180 is a simple puzzle arcade iPhone game from Headcase Games that combines a few twists on the genre together with social features.

Essentially, this OpenFeint enabled title is a match-three type of puzzle game, not so much like Bejeweled as it is like classic arcade titles that require you to actually shoot multicolored orbs at a descending sea of other orbs. However, unlike titles like Bubble Town or Bubble Island on Facebook, this iPhone application only allows the user to shoot strait.

The game has three modes: Endless, Score Attack, and Drop Attack; each of which can be set to easy or hard difficulties. In each game mode, a large number “Coins” slowly move their way toward the bottom of the screen. If they reach it, you lose. In order to remove them, players use the touch screen to fire a coin of their own up one of six vertical planes. The idea is to make rows of three, either horizontally or vertically, of the same color, with each shot.

This is where the game starts to get a little more interesting. Beyond different difficulties increasing descending speed and color variety, each coin has two sides; each of which are a different color. As one can imagine, the basic game is extraordinarily easy and can be learned in about two minutes, but here’s the kicker: Any coin of the same color touching the three that were removed, and any touching those will also disappear. In order to swap colors and flip a coin – any coin, be it the one you shoot or the ones already on the field – a mere touch is all that is needed.

Obviously, this creates a very nice means to compound scores, and it is actually pretty fun to try and plan out moves using the mechanic. Additionally, 180 takes the Bejeweled “Combo” mechanic and will connect any remaining coins after those between them have been removed. Should they be the same color, they too will also go away. Frankly, the combination of these two score manipulators makes for a wonderful way to add some depth to such a simple concept. Granted, it’s not as amusing as all the power ups and random special effects, score generators, and multipliers found in the PopCap grand daddy, but it’s a nice addition, nonetheless.

As far as the specific game modes go, they honestly don’t feel all that different from each other in that only the scoring mechanism changes (save for Endless which is like Score Attack). Endless is fairly self-explanatory where you play until you fail; Score Attack is just trying to get the highest score you can in 90 seconds; and Drop Attack appears to base scoring on how many lines you add to the screen.

Stylistically, 180 is alright. It’s a bit simplistic and lacks the flair that some of its predecessors have had in the past. That said, it doesn’t look bad at all, but if you are a fan of Bejeweled (which the game does compare itself too), you will be a little disappointed. It is interesting, however, that 180 has a selection of four curious, anime-like avatars that cheer you on as you play. They dance, they cheer, and they get upset when you do poorly. It’s actually a very cool idea, but they’re so small that they don’t really get noticed much; not that you want them to when people are focusing on the puzzle at hand.

Since 180 is a score based puzzle game, it fits perfectly on the OpenFeint platform’s leaderboard systems. Curiously, the new, free version of 180 is not enabled. Regardless, in addition to the scoreboards, there is a surprisingly large number of achievements to unlock and share as well. In fact, in light of that, Headcase Games is hosting a promotional contest in which the first player to clear all the achievements will win their choice of a game console of iPad. However, this guy started on the 18th, so if you’re reading this now, you’d better get cracking.

Overall, 180 is a pretty decent puzzle game for the iPhone. But for $1.99 it’s unlikely to be chosen over a free version of something like Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook or Bejeweled 2 for a dollar more. Nevertheless, if you are sick of the exact same match-three games, then 180 does at least feel different and fun enough to be worth a try.

There’s been plenty of talk lately about the Android mobile operating system’s latest iteration, Froyo (Android 2.2). In stark contrast to the iPhone, Android-based phones will have full Flash functionality once updated to Froyo. That would appear to have major implications for mobile gaming — provided the Flash implementation is well done.

Instead of waiting to see, web gaming portal Kongregate decided to go ahead and release some Flash games for Android. Ten days after putting out a call to some of the developers who work on its platform, Kongregate has already released 120 games.

“The actual Flash performance is much better than I expected,” says Kongregate CEO Jim Greer. “I thought it would be mediocre, but it’s actually very good.”

