BitRhymes has a new game out that’s a cross between your typical animal husbandry sort of app and zoo keeping (aka tycoon games), called Wild Paradise.

Players create a range of habitats ranging from forested landscapes to artic tundras, populating them with a rather sizable variety of animals and decorations. In order to earn a digital living, players must care for their animals until they are fully grown, then release them into the wild. However, unlike other husbandry titles of its kind, the larger variety and quantity of animals is what determines your primary income.

This is the whole tycoon aspect of the game. Evidentially, players will passively earn periodic income from visitors that come to visit. Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of visible visitors walking about (and by that, we mean none), and they are merely represented by a number on the screen. Nonetheless, they still pay the same coin, so we forgive them for hiding.

Perhaps the reasoning is to give a greater focus on the aesthetic, decorative element of the game that the player controls. With the vast number of animals and decorations, there is actually a tremendous amount of options for virtually every decorative palette. Furthermore, Wild Paradise doesn’t force the user to have X amount of neighbors to expand the virtual space, nor does it charge virtual currency for expansion. The reasoning behind it is because right from the start you can build up to five different habitats, and each one has the maximum, and extremely generous, amount of space.

This scale, coupled with the relatively small amount of space most animals (even elephants) and decorum take up, is perfect for users that just want to create something. Moreover, they begin play with a rather sizable amount of starting money too, giving them the ability to buy just about anything. Of course, what you can buy is limited by level, and if there was any one complaint, it is that some of the items just don’t have the same artistic feel as the others. As an example, the animals all have this cute, saturated look to them, while most of the trees feel like they’re a photograph cut out in Photoshop and posterized. Animals have simple shading and few colors, while much of the decorations are multi-hued and shaded. The items seem like they’re not from the same team of artists.

Unfortunately, while all the aesthetic design for Wild Paradise is still pretty good, the concept is something that most users have done before. This isn’t helped much by many of the supporting features that have alsobeen done before. Many of the title’s nuances have come from other games. To name a few, users get a daily match three type of game – based on Bejeweled - in order to earn extra money based on your score; something that we see in CrowdStar’s Zoo Paradise. Your Facebook friends will wander onto your habitats as rangers and you can “say hi” (a post to their wall from the game); something we saw in Digital Chocolate’s Safari Kingdom. And you can even play with your animals to keep them happy and earn extra coin and experience; something we saw in Gameforge’s Funfari. Of course, in the last example, the animals had to want to play first and doing so made them more hungry. Here, you can play whenever (only once for reward) and it doesn’t affect when you can feed them again.

Curiously, discussions with the designers of Wild Paradise did actually reveal that the game has, in fact, been in development since early January of this year. That in mind, most of these similar features appear to be somewhat coincidental, which is not entirely surprising in regards to some of these extra concepts (especially the Bejeweled-like one).

Of course, there is one truly unique feature that opens up around level five. It’s nothing tremendously in-depth, but still cool in its own right, but it was pointed out to us that players can actually collect building structures from friends and train their animals over the course of a few days. Evidently, each training session will result in new and fun looking animations unique to each species of animal that was described to us as being analogous to tricks one might see from “Shamu or sea lions” at the San Diego zoo.

On the social side of things, the most basic feature is inviting more friends to become your “Rangers.” Doing so allows you to adopt more animals for your various habitats, but thus far we have yet to reach that threshold. However, even though we haven’t reached that point, it could prove to be an obnoxious hindrance for users that can’t get friends to play with them.

If you don’t have that issue, then you can also work with your friends to breed your fully grown animals. It’s actually a very cool way to work together, as you cannot breed on your own. Doing so allows you to put your animals that can breed on your Facebook feed as a request and should your friends accept you can get yourself some free baby critters.

Overall, Wild Paradise doesn’t really offer anything new and interesting. Its social features are decent, and it does a lot for the decorative virtual space concept (even if all the art styles don’t quite synch up), but it just doesn’t feel especially fresh. Though the core of the game is strong, it’s still the same husbandry/tycoon game you’ve played before. As it stands, the game already has around 84,000 monthly active users, but only time will tell whether or not the new improvements outweigh the old standards.

