Like day and night, Big City Life and Nightclub City have moved as a pair up our rankings of fastest-growing Facebook games still under a million monthly active users this week, finally landing at the top.

Big City Life, by Playdom, is the “day” half of the equation, in which players get a job, make friends and enjoy their daily life. The other half of the equation comes in with Nightclub City, which is, as the name makes so clear, all about “da club”. It’s not Paris Hilton, though, as there’s also a management aspect to the independently developed game.

The two games also probably come a lot closer to the life of the average Facebook user than farming games ever did. Here’s the top 20 list from AppData:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Big City Life	711,997	+471,481	+196.03
2.	Nightclub City	361,981	+273,370	+308.51
3.	Jungle Life	264,271	+214,062	+426.34
4.	Lettr’IQ	184,347	+173,182	+1,551.12
5.	My Vineyard	496,918	+107,549	+27.62
6.	My Casino	445,595	+102,914	+30.03
7.	Profile Box	199,355	+93,520	+88.36
8.	NanoStar Siege	269,157	+90,349	+50.53
9.	Treasure Quest	105,114	+83,383	+383.71
10.	MonstrosCity	231,923	+76,244	+48.98
11.	( Fupa Games ) – Arcade Blitz	290,250	+74,072	+34.26
12.	Football Mania	266,425	+73,662	+38.21
13.	Fashion Battle – Sorority City Diva Life	323,008	+68,714	+27.02
14.	¡Teclas Machucadas!	500,208	+68,550	+15.88
15.	( High Seas Pirates )	323,764	+67,971	+26.57
16.	Ranch Town	111,735	+66,164	+145.19
17.	( Full Moon Vampire ) – Twilight Blood Wars	333,414	+64,235	+23.86
18.	Dumbville	233,017	+52,655	+29.19
19.	Tubely Games	140,197	+52,176	+59.28
20.	Funfari	318,878	+52,074	+19.52

Jungle Life comes in at number three, but it’s not the urban jungle; this is yet another game about raising baby animals. Playdom has its fingers here, too, since it invested in developer MetroGames. It should also be noted that both Jungle Life and the title after it, the word game Lettr’IQ, accomplished almost all of their growth over the past week.

My Vineyard must be aimed at all those Stanford grads who haven’t managed to blow all their life savings on wineries in Napa yet. It’s a Metaplace game, and appears to be growing faster than their first title, Island Life, did when it was released.

Skipping down a bit we find several more in-depth indie developers doing well. NanoStar Siege is a strategy game by Digital Chocolate; and while Treasure Quest sounds like a competitor to Zynga’s latest game, it’s actually an innovative take on the game portal concept by Big Fish Games. And the top half of the list is rounded off by MonstrosCity, which, happily, involves raising monsters instead of cute pets. It’s solid success on Facebook for its developer, BitMinion.

Viral growth doesn’t appear to be happening much for social games following Facebook’s many changes to its communication channels for third parties. That leaves advertising and cross-promotion. But if you’re a small developer without a big budget or many games, how do you bring in new players?

The ad-hoc answer come up with by a small consortium of social gaming companies is called Applifier. Started by Nabeel Hyatt of Conduit Labs and Jussi Laakkonen of Everyplay, Applifier is an invite-only network of games that will promote each other in an effort to increase traffic for all. The other founding participants include Metaplace, BitMinion, Free Lunch Design, Wonderhill and Three Rings.

“It’s more difficult to grow organically or acquire traffic than it was 6 months ago,” Hyatt told us today. “There are a lot more large players that are spending tens of millions of dollars to acquire traffic. But we feel like there’s a lot of innovation happening that’s not just around the big players.”

The aim of Applifier, then, is to pass around frequent players — people who Hyatt says play multiple games anyway. Each company that’s part of Applifier will agree to actively promote other games within their own products. You can already see it at work in games in the network like Music Pets, where a small banner bar sits above the game screen.

There are already a lot of formal and informal traffic exchanges between developers on Facebook. Applifier looks a bit different for a few reasons: the potential large number of participants, the relative openness (we never hear about most of the deals), and the absence of any money changing hands.

Hyatt says that Applifier was designed to be free to distinguish itself from other traffic exchanges, which he says typically exist to benefit the creator. “The spirit of this is kind of a rebel alliance where we’re banding together to make the whole stronger.” Of the membership requirements, he says, “We’re doing business with the people that we want to do business with.”