Greer’s take is much the same as other early Froyo reviewers, all of whom agree that the powerful hardware in most Android devices helps the case. With performance out of the way, the remaining question is how easily existing Flash game developers will be able to switch over to mobile.

One might think that Kongregate and its developers, having taken only 10 days to port their games to mobile versions, didn’t put a lot of effort into it — and that assessment would be about right, according to Greer. “What I would say is to an average Flash developer is that you don’t necessarily think that you’d use the same version as on the web, but that’s just the same fallacy that people committed with the iPad, where they thought they had to have an app in the store even though there’s a great web browser.”

Most of the work is in simply choosing games that work well with touch-screen controls. Many of the 120 games are physics-based, with the main interaction from users being taps on the screen or a drag of the fingertip. Most games that use mouse controls on the desktop can be easily modified for mobile.

You can check out the games yourself on Kongregate’s mobile site, while mobile developers will now have access to a separate category and uploader for the site. Going forward, Kongregate plans to release an arcade app to add in social features, as well as the features from the main site, like voting and leaderboards.

Of course, if surfers go directly to Kongregate’s web site, that means they won’t have any reason to visit the Android Market for the same games — or to pay up front for any games at all. The addition of Flash could immediately set Android on a different course than the iPhone. But it seems likely that Google already knows that, and doesn’t mind at all.

John Hammond’s idea of a Jurassic Park may have ended in catastrophic failure, but your’s doesn’t have to. It’s been a long time coming but finally someone released a Facebook game about dinosaurs (well, at least one that we’ve found). The app is called Jurassic Farm, from 2Bsocial, and while it may have an interesting premise, its concept is all too familiar.

Despite what the name suggests, Jurassic Farm is not actually a farming game. It’s one of those animal husbandry, pet-caring titles, only with dinosaurs.

Obviously, this makes the core of the game pretty simple: Grow, care, release, profit. As players purchase dinosaur eggs, the creatures will grow relatively rapidly (though higher levels dinos, of course, take significantly more time) and players must ensure they are well fed and have plenty of water.

These two elements are easy enough. With each visit, players fill up a trough of water – which is odd considering there is a river in your first farm – and feed the titanic lizards according to their diet. Based on the species, they will be either an herbivore or carnivore, with particular types of purchasable food filling them up more quickly. As long as the food is respectively plants or meat, the animal will eat it, but food they “dislike” will fill them up less it seems.

In addition to hunger, players must also ensure the health of their prehistoric pets with both medicine and protection. Medicine is fairly self-explanatory, but as dinosaurs get greener, the get sicker, and are, in turn, less valuable. Additionally, periodic predators will appear and attempt to steal your eggs and/or baby dinosaurs, so players must either fend them off manually, or use virtual currency (Gems, which can be bought and, at least for the first day, be earned by coming back 24 hours later) to build fences that keep them out for a limited time.

As a matter of fact, all the decorations appear to be limited in time. As players level up, they unlock the ability to buy new types of farms, such as a forest for herbivores or an island for carnivores, and each environment has various decorum that can be placed there for X amount of time (i.e. a week). The longer the user chooses to buy it for, the more it costs.

It’s a curious idea, to say the least, but the player has no evident control over where the decorations go. They just sort of appear in a default position. Granted, they do look sort of nice, but it really defeats any sort of purpose behind the personalized virtual space concept. Additionally, most of the décor doesn’t seem to have a point beyond aesthetics, making the time limit all the more odd. In fact, the only ones that make sense are the fences, as they passively protect your farm from the noted predators.

Unfortunately, fences only protect from non-player predators. You see, Jurassic Farm actually has a bit of a player versus player element to it. Users can actually go “hunting” in other random players’ (or friends’) farms. So long as the dinosaur is not classified as “old,” which is obvious anyway since they get shaggy and decrepit looking, users can hunt them and turn them into meat to feed their own animals.

It’s a most interesting concept, but once you’ve hunted, that’s it, the dinosaur is toast, and there isn’t a lot the victim can do, by default, other than try and get revenge. This is, however, balanced to some degree by only allowing three hunts, on what appears to be a daily basis. Additionally, users can purchase various power ups for a paltry amount of gems (two) that can insure you for any lost dinosaurs in a hunt, can hide your identity from your victims, and even warn you when you are being poached.