Jungle Extreme, from a developer called Targa, combines the well-established farming mechanic with jungle survival — everything from hunting to crop thievery.

First, the basics. The farming standards are the usual: plow land, plant crop, and harvest crop. Additionally, the game has trees and animals that never die, and you “harvest” them for some coin too. That said, the animals are a bit more feral than a tame farm critter – not to mention that a rhinoceros hardly produces milk – so getting income from them is a mere click and you don’t actually get an item to sell.

What makes Jungle Extreme a bit more interesting is some of the side features that it comes with. Beyond the core farming element, players are trying to survive in the jungle. To that end, anything and everything you might be able to use becomes your ally. Periodically, random bugs or objects appear around your camp and the player catches them to earn some extra money. Sometimes it’s a little uninteresting, merely requiring a click, and other times it’s a task that requires you to come back and check on it. As an example, if you find ants, you can set up a trap to catch them, but must come back to collect later that day or risk losing them.

Frankly, the whole survival concept does show promise, but at the moment, it feels weak and is really only there as an extra. However, there are few other interesting features that do enhance that whole surviving idea. The most basic of these is that when night rolls around, players need to use a campfire to light up their jungle for an hour. Doing so earns a good chuck of experience, but at the cost of wood.

Interestingly enough, in order to get more wood, players can cut down trees they plant, giving them another nice purpose beyond the usual slow, yet infinite accumulation of income via farming. Of course, you can just buy the wood too if you want.

The multi-purpose idea is thrown into the crops element as well.

You see, there are actually two types of plants that can be grown: Crops, or tropical flowers. The flowers sell for the most money, but for every action you perform you consume health. In order to regain it, you can either wait long periods of time for it to regenerate passively, or eat food. In order to cook it, you first buy a heating source of some sort (i.e. a campfire) and grow the crops.

These crops become the ingredients to your various dishes, that you can then eat or sell. Additionally, if you do not have any ingredients, you can make what’s called “Party Food” and ask your friends to help cook it. This is simply a Facebook feed post, and costs only your friends clicking on the link.

It is also worth noting, that Jungle Extreme has a rather curious means of gating its content. Be they decorations, crops, flowers, or animals, many require the user to allow different levels of “commitment,” as it were, in order for them to purchase them. This is beyond just level gating, but many actually require you to become a fan, bookmark the game, or register for emails. It’s a clever way to make users feel they are getting something a bit more exclusive for not really doing anything, yet at the same time making the app more popular on paper — and something that many other developers have experimented with.

Another social element to this app is the prospect of stealing. When in the jungle, survival is everything, and it is possible to steal crops and whatnot from your neighbors. Obviously this allows users to earn 100% profit on stolen items, but it can lead to a few upset friends. Of course, if you have some virtual currency to spend, you can use it to purchase various items that either protect against theft or improves the amount of items you can steal in the first place.

Overall, Jungle Extreme is not a bad game, but it does feel a bit average at its core. It has a lot of interesting ideas, but the central concept has just been done to death. Frankly, it would have been infinitely more interesting to focus solely on some of the survival elements such as the trapping of bugs and animals, chopping wood, and cooking food. Obviously, these features have been enough to interest players as the game has been fairly steady around 400,000 monthly active users as of late, but there just isn’t enough to make it really take off, that we can see. With even FarmVille slowly losing users, it is time for new core concepts to come about.

Much has been made of Facebook’s success in bringing millions of new users into the gaming industry. But how many of those new players are willing to go deeper than, say, FarmVille? Is it possible for forward-minded developers on Facebook to literally train a new generation of hardcore gamers?

A panel at last week’s Social Gaming Summit covered this issue, featuring Andrew Busey of Challenge Games, Susan Wu of Ohai, Andrew Sheppard from Watercooler and Jim Greer of Kongregate. All of them have attempted to create more in-depth social gaming experiences, with varying levels of success.

The answer: Yes, social gamers can become hardcore gamers, and they may even want to — even if they don’t know it. The problem is that the hardcore gaming market is naturally limited to a smaller number of people, those with time and a natural gaming inclination. There are already a few million of these people on Facebook, but individual developers can find it difficult to attract enough.