The Applifier ad bar isn’t just a parallel of the ones you see on games from larger companies like Zynga and Playfish. It’s a sort of subversion of Facebook’s advertising sidebar, where smaller developers are struggling to outbid huge developers like Zynga and Playdom.

It also points to the larger problem on Facebook. The options that developers have for finding users beyond ads, viral features and cross-promotion are currently limited to the company’s new app and games dashboards on its home page, and direct app-to-user email. Facebook is trying to improve the dashboards, but so far developers have not reported meaningful traffic from them.

Right now, the Applifier network has about 5 million monthly active users, which Hyatt sees going to 10 million within a couple weeks. We’ll keep an eye out to see whether it seems to be significantly helping its member games get traffic.

Berlin-based wooga (short for “world of gaming”) made its first appearance on Facebook last year with a simple yet well-polished puzzle game called Brain Buddies that was reminiscent of Playfish’s Who Has the Biggest Brain? In an ongoing trend, the German social developer moved to polishing another older, arcade concept with Bubble Island, an app recently added to our Top 25 list this month. Now, the company is changing up yet another genre as it takes on farming with its latest app, Monster World.

While it does become tiring, from time to time, to see a still steady flow of the same game reskinned, it is interesting to watch how much a developer will deviate from that old game mechanic. Sometimes it is truly the same game with new graphics, and other times it feels completely different. Monster World falls somewhere in the middle.

Players choose a monster avatar from a set of three families – big furry monsters, slimy, blobby alien sets of guys, or horned devil things – and from there, narrow it down to a specific, pre-set of avatar style. Yes, “pre-set.” Sadly, there is no customization. Regardless, once your monstrous avatar is ready, you are granted a small plot of land in which to make your living.

For the record, farming is not exactly the first job description that comes to mind for a monster. Nonetheless, the player is given plots of plowed land and some monstrous plants in which to harvest and grow. Obviously, this is the first difference as all the plants are truly bizarre, yet visually interesting in their own right. Some fall into the “freaky” category with giant morning star spiked plants, and cacti with mouths, while others are more cutsie with candy cane trees and heart flowers.

This is where wooga does something a bit different. At the start of the game, they do not make you buy seeds, they actually give many of them to you throughout the tutorial section. Here’s the catch though: Each plant produces two of itself when fully grown and harvested. Now, the player is given a choice to either replant, keep, or sell the harvest.

Interestingly enough, the selling aspect is not as simplistic as other farming games — where you just sell crops and are done with it. Though Monster World is not terribly more complicated, there is actually an economy-like feature when it comes to buying and selling. Whenever the player visits the market where plants are sold, each plant will come with an icon of either a green up arrow, red down arrow, or equal sign representing its value when compared to standard market price.

From day to day, the prices of these crops will fluctuate, so it isn’t always wise to simply sell your plants right as they are harvested. Buy low and sell high: That’s the basic concept being used.

Of course, if you’re not patient and want immediate return, there is a little robot by the name of Robert that will come by, daily, to buy from you. Unfortunately, he only buys a specific plant with a specific amount requested, so if you don’t have that, it does you little good. Nevertheless, if you do meet Robert’s requirements, he will buy them for well over market price, making it prudent to grow a wide variety of plants.

Caring for the plants is a bit different too. Actually, you don’t care for the plants at all. You make your friends do it. The best part is, they don’t even have to play, and you tell them they’re watering your gardens anyway. As expected, they come in as a random avatar – should they not play – and you have to feed them to keep them happy and working. It’s pretty simple, really, as all the user needs to do is feed them food that lasts 24 hours and come back the next day.

Presumably, you will eventually be able to have more than one helper as your land expands and you earn more plots for plants. We assume this as when we check up on our helper’s happiness, it says it serves 18 out of 14 plots. This suggests that as you level, you will be able to plow significantly more land. However, this privilege is few and far between, as it has been multiple levels since we were last able to plant more crops. As for the happiness itself, feeding is a good idea, but there are various decorations that increase it as well, though it doesn’t feel like it is all that important. A few paths and regular feedings and our slave… err, friend works just fine.