Other issues currently hindering the game play experience are a few irritating annoyances. Frankly, Jurassic Farm doesn’t do a very good job at updating itself and providing real player feedback. For example, the game actually asks you to refresh your farm to see growth of your dinosaurs or hatched eggs. It doesn’t happen all the time, but often enough to be annoying.

Overall, Jurassic Farm has an interesting premise and a few new features, but the execution feels a bit incomplete. It misses the mark in regards to virtual space decoration, and while the limited time purchases work for defensive elements, they feel pointless for everything else. Such issues are made up for, somewhat, by the curious hunting mechanic, but with the only way to mitigate its devastating results (especially if you happen to become victim to someone you don’t even know) being through virtual currency, it’s a feature that might become more obnoxious than anything else.

Nevertheless, the app is brand new and already has over 3,000 monthly active users. It certainly needs some work, but it’s an idea with room to grow.

XPD Media, a social game developer based in Beijing, has sold to Zynga for an undisclosed amount. China is home to many dynamic smaller social game developers, but Zynga has not had an official presence in the country to date. Rivals, like Playfish, have.

With the acquisition, XPD cofounders will take on strategic regional roles with Zynga, and its 40 person team will make up the core of a new Beijing studio. Robin Chan, who previously worked at Verizon (and is an angel investor in Twitter), will be Zynga’s new General Manager of Asia Business Operations. Andy Tian, who handled mobile partnerships for Google China, will run the studio. Zynga is now hiring locally, as it has begun advertising for recently.
Zynga has offices around the US, in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Baltimore. It has also opened an engineering office in Bangalore, India.

XPD has been running games on Facebook and on Chinese social networks like RenRen, and it will continue doing both under Zynga. It has already developed a relatively popular simulation game called Medical Mayhem on Facebook. The game grew last fall, and had more than a million monthly active users and more than 200,000 daily active users as recently as a month ago. But note that XPD shut it down recently, apparently as part of the acquisition.

The company has also gained hundreds of thousands of daily active users on Chinese social networks, and it will continue to serve the local market. The Chinese government’ restricts foreign developers from owning majority stakes in gaming companies in the country, and it requires all companies to have an expensive license to operate. The social networks themselves typically handle the licenses, and developers publish their games on their platforms through them.

The sale of XPD also marks an exit for Silicon Valley investment firm True Ventures and New York-based venture and private equity firm Pilot Group.

The Mayans may think the world is going to end in 2012, but a fairly new Facebook role-playing game from Dark Roast Media may have something different to say about that. The app is Exorcists vs. Demons, and if the latter has their way, the Earth may be doomed sooner than expected through the fire and brimstone that is the Rockapocalypse.

Yes, Rockapocalypse. Evidentially, the demonic legions of the underworld are planning an invasion of epic proportions using rock and heavy metal as their primary vice. Set in a rock and roll style most similar to that seen in Guitar Hero III, this mafia-style RPG give players the choice to pick whether to fight for a rather buxom young exorcist named Alice to prevent the end of the world, or join the legions of hellspawn in creating a guitar riff so powerful that it will change the course of humanity.

Unfortunately, the side you choose to play doesn’t really affect the game play at all. The only significant difference is that the storyline is different and you can only view the story of the faction you allied with. That said, however, the plot is certainly presented in an interesting manner, using a beautiful comic book method with new pages unlocking as you play and level up. Frankly, for those users that do enjoy an interesting story, it feels like a much better reward for leveling than mere, superfluous level numbers and some images representing loot.

As far as the leveling goes, most of it is pretty typical of your standard Facebook RPG. Players consume energy to complete quests, earning them experience, gold, and random items, and as they repeat the quest and “master” it, they earn extra bonus items or stats to improve their character. Also standard, as players unlock more advanced quests, various items become required, such as non-player minions that make up your army and items that grant you bonuses to attack, defense, or luck.