But the training toward hardcore gaming is coming not from indie developers with a big idea, but from the more shallow social games that started the whole trend. “These games are training gamers in hardcore activities like harvesting over and over,” said Wu. “How do you combine art with the kind of behavior your average social gamer is performing today? To me that’s the future of all gaming.”

Ohai’s first game is City of Eternals, which during the panel Wu said was drawing in the same largely female group that Facebook tapped. The problem is changing the way they look at the activity. “I think there’s a cognitive barrier. They don’t see themselves as gamers, they just think they’re socializing with friends,” she said.

But most City of Eternals players do end up migrating from Facebook to the game’s web site, which often turns five minute sessions into 30 minutes, as well as increasing the likelihood of interactions with strangers and group activities, something all the panelists pointed to.

At the end of the day, Facebook probably won’t be the destination site for more intensive gaming, because of the social network’s intended experience. “When you go to Facebook, you log in and there are 60 friend requests, then you want to look at pictures of your niece — it’s kind of schizophrenic,” said Sheppard.

But once social gamers have been lured over to more in-depth experiences, they logically also tend to spend more money, too. Greer said that Kongregate has games with mechanics that are actively hostile to the players, which means fewer people get involved — but that the average revenue per user (ARPU) was huge, with people routinely spending over $100. Busey’s game Warstorm also monetizes several times better than the average social game, he said.

One challenge for the future will be making the graphical experience better. “The problem is the coming religious war between Apple and Adobe,” said Busey, which will hinder developers from effectively using Flash. Unlike the video market, HTML5 is no replacement for web gaming.

When Unity3D came up, most of the panelists expressed admiration for the development tool, which can put a high-end graphical experience on the browser. None seemed convinced that Unity would gain traction, though. “You’ll see social elements moving into console games faster than the opposite, is my guess,” said Greer.

Between the draw of social networking and the addictive nature of most mainstream massively multiplayer online games, it is logical to think that a Facebook-based MMO could hold the potential to monetizing the genre to new heights. However, it seems that the right formula has yet to reveal itself. While most companies tend to lean towards the more serious route, such as Ohai’s City of Eternals, an interesting app called Fantasy Online is using a very… different path.

The open beta MMO is basically your typical fantasy RPG, but rather than work with the new evolution of technology, Fantasy Online goes with a more satirical, retro feel. The game is done in entirely 16-bit visuals in an almost completely top down point of view.

Players start out as a very simplistic, and very naked, hero. Obviously, this means your initial customization of your character doesn’t exactly take too long: Hair, eyes, and skin are all that you get to mess with, though at 16 bits, that’s hardly an issue. In fact, it’s more of a joke, as even the play button is along the lines of “it looks just like me! Can we play already?”

From here, MMO players ought to recognize the now-standard quest setup. Non-player characters with exclamation points above their heads have quests, and ones with yellow question marks are those you turn quests in to (when completed). These are fairly typical of most new player quests, tasking users with the basics of kill 10 of these, find five of that, and simple messenger quests (go talk to Bob in the hills).

As players complete quests and kill enemies, they earn experience, stats, and hopefully, some clothes. As they level, new equipment can be found, bought, and equipped, and statistics distributed to where you see fit.

This is actually where a little bit of customization comes into play. Eventually, players will be able to purchase new abilities for use. At the start, using a hotkey bar similar to World of Warcraft (for the record, a lot of the UI elements are similar, 16-bit, versions of WoW), players start with a special physical attack and a heal. Not exactly exciting, but at level five, new ones can be bought from a vendor. However, beyond a level requirement, each ability requires X amount of one of the four stats – stamina, strength, agility, and intellect.

Easily, this becomes the part of Fantasy Online that holds the most potential. You see, most MMOs make you pick a class such as mage, rogue, or warrior. Here, however, you are building your own class, similar to how it was done in Ultima Online. In Ultima, players could level 700 points worth of skills, with 100 being the maximum for each one. A similar rule, but to a lesser degree, was in effect for stats such as intelligence, strength, and dexterity. With this freedom, players could mix and match warrior and mage skills, healing and archery, taming and poisons, whatever they wanted. Basically, that same feature is here. It’s to a lesser degree of course, but that level of customization, for an RPG player, is greater than any avatar or virtual space.