In regards to the decorations themselves, everything is typical of a virtual space. All the décor is centered around a monster-like style. You have things made of scrap, stuff from space, and any number of interesting variations of everyday garden items. That said, the art style is probably going to be pretty hit or miss. This doesn’t refer to the quality of the art, as it is actually quite good, but the whole monster premise. Frankly, it feels like something more appealing to a younger audience.

Regardless of style Monster World does attempt to do something a little bit different with a tired genre. Truth be told, it is always more exciting to see a game that does something completely new, but there are still plenty of ways to evolve a game that has been done before. Currently, however, the game is seeing an extremely rapid increase in monthly active users and is sitting at around 90,000.

MySpace is following Facebook’s lead into social gaming with a key new hire. The once dominant network has lured away LOLapps product manager Manu Rekhi, naming him the new general manager of MySpace Games and its attendant developer platform.

The company isn’t saying much yet about the hire, but it’s reasonable to expect that Rekhi will play a key role. Following a string of managerial shakeups (which continues today; SVP of marketing Angela Courtin just left), MySpace recently reset its priorities, making games a major focus — perhaps even as much as music used to be — with the release of the developer platform this year.

LOLapps, also, switched its focus to social games after first becoming successful with user-generated quizzes, so Rekhi has some applicable experience. He was also a product manager for Google working on OpenSocial and a few other Google products, including Orkut.

But MySpace has proven an insurmountable challenge to a number of other gifted execs, continuing to hemorrhage users to Facebook on other services over the past couple years despite their efforts. The News Corp. owned company also just announced its most recent loss: about $150 million in the first quarter of the year.

The bad news may prove beneficial for Rekhi’s job, since Rupert Murdoch seems to be readying for change at the social network. Speaking about the loss, Murdoch said that his company had made “big mistakes” over the past two or three years, implying that it was time for a turnaround.

And of course, MySpace has already made significant changes in the past couple months. The last big update, back in March, marked MySpace’s turn to a more game-centric design.

Ultimately, MySpace has many of the ingredients required to expand its significance to social game developers. It still has tens of millions of users, who are entertainment-focused, and who have a long history of forming loose, public friendships on the site. Its developer platform has already grown to be the second-largest social gaming platform behind Facebook, and it is still growing, as you can see from our look at its top 25 games from the past month. We’ll be covering its efforts to move forward.

Digital River, a billion-dollar publicly traded e-commerce company, has bought the Austrian virtual goods company Fatfoogoo for $10 million, it announced yesterday.

Fatfoogoo started its current business of adding white-label monetization platforms to other games about four years ago, and has picked up several clients since, including the avatar maker mEgo and Gogogic, which has a small game on Facebook. Digital River was also listed as a partner before the acquisition.

It’s possible that the company was having trouble growing on its own; when we talked to them last September there were 22 employees, but VentureBeat reports that it now has 16.

For now, Digital River will keep Fatfoogoo based in Austria. For a bit more on the company’s view, you can check out a January guest post here on Inside Social Games by Dan Taylor of Fatfoogoo.

It’s a sequel over ten years in the making. In 1998, Blizzard Entertainment launched the blockbuster real-time strategy game, StarCraft, and come July 27, the long wait for its successor will be over. However, before its debut, Blizzard has a few more surprises including today’s announcement that the upcoming StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, and by extension, Battle.net will be getting Facebook integration.

For those that have been in caves for the greater part of two decades — or at least not doing any serious gaming –Battle.net is Blizzard’s free online service that allows users of their various online games to connect and play. Originally a means to merely host games for the original Diablo, the network has undergone significant transformations in the social form by showing the world its coming overhaul, “always-connected experience,” and cross-game community mechanics back in February. Heck, such social elements were even hinted at way back in September of last year.

But all these previews and hints were tailored toward an internal network between Blizzard players. With the coming Facebook integration, players of StarCraft II will be able to post directly to their news feeds, letting all their friends know when they’re online and when they just “pwnd some noobs” with the Zerg. Of course, considering the World of Warcraft Armory Facebook application that lets you do similar, if not the same thing now, this is extension isn’t that surprising.

The integration will also allow StarCraft II players to easily add their Facebook friends to their Battle.net friends lists as well. But to one up even that, according to Paul Sams, Chief Operating Officer at Blizzard, this new integration will extend to future Blizzard games as well. Facebook updates for Cataclysm anyone?