What is rather interesting about the army members (which can also include NPCs bought with only the virtual currency Awesome Points and invited Facebook friends), is that players can set up automatic equipping of all of them. For each soldier in your exorcist or demon army, two items, such as scripture citing or even shotguns, can be equipped, and considering the army can grow to about 1,000, this mechanic becomes… rather useful. Since there are only three stats (the same as the player’s), this automation can be set to balanced between attack and defense, aggressive, or defensive. Of course, for more experienced users, manual control is still possible.

Most of the items you acquire can be bought in Exorcists vs. Demons, but there is still a good number of quality equipment that can be earned through leveling and questing. While boss battles (which will probably be similar to those in Castle Age) have not been added yet, some other items that provide passive bonuses appear to be earnable by completing entire sections of the story. For example, for completing part one, users can earn “weighted dice” which decreases the time in which income is earned when one purchases land; a feature found in virtually every Facebook RPG.

Beyond epic loot, players are also given various collections of random items that could be discovered when completing a quest. Upon completing one collection, users will gain one of three random, powerful rewards. Unfortunately, what they do is not revealed until they are earned. Another interesting addition to items, is that more common ones, such as Holy Water, can be transmuted into even more powerful versions. Of course, there is a cost of in-game gold, more than one base item to work with, and some virtual currency.

As was noted prior, Awesome Points (AP) is Exorcists’ virtual currency, and they actually make some creative use for it. Beyond simple things like slightly better or limited edition items, the developer seeps subtle, inexpensive uses – like the transmutation – into other parts of the game. One example includes your NPC army: As the units available to you become more powerful, they begin to cost a bit of gold to upkeep. However, if you purchase it with AP, then there is no upkeep cost. Other uses include viewing the other faction’s comics, changing your profile name, or even switching sides.

Frankly, however, it feels pointless to switch sides if you can buy the other comic, because other than that story, the game is even stated by the creators to be the same basic game. Granted, the quests will be different, but in a text-based RPG, most users are just clicking the “Perform” button over and over anyway. Furthermore, the only other difference between sides is that when you battle other players, you can only fight the other faction. Nonetheless, it really feels like nothing more than slapping the tag “demon” onto a name and saying “that’s your enemy, you‘re supposed to hate them.” It would be nice to have some greater form of interaction or cause and effect between the two sides.

Overall, Exorcists vs. Demons tries to do a few new things with its mechanics and virtual currency usage, and succeeds to some degree. Unfortunately, the whole “versus” concept really falls short of what it could be, and other than the comic book (even if it is a great reward mechanism), there just is no point to pick one side over the other beyond, maybe, aesthetics. Regardless, the game does have a wonderful visual style and is, at the very least, a well above average RPG. Moreover, as more features – such as boss fights – become released, it will only get better.

Currently, Exorcists vs. Demons is earning around 19,000 monthly active users.

Just when we thought the appearance of city-building titles on Facebook were beginning to slow down, Digital Chocolate released a new application by the name of Millionaire City. However, while this, in and of itself, is nothing unusual, the release actually marks the second city-building game for the company in less than three months. The first had been the isometric NanoTowns, back in March.

At first glance, one might think Digital Chocolate is remaking the same game, but actually the two titles are very different. Yes, both involve the creation of your own bustling and aesthetically appealing metropolis, but the method to that madness is completely different.

Millionaire City is actually centered around the concept of buying, selling, and renting land, businesses, houses, hotels, and so on. It’s actually more business and real estate oriented as opposed to its predecessor where primary income stemmed from producing goods from various businesses to complete quests for citizens that were seemingly too lazy to walk down the street and buy their own darn stapler and coffee.

Essentially, players must purchase plots of land before they can purchase any buildings to construct. Expectantly, the larger the building, the larger the cost, and the more empty land required. Once requirements are met, players must then construct free roads to connect the new structure to the rest of the city and over X amount of time (which is longer for larger buildings, but can be constructed instantly for a price), the new investment will build.