This 16-bit title is intended to be a satire on fantasy MMOs. Even the name seems intended to be generic, and the in game dialogue is littered with amusing character dialogue and MMO jargon such as “noob” or “leet.” Nevertheless, while this is funny to some people, those that do not play such games frequently will likely not get the reference. Moreover, it doesn’t make up for the dull game play.

Basically, combat is simple point and click. There is no sound, no music, and no animations, just numbers appearing on the screen. When you finish a fight, you automatically regenerate health and energy (mana), which is used to cast abilities and spells. Granted, as you get to higher levels, and actually need to use abilities, this becomes more interesting, but early on, there is just no hook. Furthermore, even when more abilities becomes a requirement, there just isn’t all that much style to be had, and nothing really keeping the player’s interest. It’s just going around whacking stuff because some NPC said to do it.

The fact that Fantasy Online is an MMO does save it a little bit though. For those that like to spend their time chatting and talking to other people, the game comes with that too. As a matter of fact, the chat logs are very full most of the time, and it is refreshing to see people talk about more than how good their gear is in Warcraft.

Overall, Fantasy Online has some good parts, but they are held together weakly. The core of any MMO should be whatever the primary means of leveling is, and in this case, it is combat — and frankly, it is boring in this game. Sure, there are those that are going to argue, “but it gets good later on,” but that is the key problem. If the player is bored in the first 5-10 minutes, there won’t be a later on.

Croom is a table-top game popular across parts of Asia and the rest of the world, and now it’s come to Facebook. The app is called Carrom Challenge, and it should be interesting to fans of the physical game — although it could improve on how it uses social features.

Essentially, carrom is a game most similar to pool. Of course, the big difference is that this game of “billiards” is about the size of a table and one uses their finger, shooting from only one side of the board, instead of a big stick to flick a large disk called a striker (basically a cue ball) . Presumably originating in the regions of India and Pakistan – and still exceedingly popular there – the board game requires players to use the striker to sink all nine of their disks and a special one called the red queen. The trick is that after sinking the queen, the player must sink one of their own discs to “cover” it.

Granted, this is all a summation of the game, and certainly doesn’t cover all aspects of it (especially all the different variations from around the world), but for the purposes of Carrom Challenge, it will more than suffice. Developed by two individuals, the title most closely represents the Pakistani and India versions. In the app, the player is able to choose from three modes, with each tailoring to a different form of player style.

The first is Challenge mode which is pretty much your basic, more traditional, version of carrom. Players are given a random “challenger” that appears to be a non-player character to face off against. Taking turns, shooting from the opposite sides of the board, each player attempts to win with the basic carrom rules. However, in order to win, one must not only sink their nine discs, but also, the red queen before their last.

The play itself is not bad at all. In order to shoot, all users need do is click on their side of the board to place the striker and drag in the opposite direction to determine power – think pinball. The game will give the user a ghosted visual of where the shot will go and after that, it’s release and pray. Truthfully, however, it all works pretty well. The physics are pretty decent, and the momentum feels about the strength it would be for a real human finger. Sometimes it does feel a bit easy to sink the discs though. Most of the time, they pretty much go in if they even get close, unless you have a tremendous amount of momentum, which is something that can’t be said about pool. Likely though, this is just more the nature of the actual game itself, and not the app.

The other two modes are simple variations of the main challenge mode. These consist of the Time Lapse and Century Game. The former is a more urgent and faster-paced version of Challenge, with the obvious difference being a time limit (exceeding which equals a lose). The latter, on the other hand, is the polar opposite, with the objective being to earn 100 points. Frankly, the mode earns its name as each disk of your color only earns 5 points, the other player’s color is worth 3, and every time you miss, you loose 2.

In addition to the three modes, players are also able to earn and unlock new boards to play on as well as extra characters to play against. For the most part, this appears to be a mere aesthetic and difficulty enhancement respectively. Regardless, neither make for a bad addition.