It’s impossible to deny that social gaming and social features are spreading throughout the mainstream games industry like wildfire. Already we have seen them spread throughout Microsoft’s Xbox Live, countless Electronic Arts titles (and not just the Playfish ones), Ubisoft, Sony Online Entertainment, and now Activision-Blizzard (though, for the record, they have also been dabbling for some time). Those 400 million-plus Facebook users are starting to add up.

When we last heard from Sony Online Entertainment, the company was diving headfirst into Facebook with a fairly complex, but fun strategy-based game called PoxNora. In their second game, Sony is moving into the tried and true role-playing realm with its newest Facebook title, and a promotion for its upcoming first person shooter MMO of roughly the same name, The Agency: Covert Ops.

While yet another RPG on Facebook may seem like a boring thing, Sony has actually taken some of the genre’s most basic concepts and polished them to a pristine shine. In line with the company’s vast repertoire of titles and its extensive game design experience, the level of quality is hardly unexpected. However, that begs the question: How does that make up for a relative lack of social gaming experience?

Covert Ops is a story driven RPG with a level of quality above and beyond even that of Playfish’s Flash-based Gangster City. In a nutshell, the player picks from a variety of starting classes – each of which have their own sets of special abilities – and are immediately greeted with, quite possibly, the most primal and basic ways of getting a player interested: Something blows up.

Immediately after class selection, players are pulled into the game’s storyline somewhere in the middle of Amsterdam. From here they proceed through a tutorial set of missions. However, it is worth noting that this “tutorial” mode is all part of the story line, with the various tasks simply requiring one new feature each time (rather than massive blocks of text telling users everything at once). Truth be told, while tutorials are a necessity, most players despise them, so any methods that make them feel more invisible certainly warrants mention.

Now, as far as missions go they are broken up into a main Assignment and its sub-tasks. Each sub-task is your typical Facebook RPG type of quest that has a blurb of story and undertaking it, earns you experience (Influence) and costs energy (Cover). Upon completion, the player will also gain X amount of money and the chance at random rewards. Here’s the catch, though: Players do not have to repeat tasks to gain “masteries” of them like in other RPGs; which, frankly, often feels like a very artificial way to increase longevity. On the contrary, Sony takes a more MMO-like approach in having users repeat things.

While you can redo everything for more experience (at least until an entire assignment is complete), many require you to acquire specific items from doing the task itself. For example, in one mission, the player has to gather intelligence, so they peruse the city streets, talking to citizens in order to find out information. Just like in reality, a single pass will not reveal everything you need to know, so the player must repeat the quest in order get the needed criteria to “drop” as a reward at the end. This is the same Pavlovian methodology used to add addictiveness and longevity to massively multiplayer online games. If you need proof, merely look at basic quest design in World of Warcraft: Players constantly kill the same type of creature over and over again to get items required for quests, and even if they are not questing, they do similar repetitious activities to farm for items and rewards to make their character stronger.

Of course, this methodology is hardly by accident. As was noted before, The Agency: Covert Ops is but a mere promotional precursor to the full blown FPS-MMO, The Agency, coming to both the PlayStation 3 and PC. Already, the upcoming main game sounds interesting in the sense that is a shooter, but with an app the quality of Covert Ops, it’s likely to get a nice boost. It’s certainly better than past promotional Facebook apps we’ve seen… ahem.. Lego Indy, we’re looking at you.

As far as tasks go specifically, there are, at least early on, three other types of missions beyond the basic ones. The first is combat missions which are most reminiscent of a turn-based battle system in a standard, console RPG. Essentially, players face off against some non-player opponent and select various abilities to defeat them; abilities determined by the class of character you picked at the start. Unfortunately, we have yet to earn anything beyond these; an issue that could eventually lead to this mission type being a bit dull in the long run. Luckily, these are at least augmented based on the players statistics (which you upgrade whenever you level) or through researching and upgraded equipment.

You see, equipment such as weapons, defenses, and gadgets are not bought. They are built. Every 12 hours, or as luck provides through assignments, players are given components. With these, the player can create and upgrade any number of items that will enhance their performance, which really adds a nice collection element to the app. Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to be possible to trade them with friends. Nonetheless, you can always get them by spending some real money on Sony’s virtual currency, Station Cash, and just buy them.