This is where business elements begin to come into play. For each home, you will sign contracts for its tenants that vary in length based on your level and range from three minutes to a day or more. Each contract costs $X to make, but pays out a good chunk of profit so long as you remember to log back on and collect. Of course, all of this is relatively basic.

What makes things more interesting is the concept of what Millionaire City dubs “influence.” This is a blue box that expands beyond both commerce buildings and decorations. Any home that is even partially within these influenced sections will cost a percentage more rent. Furthermore, all commerce buildings will periodically produce money from whatever it sells, with extra income stemming from whatever homes are within range. Though it is not entirely clear, it also appears that homes that have overlapping influences (i.e. from having multiple decorations nearby as well) will also pay out extra cash that is 2% more for each piece of décor nearby.

In addition to decorum and commerce buildings, users may also construct buildings called “Wonders.” Unfortunately, there are only three to build at the moment, but having one grants bonuses to every single home in your city, regardless of its distance from the Wonder. However, these take days, if not weeks, to fully build, and the only way to finish faster is to post to your Facebook feed, and ask your friends to help out.

As one might surmise, other social features include visiting your friends’ cities and helping them out by “upgrading” a few of their structures. Sadly, this is nothing more than clicking on a few of them and making them sparkle for a bit, but it does earn a little extra experience and cash. Moreover, the social elements are further enhanced, slightly, by a standard leaderboard system of all Facebook friends that are playing, with its ranking determined by the overall fiscal value of your town.

As far as other miscellaneous features go, Millionaire City also incorporates a fairly basic quest system to help guide the user on what they should do next. It’s a nice extra, and completing them earns some nice chunks of in-game money as well as the virtual currency Gold, but most are along the lines of “build two decorations,” which unlocks “build X more decorations,” and so on. These don’t really act as guides so much as “hey, I accidentally did something; let’s cash in.”

Visually, this game looks pretty good too, but it’s perspective is almost completely top down, and is a style that hasn’t been seen regularly in quite a long time. Even for old school gamers, it feels a bit dated and even nostalgic. It’s not really a bad thing, just a surprising choice, and with a more realistic style, it is a stark change from the more cartoonish and stylized NanoTowns.

Regardless, Millionaire City does bring a little more depth to the prospect of city planning in the fact that to make your virtual space the most efficient, you actually do have to plan. Granted, it’s no SimCity, but it is nice to build things for more than the sake of building them. It’s an excellent point in case towards the slowly evolving complexity and sophistication of social games. If there was any one disappointment, it’s that the virtual currency is used for nothing as of this time (or at least nothing we’ve observed yet – we assume it is either coming soon or will be used for the instant build feature in higher level structures). It’s equally surprising that Digital Chocolate’s NanoVerse has yet to be involved, but that may be something planned for a future update as well.

The folks over at Playdom have launched a brand new title of the tribal, tree-hugging, city-building variety: The serene new Facebook application Treetopia.

At first glance, Treetopia is a city builder, but its premise and a number of mechanics make this particular title much more interesting than many of the watered down SimCity clones. In short, the objective is to save Treetopia and guide your own personal tribe of nature-conscious people to becoming a flourishing society beneath the canopy of a great tree.

The game goes beyond city-building, incorporating characters in quests to create a deeper gaming experience.

Of course, any semblance of storyline is a bit vague and tends to get lost and/or overshadowed by other features of the game. Players start out with a mere two villagers, the homes in which they live, and two fire pits. Here’s how it works: Each villager will move about your virtual space doing work, of some sort, that is based on the buildings you have present. The fire pits, for example, produce an in-game currency called “beads,” and as tribe members tend to them, small amounts of beads can be collected by the player.

However, there is much more to Treetopia than just this. Each home increases your overall tribe population, and the more people you have, the more money your tribe can generate. As an added bonus, as the player increases their population, the great tree within their virtual space grows larger and more fantastic — vaguely reminiscent of the tree in the movie Avatar. This aspect of the game isn’t necessary to have, but it is a nice stylistic choice that really does add to that whole “one with nature” feel the game has to it.