Overall, Carrom Challenge is not a bad game at all, and for those that may have played the American version as a kid, it might prove a very nostalgic and fun experience. That said, it is rather disappointing on the social front. By disappointing, we mean more or less non-existent. As it stands, there is no visible way to invite your friends, and unexpectantly, no way to play against other players in either an asynchronous or synchronous fashion. It’s truly surprising to find a Facebook app that turns out to not make use of Facebook or the social graph. Hopefully, a “yet” can be added to that last sentence, and likely that is the case. Considering it is an app developed by just two people, and many social games are far from “done” when they release, it is hopefully a set of mechanics still on the “to do” list.

It’s rare to see so many new games on our weekly list of fastest Facebook gainers by monthly active users, which usually favors titles that have had a few weeks to get established.

Big City Life, Nightclub City, Monster World, and Jungle Life are all pretty fresh, while a few other games that have been around longer are new to this list. Check them out the AppData list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Treasure Isle	27,574,650	+1,965,836	+7.68
2.	Big City Life	1,100,090	+732,601	+199.35
3.	Family Feud	4,288,196	+635,510	+17.40
4.	Hotel City	13,765,019	+563,634	+4.27
5.	Bola	2,259,042	+539,633	+31.38
6.	Mall World	2,520,797	+521,739	+26.10
7.	Kingdoms of Camelot	2,922,232	+470,984	+19.21
8.	Profile Box	576,883	+466,604	+423.11
9.	Nightclub City	574,874	+404,859	+238.13
10.	Name Analyzer	472,011	+295,527	+167.45
11.	Monster World	251,457	+203,770	+427.31
12.	Jungle Life	337,089	+198,359	+142.98
13.	Tiki Resort	6,429,311	+182,719	+2.93
14.	Lettr’IQ	252,521	+179,162	+244.23
15.	My Casino	545,658	+175,901	+47.57
16.	Zoo Paradise	4,873,554	+135,068	+2.85
17.	My Vineyard	572,750	+128,519	+28.93
18.	Collect Roses	482,264	+114,080	+30.98
19.	NanoStar Siege	321,734	+100,400	+45.36
20.	MonstrosCity	286,285	+94,863	+49.56

As you can see, Treasure Isle is still the reigning champion, as it has been for a month now. But it looks like the game is about finished growing; that’s also the case with Hotel City, which has dropped down to number four.

Following Isle is Big City Life. In a sense, this Playdom game is the spiritual successor to Social City, the city-building game that provided impressive growth for the company earlier this year, just as the SimCity franchise eventually lead to the Sims. But just like most Facebook games, Big City focuses on tasks that can be quickly completed than an open-ended experience; we reviewed it here.

We covered Family Feud’s success on Friday, and we’re guessing from here that it will continue and probably cross the five million MAU mark in a couple weeks. Below it is Bola, by the Playdom investee Three Melons. We just reviewed the game and found it less than perfect, but it’s definitely becoming one of the largest soccer games on Facebook to date.

Skipping down, the club management game Nightclub City really caught on over the week, adding a solid four hundred thousand players — not bad, for an apparently independent developer.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Treasure Isle	27,574,650	+1,965,836	+7.68
2.	Big City Life	1,100,090	+732,601	+199.35
3.	Family Feud	4,288,196	+635,510	+17.40
4.	Hotel City	13,765,019	+563,634	+4.27
5.	Bola	2,259,042	+539,633	+31.38
6.	Mall World	2,520,797	+521,739	+26.10
7.	Kingdoms of Camelot	2,922,232	+470,984	+19.21
8.	Profile Box	576,883	+466,604	+423.11
9.	Nightclub City	574,874	+404,859	+238.13
10.	Name Analyzer	472,011	+295,527	+167.45
11.	Monster World	251,457	+203,770	+427.31
12.	Jungle Life	337,089	+198,359	+142.98
13.	Tiki Resort	6,429,311	+182,719	+2.93
14.	Lettr’IQ	252,521	+179,162	+244.23
15.	My Casino	545,658	+175,901	+47.57
16.	Zoo Paradise	4,873,554	+135,068	+2.85
17.	My Vineyard	572,750	+128,519	+28.93
18.	Collect Roses	482,264	+114,080	+30.98
19.	NanoStar Siege	321,734	+100,400	+45.36
20.	MonstrosCity	286,285	+94,863	+49.56