The next major mission type is a mini-game type. Players are given a mission to decrypt a password that protects some computer you need to access in order to garner more information for your overall assignment. In order to do so, the player is granted an infrared visor that will allow you to see fingerprints on a key board. Scanning it back and forth will reveal all keys recently pressed, with brighter fingerprints being on letters pressed multiple times. In order to decrypt the puzzle, players must formulate a word X letters long (determined by the number of spaces provided). Doing this will reveal one letter of the already encrypted password. However, choose carefully, as harder encryptions have more letters in the password and a time limit. If your words are spelled incorrectly or not real words, you will lose time. Conversely, if they are correct, you gain time. As an added bonus, encryption is not the only mini-game as players will also have to defuse bombs, gather evidence, and even perform some rooftop parkour.

The last task type is where social play comes more into the picture. Beyond just wall postings, users can invite their friends to become operatives as well. With them playing, you get all the basics such as visiting each others’ headquarters (to be touched on later) and viewing each other’s avatar, but the big feature is what is dubbed Group Missions.

These particular missions last extended periods of time that can reach up to a couple of days. Obviously, the length means that the rewards are significantly higher but so is the risk. In doing these missions, users can assign an NPC operative (which are bought with in-game currency) or friends to complete it. However, players must return to extract their team when the mission is finished lest they become compromised.

Beyond all the missions the last aspect of Covert Ops is virtual space customization. As was mentioned prior, friends can visit each others’ headquarters – presumably to sweep for bugs. These are isometric spaces in which the player utilizes the money earned from their assignments to purchase furniture, electronics, and other forms of décor to decorate as they see fit. Sadly, these does not seem to have a point beyond aesthetics and is mostly out of site, thus making the addition nice, but ultimately superfluous. Additionally, that same cash is used customize the way the player’s 2D avatar looks as well.

On a side note, more in-game currency, energy, and a special item pack called a “Dead Drop” (contains weapons, components, and NPC agents) can be bought for Station Cash as well.

Overall, The Agency: Covert Ops is a very cool game. However, it looks very much like a mainstream title. Granted it plays like a Facebook, social game – even if it has many more features than most – but since a majority of Facebook users, and by extension social gamers, still deny themselves as being gamers, Covert Ops’ very game-like appearance may, for lack of a better term, scare them away. It is a prospect enforced greatly by the rapid decline of Sony’s predecessor, PoxNora on Facebook. Nonetheless, that game was synchronous whereas Ops is more asynchronous. It will be interesting to see just how much of a difference that makes. Moreover, it will be curious to discover just how much buzz gets generated and how much this app plays into The Agency MMO’s initial success.

Ubisoft, the France-based (as far as its headquarters goes) video game developer and publisher, is taking another shot at Facebook with a new game called Horse Gaga. This follows up on their first effort back in 2009, a game called TickTock.

No, despite the title, and follow-up coverage regarding the company’s trademark for the name, it has nothing to do with Lady Gaga, the singer. The game is actually centered around the caring for and raising of competition-level horses. Unfortunately, this concept immediately comes with a stigma along the lines of “not another animal husbandry app,” but Ubisoft does a pretty decent job of differentiating itself by combining the familiar elements from the pet caring sect with those of the role-playing genre. That said, it has been noted to us that the concept is based on a Facebook Connected French title called Equideow. Of course, not being fluent in French makes it difficult to see just how much was used from the orginal rendition, but they do seem strickingly similar.

Regardless, moving back to Horse Gaga: As far as the husbandry element goes, your horse has a set of five attributes: Nutrition, Happiness, Energy, Cleanliness, and Proficiency. Each of the five have a set of actions associated with it that will increase those attributes by X amount of “Care Points.” The idea is to increase Proficiency to its maximum allotment, but in order to do so, Care Points for the other four are consumed. To that end, a certain number of points for the others must be available in order to train Proficiency, thus it becomes a see-saw effect of training versus caring.

For each action performed, the user’s energy pool is depleted (the same way it is in most other Facebook RPGs), thus limiting what one can do in a single sitting. Additionally, some actions, such as feeding, also consume your in-game currency, Horse Coins. Luckily, any fiscal loses are recovered by the next element of the game: Competitions.

The whole point of training your horse and caring for it – beyond just loving horses – is to enter it into horse races. The game isn’t just about virtual frolicking in green pastures. As players gain experience (earned through every action) and level up, more types of competition will become available, but the basic is simple racing. This is most comparable to a quest or mission in Mafia Wars. Each one takes X amount of time to complete, ranging from 30 minutes to 24 hours.