In addition to villagers earning beads, users will also need to construct different buildings that produce greater quantities of beads as well as stone and wood. Over X amount of time, each structure will accumulate a maximum amount of resources it can produce that the player can then collect in one lump sum. Curiously, it appears this income is independent to the small bits of resources your working villagers produce.

As level and income increase, the player will then be able to construct warrior, mage, healer, and shielder “quest support” buildings. Now, these do not produce resources per say, but offensive and defensive villagers used within Treetopia’s more unique questing mechanic.

While building structures and collecting revenue earns experience, the primary means of leveling comes from doing quests. Once level three is acquired, your villagers can venture out into the world and complete various text based quests that reveal a bit more about the world of Treetopia and supposedly some semblance of story. Unfortunately, since the quests are repeated so many times, many text screens get skipped over, and any story is lost.

Nevertheless, each quest has various steps within it and random events. For example, to undertake journey into the desert, the user might need to have X amount of beads, wood, and stone. However, random events such as storms may occur, forcing you to “take shelter” and use extra resources to survive. Should you have insufficient amounts, the quest will fail. Furthermore, if you do not have some of the noted warrior buildings to produce warrior villagers, you can also fail (due to sickness, beasts, etc.), but this is actually where some cool social features come into play.

By default, the game gives you a computer played neighbor, but as your friends play and build out their own villages, their warriors, mages, and healers can come to your aid, automatically, during quests in order to help you succeed. Now, with the computer controlled village, this isn’t really necessary early on, but as one levels up and gets more resource intensive quests, it is probably a safe assumption that more quest support classes may be needed. Combine that with the fact that physical real estate within each player’s virtual space is a bit limited, then friends become very important.

Other than helping with quests, friends can also visit each others’ villages themselves to help out there as well. You see, your villager’s productivity is not only limited by population but how happy they are. Unlike other games of this ilk, decorations play no role in this, but rather it is the presence of plant-like monsters that periodically sprout up. When they do, the non-player characters will remain hiding in their houses and either the player or a friend must click to remove them. Of course, this leads to minor monetary rewards, but interestingly enough will get your friend’s village back up to speed and even allow you to collect the extra resources it produces (not the big chunks that structures produce after X amount of time though).

In addition to game play, the overall atmosphere and visual style of Treetopia is fantastic as well. From the almost mystical sounding tribal music to a saturated, cel-shaded style, to even the ability to moderately customize your male and female villagers, it’s a game that successfully nails the style and mood it is seeking.

Frankly, Treetopia is a wonderful game, and while it incorporates features that have been done before it, it does so in a much more interesting fashion. Furthermore, with its appealing aesthetics, well-done social integration, and just overall quality it makes for a very refreshing change in an every expanding sea of remakes and imitators. That said, there is probably some other similar game somewhere around the internet, but for what it’s worth, after about 9000 farming games, Treetopia feels very unique and comes highly recommended.

EA may have Playfish to help develop social versions its branded sports games, but ESPN is planning to take its own slice of the professional sports market on Facebook and other social networks. The broadcaster announced today that it has signed a two-year deal with Playdom to build games, starting with two planned for the near future.

The question is what sort of games ESPN wants to make. Its first move is to also announce that it has modified its two year old Sport Passport service, with which sports fans chronicle their fandom, to allow Foursquare-style check-ins at games and other events.

Details on future games are hazy, though. One will allow players to build their own college sports franchise, according to MediaBistro. That may or may not be the same game as ESPNUville, which SportsBusiness Journal’s Eric Fisher reports (via Gamasutra) to be similar to FarmVille — although that name, happily, doesn’t appear to be set just yet.

Whatever the name or details, it’s looking increasingly like this will be the year that social gaming and sports finally come together — at least, if the large companies have their way.

We’ve already seen successful apps and games based on college basketball and soccer show up on Facebook, and EA has licenses with FIFA, the NFL and other organizations that it will be bringing into play. And ESPN itself is no slouch; it has kept up with the web throughout the years, and has a Facebook Page with half a million fans.