Booyah Upgrades MyTown – Location-based iPhone app, MyTown, from Booyah has been growing significantly since its initial release. However, this week brought yet another significant upgrade to the real-world Monopoly-like title. Now, with the 3.1 update, the game changes yet again with the addition of in-game collectibles and rewards for checking in, purchasing new locations, or upgrading old ones. Additionally, the new version has 10 new levels, the ability to research top trending properties, accuracy bonuses for checking-in closer to the target local, and even the ability to view Facebook profile pictures and timestamps on others’ check-ins.

On another note, the social/mobile app has seen a 100% gain in users in less than three months, sitting at roughly 2 million players. Almost double that of its chief competitor, Foursquare.

Kwedit Repayment Rate Growing – Launched back in February, the quasi-credit company, Kwedit was a curious idea, at best. Essentially, the firm provided a means to purchase virtual goods by making a “promise” and paying back the money later by going to a 7-11 or mailing cash. The only negative, was if you didn’t pay, you got kicked out of their system. The company announced some results, the past week. One out of three users are paying back promises with a little less than 20% of initial promises repaid and 72% of second promises. Furthermore, 22% are repaid within 24 hours and 66% in the first week. Most importantly, publishers using Kwedit are seeing a 5% increase in revenue; a number the company expects to soon reach 10%

Capcom Integrates Social Features with OpenFeint – Aurora Feint’s OpenFeint mobile social platform got one of mainstream gaming’s larger developers signed up: Capcom. Using the platform to support features such as achievements and leaderboards, the console developer has launched both Dark Void Zero and Hatchlings for the iPhone.

Apple VIP Program for iPhone Apps - Apple is planning a new advertising program called ViP (Verification of iTunes Purchase) to give its iAds a more competitive advantage, as TechCrunch spotted. Developers that use iPhone ads to drive their downloads and purchases will have direct access to iTunes purchasing data for their app, measuring conversion rate and ad impressions to downloads. The tracking is done via a “proprietary direct link from the ad to the App Store,” and once a user “downloads your app, they won’t ever see your ad again.”

IBM to Create City Builder Game for City Planning – This past week, IBM revealed a new type of virtual world/game by the name of CityOne. Unlike the social counterparts we have seen in the past few months, this game will be a free world meant to guide players through quests and teach them about city planning issues such as energy and water. However, the catch is the game’s various missions will be seated in actual real-world scenarios, and is noted to be a means to help train future city planners. The game is slated to debut this fall.

App Store Spam - As if getting discovered in the Apple App Store weren’t hard enough, a recent post by well-known developer Marco Arment shows a number of spam applications appearing for various searches. The example given was a search for a game called “Angry Birds” and six out of ten results were scams and ripoffs promoting “cheats” or “guides” for the searched title. Furthermore, most are also guilty of ripping off both names and icon trademarks.

The Origin of Farm Games – Though FarmVille may be the most popular, China Social Games has done a detailed study of how the birthplace emerged. The earliest versions of farming games go as far back as 17 years with the title SimFarm in 1993 from Maxis and then again with Victor Interactive Software’s title, Havest Moon, in 1996. However, in regards to social farming it was popularized initially in both China and the U.S. at approximately the same time in 2008 with Five Minutes’ Happy Farm and Take(5)Social’s (playSocial’s) myFarm.

Farm Town also started around the same time. While Take(5)Social claims that the developer, Slashkey, copied its app, our understanding is that this is not the case. Instead, Farm Town combined aspects from a number of other formative social games, like (Lil) Green Patch, on its own.

One Million iPads Sold – Many wonder how the iPad will do in the long run; especially when compared to the iPhone predecessor. Well, according to Apple, April 30th was the milestone for the 1 millionth iPad sold, just 28 days after its initial launch in the United States. To add some perspective to that, the iPhone took 74 days to reach that same number.