As you’d expect, longer races earn both more experience and more income. Obviously, as some are a day or more long, the player does not control what happens and the results are completely automated. That said, you can influence the results to some degree in two ways.

The first and foremost means is train your horse to its maximum level of proficiency. Beyond this, you can publish your races to your Facebook feed and get your friends to click on the link to “cheer for you.” The more they cheer, the more likely it is that your horse will win and take the first prize. Curiously, each of these races are also run against other random Horse Gaga players as well, so make sure your steed is well trained as it will be going up against other well-bred horses.

This is where things get even more interesting. Yes, you can actually breed horses. Using coins or the virtual currency Horse Cash, you can buy extra horse boxes in order to stable more animals. Once you’ve done so, you pay coin to breed your mare with a stallion of your choosing. Doing so will not only give you different colors and styles, but also, should you train your mares to maximum proficiency, you can apparently increase the maximum your newborn will have. The long-term goal here is to breed the perfect racing horse.

Beyond these mechanics, Horse Gaga has a number of smaller elements to it, too, such as buying items to expedite processes (like breeding time) using virtual currency, as well as buying decorative horse equipment and horses using in-game currency and the former. Other miscellaneous features include visiting your friends’ stables, various achievements, and tasks (quests) to help guide you on what to do next. All very nice to have, but nothing truly extravagant.

As far as game play is concerned, Ubisoft has done a very nice job. Frankly, at its core, Horse Gaga is much more interesting than others of its ilk. However, for a developer as big as Ubisoft, the presentation itself is rather underwhelming. Yes, the stills and user interface look crisp and clean, but overall it feels rather bland. Other than drifting clouds in the background, everything is static and devoid of life. Even though they are clones of clones, other animal caring apps had animals that at least felt like more than a paper cutout. With Gaga, you’re pretty much staring at the same static picture of your horse the entire time, and just clicking buttons that pop up with simple animations.

Luckily, superfluous presentation elements are always easy to fix when compared to the central mechanic of a game. At its core, Horse Gaga is pretty strong – its surface just needs a little grooming. That said, it certainly isn’t a game that is going to appeal to everyone. It is very slow paced and not much to do at any given time. However, if you are a fan of the animal caring titles, RPGs, and horses, this is one you might find most interesting.

Thanks for the tip, Steve Franco, Esq.

The new and the old mix on this week’s AppData list of fastest-gaining Facebook games by daily active users. Leading it off is FarmVille, with a gain that looks large but isn’t really, at least in proportion to the game’s total DAU. As is often the case when FarmVille appears on our lists — it’s not actually growing, and only present because of relatively small variations in its numbers.

Following it are Playdom’s new game Big City Life and the independently produced Nightclub City. Both are interesting, but their DAU gains are exaggerated by all the first-time users; it will take time to see how many stick around. We’ll talk about the two in more depth on Friday, and in the meantime we’ve reviewed both.

Here’s the top 20 list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	FarmVille	27,123,996	+566,014	+2.13
2.	Big City Life	141,217	+130,465	+1,213.40
3.	Nightclub City	126,175	+107,101	+561.50
4.	Country Story	840,738	+102,426	+13.87
5.	Mall World	438,712	+99,149	+29.20
6.	Bola	382,367	+86,773	+29.36
7.	Zoo World	1,754,619	+78,655	+4.69
8.	MindJolt Games	1,862,986	+72,924	+4.07
9.	Jungle Life	64,419	+61,635	+2,213.90
10.	Hotel City	2,924,446	+54,612	+1.90
11.	Kingdoms of Camelot	493,456	+52,833	+11.99
12.	Lettr’IQ	53,822	+51,707	+2,444.78
13.	Games	307,578	+38,712	+14.40
14.	Ameba Pico	83,943	+37,052	+79.02
15.	Bubble Popp	187,819	+30,029	+19.03
16.	Treasure Quest	26,163	+25,269	+2,826.51
17.	GooBox – Jeux Gratuits	381,123	+23,227	+6.49
18.	Ranch Town	42,526	+22,820	+115.80
19.	Is Cool	301,526	+19,916	+7.07
20.	Ferme Pays	213,500	+19,583	+10.10

The list doesn’t really start to get interesting until we reach Mall World at number five. Mall World is a bit over a month old now and steadily growing toward three million monthly active users. It appears to be headed, though, for a DAU as a percentage of MAU that’s slightly under 20 percent, a bit lower than most popular games.