This week’s list of Facebook’s fastest-growing games by daily active users is mostly filled with newer, growing games that are still picking up significant numbers of both monthly active users and DAUs. It’s headed up by Nightclub City, the nightclub management game that has risen quickly through the ranks since its release almost exactly a month ago.

Here’s the full list of 20 from AppData:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Nightclub City	491,476	+149,637	+43.77
2.	MindJolt Games	2,155,916	+120,043	+5.90
3.	Zoo Paradise	1,088,126	+97,340	+9.82
4.	Family Feud	1,241,987	+68,824	+5.87
5.	Bejeweled Blitz	2,601,031	+64,306	+2.54
6.	Games	400,581	+54,590	+15.78
7.	Bola	477,926	+37,376	+8.48
8.	Garden Life	322,181	+34,621	+12.04
9.	Jewel Puzzle	75,522	+32,904	+77.21
10.	Belote	35,744	+32,269	+928.60
11.	Lovely Farm	31,812	+29,795	+1,477.19
12.	瘋狂診 所	27,745	+27,616	+21,407.75
13.	Jungle Life	92,747	+26,879	+40.81
14.	Happy Pets	1,348,313	+25,213	+1.91
15.	Funflow	65,150	+25,115	+62.73
16.	Play Game	25,632	+24,002	+1,472.52
17.	Country Story	804,999	+23,518	+3.01
18.	My Tribe	192,006	+23,128	+13.70
19.	Happy Slots!	64,063	+23,074	+56.29
20.	Funfari	67,271	+22,222	+49.33

MindJolt Games is at number two, and we see here an interesting trend when it’s combined with number six, Games. Both of these apps are game portals, containing hundreds of flash games, with social features overlaid. MindJolt is the leader of the category, and has had a significant playerbase for quite some time.

Both MindJolt and Games are shrinking in terms of MAU, but their DAU is going up. This may be the result of efforts to add more social features, interaction and virality to the basic game portal concept. Take a look at their DAU as a percentage of MAU charts:

Of course, older apps that have stopped growing can employ a number of tricks to temporarily bring new users in or old ones back, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll keep their higher DAU percentages.

Below MindJolt, CrowdStar’s Zoo Paradise appears to have lost nearly all its growth momentum, although it’s difficult to tell, as Facebook’s updates to MAU have been frozen for days. The animal-collecting game’s DAU still shows some slight gains. Jungle Life, a similar game by Metrogames that is exactly ten places down at number 13, shows much more potential, although it’s still a tenth the size of Paradise.

Finally there’s Bola, at number seven. We recently reviewed this Playdom-owned Three Melons title and found it to be a pretty good soccer game, but its DAU, which rose at the beginning of the week we’re measuring for but actually dipped toward the end, suggests that it, too, may be running out of steam.

Social game developer Playdom has announced the acquisition of the more mainstream games developer, Acclaim today for an undisclosed amount of money.

The name “Acclaim” is most recognizable as a developer and publisher of various arcade and console games until it went under in 2004. It was resurrected by current CEO Howard Marks in 2006, and moved more into massively multiplayer online role-playing games (such as Chronicles of Spellborn), and the more recently popular Facebook, Guitar Hero’esque title, RockFREE which currently garners around 370,000 monthly active users.

As for the details of the deal itself, again, nothing specific has been disclosed thus far. However, it is noted that Marks will continue to run the Acclaim studio for Playdom, but will also act as in a “senior strategic role,” helping the new parent company in its business development endeavors. Additionally, Chief Technology Officer for Acclaim, Neil Malhotra, will now also act as the studio’s senior technical officer.

Playdom alone earns upwards of 37.8 million monthly active users, with Social City leading the pack at 12.3 million. Added to this already impressive number will be another 15 million registered online users for the various Acclaim free-to-play titles, and whatever new numbers they earn with an upcoming, unnamed Facebook title slated to launch sometime this summer.

The acquisition of Acclaim marks another major purchase for Playdom in the last two months, following Argentinean developer Three Melons. Before even this, however, the social developer had sunk $5 million into another Argentina-based company, MetroGames, as well as purchased Green Patch and Trippert Labs in November of 2009.