Hive Media Launches New Game & Social Platform – Earlier in the week, Hive Media launched a new social game called My Hollywood Studio, as a means to display its new social platform. The game itself is a quaint title where players move from being nothing to big time Hollywood names and is based on the PC title, The Movies. As for the platform, caters specifically to larger brands with intellectual property. Furthermore, through Hive’s “Collaborative Content Delivery Platform” — which is a fancy name for a templating system — developers can easily upload video, graphics, texts, and so on to create varying genres of games. Thus far, Hive Media’s first partnership will be Michael Bay’s “The Institute.”

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IPhone developer On5 – the folks behind Charadium – have created an app that takes pop icons and turns them into a game with its latest app, Tiptop: The Last March.

The title is basically a mobile version of the classic game Lemmings. In fact, it is most recently reminiscent of the app Age of Tribes. Basically, players are granted an army of little avatars representative of people like Susan Boyle and Dr. House, as well others such as Will Smith in his Hancock role. Unfortunately, despite what their personas may suggest (or because of what their personas suggest, as the case may be), these little guys walk mindlessly about a terrain reflecting their origin, bouncing off of whatever gets in their way.

Like Lemmings, this also means that they will walk right to their digital deaths, landing on spikes, in poisonous pools, or running into some creative monsters. In order to keep them alive, the player must draw platforms to guide them using their fingers on the touch interface. You can also block paths and create bridges and ramps. Players can even use this method to even rid themselves of equally lemming-like monsters that appear in the game.

In order to balance the game, and add a bit of challenge, players have a set amount of ink that is consumed whenever they draw anything. This does regenerate, but when one has to draw quickly, it becomes very smart to plan ahead. This becomes even more important in later levels. Early ones have many spots where the pop lemmings will walk back and forth safely, but such areas become more and more scarce as the game goes on. Furthermore, lines disappear after a short time, so if you are not careful, they can fade away right beneath your icon’s feet, dropping them into a nice pit of spikes.

Winning each level is a bit frustrating at first, though, as users have to ensure that X amount of icons make it to the end. The controls are a bit awkward initially where the player uses one finger to draw and two to scroll the screen (though eventually you do get used to it). What’s worse is that the game doesn’t always recognize drawn lines very well.

Basically, if you don’t draw a ramp at the proper incline, the characters will merely bounce off of it. If you leave a slight gap — even if it is smaller than the characters — between your line and the ground, they will walk through it. And most obnoxious of all, the game has little jump platforms that send characters skyward and will often cause them to clip through a line you’ve drawn to keep them off a hazard. Even though the line is there, they can get killed. It’s not the end of the game, but it is rather frustrating at times.

Nevertheless, the game is full of personality, and is fun once you get past initial frustrations. It’s quite a kick to see what can kill you too: This includes swine flu pigs with runny noses, the dreaded X from Simon Cowell’s various Got Talent shows, and even those cholesterol filled cheeseburgers we eat too much of. Additionally, some of the levels are equally amusing, especially the black and white levels with a “color crisis” where colors have gone out of business (basically a play on the economy).

Really, the only other weak element to Tiptop is it apparently has a story mode. It’s a bit short and, frankly, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Nevertheless, the game still has a good amount of replay value that stems from strong level design and a scoring system based on time to completion, characters that finish, etc. Moreover, the game is enabled through Ngmoco’s Plus+ platform, thus giving the users a ton of achievements to unlock and show off to other Plus+ friends.

Of course, with Plus+ this means a myriad of leaderboards in which players can compete against each other as well. Unfortunately, these social features are still very basic and when you look at the way that some apps make use of the platforms — i.e. Ngmoco’s GodFinger on the iPad, that actually brings your Facebook or Plus+ friends that play into your universe — it is a bit underwhelming.

In the end, Tiptop: The Last March is a pretty decent game. With its strong level design, Plus+ integration, and simple mechanics, it’s a title with a good deal of longevity. Furthermore, the level of style and personality this app has is fantastic and it really is amusing to see some of the satirical takes On5 has on popular and social culture. Is it the best game we’ve checked out on the iPhone.? No, but for $0.99 it certainly isn’t a bad deal.