Bola is also new; it’s from Three Melons, which Playdom recently bought. Below are Zoo World and MindJolt Games, both older and, like FarmVille, not actually making significant gains; then, Jungle Life, which is yet another brand-new game.

Hotel City, by Electronic Arts, is perhaps the most interesting game on today’s list, if only for the evidence that its previously rapid growth is leveling off. Its DAU gains have been almost flat for almost a month now, while MAU gains have been slowing less obviously; but before long, we expect that MAU will also hit a plateau.

There is no denying that Facebook users enjoy raising forms of virtual pets. That concept was proven long ago, with the Japanese Tamigotchi pets – you know, the little beeper-like things that hung on a key chain or belt loop. It’s no surprise to see so many virtual pet caring games on Facebook. From aquariums to savannas, more variations of the same type of game spill forth. This time, however, Metrogames takes players to a new area — the jungle — in its most recent title, Jungle Life.

All in all, Jungle Life is a more terrestrial version of the virtual aquarium boom. Rather than fish swimming about a tank, you have a 2D plot of jungle landscape that you fill with a wanton variety of creatures. Evidentially, it’s not too hard to fill up your virtual space either as jungle critters apparently don’t cost too much.

Once your animals are in their new habitat they move about doing the basic animal stuff… namely wandering about and sleeping (nature’s not quite as exciting as television seems to portray sometimes). As the animals live out their digital lives, the player will be required to feed them after X amount of time; a time that increases depending on the size of the animal, with the larger ones taking longer.

At each feeding the animal will age a year and become worth more coin. This is the primary means of income, as with each year, they will continue to increase in value. Obviously, this means that they are worth the most at the maximum age, but should they not get feed regularly, they will not grow until they have a full stomach.

Honestly, it’s a typical core mechanic seen a dozen times before. One thing Jungle Life does do a little bit differently, however, (though even this has been used a number of times in some fashion or another as well) is the prospect of mating. At age one, should you have an animal of each gender, you can mate them once every 24 hours to get a free animal of that species. It’s a nice addition, and a nice way to make some profit once you have unlocked the larger, more expensive creatures.

Pretty much everything you do earns experience, including simply petting your animals once every so often. Unfortunately, as it stands, this is only limiting in regards to what you can buy in the store: Animals or otherwise.

Of course, this “otherwise” refers to jungle decorum. Everything within the store is tailored to a jungle theme. The goal of Jungle Life really doesn’t seem to be being original, but to merely tailor a popular genre to a different set of tastes. That in mind, Metrogames doesn’t do a bad job at all. The art style has a distinctive, cartoon look to it and the environment is spacious enough with enough variety in the current initial to appease a great number of player palettes.

Like the similar aquarium games, players are also able to expand beyond a single jungle. This is really the means that more advanced players will use to make more money, and to be honest, considering that most decorations cost 10 times more than the animals, it is going to be needed. Basically, each jungle is capped at 10-20 animals, so having multiple ones will allow you to better breed different species. Unfortunately, this is where players tend to run into a snag.

Unlike many of the aquarium ilk, where more tanks simply cost exponentially more in-game currency, Jungle Life requires both coin and neighbors. This is part of a larger trend we’ve seen in games lately, where you need to invite friends in order to make progress (though there is usually an option to use purchased virtual currency to buy expansion areas instead). The mechanic basically means that if the player can’t get their friends to play with them, they, themselves, are penalized by being unable to progress in the game (or at least become hindered) – even if they like it.

Getting back to Jungle Life specifically, it is an average game. If you’ve played one animal husbandry app or virtual aquarium title, you’ve essentially played Jungle Life. There’s nothing truly unique about the app, and while it’s well made, gameplay-wise, it just feels uninspired. That said, Metrogames, again, may not be looking to be innovative, but merely attract those that would prefer the games that have played before in a new environment. Thus far, that seems to be working too. Currently, the past two weeks have shown a steady incline of monthly active users for the app from virtually zero to north of 210,000 — although the company has room to spend on things like ads for the game, as it recently raised $5 million from Playdom. We’ll be watching to se just where this adaptation of an established genre caps out.