJolt can publish all the games it wants. The company isn’t losing anything if a game doesn’t succeed; after all, someone else took the time to develop it.

What MindJolt really needs is better organization and navigation for its many games, and perhaps a way of spinning off successful games if or when it develops those. That’s not listed in the press release as one of the major goals, but it does seem to fit with the new MindJolt team’s stated goals of adding virtual goods and expanding across multiple platforms.

By the way, it’s not clear what’s going to happen with other Flash gaming platform companies currently active on MindJolt. For example, Mochi Media, the Flash monetization and distribution company that was recently bought by China media giant Shanda, appears to handle the ads in some of the games, probably either through game distribution deals with MindJolt, or through separate deals with game developers who happen to be in MindJolt. See Crazy Cabbie, which we mentioned earlier, for an example.

Who’s the next acquisition target for the DeWolfe / Austin Ventures team? If they’re looking for proven social networking successes, they’ve already poached one of the few top picks available. Meanwhile, big competitors like Playdom and Zynga have been busy buying companies themselves. Expect more small developers with Facebook experience to get bought soon.

Of all the popular genres seen in free-to-play games – be they social, casual, or otherwise – ninjas seem to be a highly reoccurring theme. Be they in Naruto RPGs, epic sagas, or battling armies, these Japanese assassins have been anything but stealthy. So why not make a free-to-play massively multiplayer online Facebook-connected social game about them? And thus we get the open beta rendition of Nindou International from 1001F Interactive.

Incorporating players from not only the United States, but other regions such as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the Facebook Connect-using site provides a competitive battling ninja war, of sorts, set within a Japanese, cel-shaded world. As a matter of fact, the art style is one of the most noticeable element to the game, as it is likely inspired by the PlayStation 2 title, Okami. For those unfamiliar with the game, the entire world looks similar to a Japanese semi-e ink painting (just with more color). This style, coupled with over the top and quirky animations make Nindou most interesting right off the bat.

Despite a warming aesthetic style, the core of the game is anything but. Using a click and hold technique, along with a mouse drag, players charge up “NP” and dash about a screen in order to reach and attack various objects and, ahem, inflict “great suffering” upon any enemy players who get in the way. Attacking with these objects is basically point and click (though eventually you do get ninjutsu), with the point being to complete the objective of various game modes.

Each mode is a hosted battle within the game’s world, with each having a unique objective. “Save the Princess” grants victory to the team the breaks the wall containing the princess first; “Spooky Hunters” marks one person on each team as a ghost while the other team hunts them; “Death Instructions” is a team deathmatch; “Thousand Kill” is a timed deathmatch where the team with the most kills wins; and “Last Man Standing” is a free-for-all with a self-explanatory goal.

For each match played, players earn experience and gold. The former obviously goes toward new levels which is primarily used as a gating mechanism when it comes to buying new weapons and equipment. Gold, on the other hand, actually buys it. Nonetheless, like most free-to-play MMOs, players have the choice of buying most items with either the in-game currency of Gold or the buyable virtual currency, Nin Coins. Essentially, using the latter is not required, but it allows for faster progression through the game.

As for the world itself, it is broken up into various villages, which serve as community chat rooms where people can walk around, view profiles, and join games. Beyond these, there are also a surprising amount of shops that you can visit. These include weapons, armor, ninjutsu (spells), dougu, seki, plastic surgery (changing your avatar), and more.

If you’re a bit confused by the terms of dougu and seki, that’s to be expected, as the game doesn’t do a very good job of really explaining what all of this is or how to use it, at least not yet. Essentially, these are temporary enhancements to your character and weapon enhancements. And though it sounds a bit clearer when put in layman’s terms, the only tutorial to find this information is a link to a help page that contains a tremendous amount of information that most people are going to forget in a minute or two.

The majority of players are going to learn through doing, which is the other key issue with Nindou. Any sort of matchmaking system feels, currently, non-existent, making a new player’s life a nightmare. At best, there are areas labeled level 10 and under, but are often barren, and thus when a player goes to a more populated area there isn’t any real limitation on who joins a battle. A level one can be put up against a level 21, and there is no way to tell what the levels the players in a battle will be until you join the waiting room.

This is a hindrance on two levels as not only does the match itself become unfair, but for anyone that has played an MMO of any type, they can tell you that internet anonymity leads to a lot of elitist players that often shun the “noob” that doesn’t know what they are doing. Such attitudes are no fault of the developer, but are still something that they need to be aware of and attempt to mitigate. New users need a place to learn and grow at their own pace to see if they like a game. Baptisms of fire aren’t what many players are looking for.

Nevertheless, the game is still in beta so such issues are subject to change. Hopefully there’ll be improvements, as the game actually does have a lot of depth when players become more advanced in using the buyable abilities. Also, the game can be connected to through Facebook itself, so getting started is extremely quick and easy, and it doesn’t hurt that you can post your in-game accomplishments to your feed as well.

Currently, through Facebook, the game is earning around 350,000 monthly active users. However, as a stand-alone site with portals from Yahoo and Yam as well, it is likely getting much more.