Social sports games have never really taken off on Facebook. We’ve never been entirely sure why, but some theories include the prospect that most people that might be interested are not your average Facebook user, or at least social game player. So we got interested when the soccer application Bola, from Playdom-owned Argentinean developer Three Melons, reached near 2 million monthly active users recently.

Perhaps it is because soccer is the most widely watched sport in the world — and because the World Cup is happening this summer — but the success may also be due in part that the game doesn’t quite feel like a typical sports game. At its face value, it feels more like a SimCity type of game. Here’s our review.

The opening screen is an empty set of land with some paltry buildings the player must build up. After choosing their team colors, the first task for the player is to build up their stadium. Already the game shows promise as each item you buy for your stadium increases its luxury, and in turn, its ticket price when you play games in it. Unfortunately, this section is far from completed as only the stadium seating and field can be upgraded, and anything beyond that, such as paint, billboards, or random decorations are still “coming soon.”

Obviously, upgrading the stadium is a big deal when it comes to income, but the game also allows you to supplement that with weekly sponsorships from some rather sizable names. The two that stand out are National Geographic and Fox Networks. Furthermore, each sponsor ship offers a bonus achievement, that if you accomplish, you will earn a bonus of 10,000 “Bollars” (Bola’s in-game currency). At the moment, it is finishing a game without any goals scored against you.

This is where Bola moves into a different 5yp3 of a game. Players actually play and control a soccer team in each game. There are three modes: Practice, Tournament, and Social. The former is nothing special, but really just lets the player get used to the controls that consist of the arrow keys, and two buttons for shoot and pass. Tournament mode, on the other hand, allows users with enough experience (fans) and coin to enter and earn various trophies, prize money, and more fans.

The real meat of the game comes with the Social Matches. From here, players can challenge both friends (who have seven days to accept of automatically forfeit) and other random Bola players their level. The game will play out with the user controlling the athlete closest to the ball. This is, of course, all asynchronous, with the AI controlling the other person’s team. At first, it was pretty fun, but it gets old very quickly.

Frankly, the computer is a lot better than the player, with not much in the way of difficulty curves. Also, the controls are too simple for something like this. You can’t control who you pass to, the ball often goes where you don’t want it too, and since control switches to the closest player to the ball, you often find yourself running in random directions before you realized control switched. Furthermore, each match is extremely short; maybe a minute or so, thus leaving most matches at 0 to 0.

Oh, there is also one other thing to… Loading…. mention about the Social Match mode…. Loading 75%…. and that’s that the game constantly, like clockwork, freezes during loading. Not only are the loading screens long from time to time, but well over half that time they freeze part way through the load and the user has to refresh the whole game and try again. Moreover, they have to wait for the initial game to load before trying to reload the Social Match.

The game is in beta, so bugs like this are understandable. The problem is that much of the game is impossible to play as a result.

As a matter of fact, because of this issue, we could not experience the entirety of Bola, as to unlock new mechanics, you have to level up a good amount and playing matches is the only way to earn experience. This is a shame too as there are a number of features that unlock as the player levels up, including a headquarters to modify your players, a gym to train and upgrade them, and even some more “coming soon” areas including a lab and a city. What these will do is yet to be determined, but likely the latter may have something to do with friends cheering for your team, considering when you mouse over it, there is a status bar for “Passion.”

Assuming the game works right and the player is able to level up to the required level to unlock some of these elements, they really do add an extra level to social play against friends. Even though the computer will control their teams, their teams seem to inherit the training given to them. It’s almost like playing a half version of them. It’s not an original concept, and we’ve seen it in other apps, but it is still cool.

Overall, Bola looks great and has tremendous potential. It does an excellent job at masking the most sporty elements, that likely frighten away many Facebook users, with it’s SimCity’esque façade at the start. However, the mini soccer game itself is a bit clunky and really needs some overhauling. Also, many users might also desire an automatic result without them having to play it out. At the moment, it tailors only to real gamers with its twitch-based style of play, and most Facebook users are going to prefer the slower-paced building up of their team and soccer club. That said, all the potential in the world means nothing if players can’t actually play. We’ll be tracking the game as it improves.