Morphee Games is bringing us back to battle-oriented concepts with its newest Facebook release, Galamon. Previously, we’ve seen games like Battle Punks from Gravity Bear approach the concept.

Of all the automated fighting games out there, Galamon is perhaps most similar to an even older title called Ninja Warz. However, unlike predecessor, it comes to the table with a bit more in the ways of strategy and greater reward — along with room to improve on social features and game-play.

The objective behind Galamon is simple enough: Beat the opponent. When starting out, users are granted a handful of these creatures, called Galamons, that are classified as ninjas, pirates, cute, “ekeko,” aliens, or zombies. This doesn’t particularly mean anything, but different types have different looks and attack animations. What does matter, however, are the statistics and different abilities they might come with.

You see, the game puts the player in a galaxy full of non-player planets that contain specific team make ups. In order to progress, users must tailor their own team of four Galamons to best counteract it. This is where strategic planning comes into play. Each creature has its own set of stats consisting of attack power (damage), health, and attack speed. These are merely to determine basic strength. It is their abilities that really make or break a strategy.

While stronger stats are good, each Galamon has an elemental ability. For example, one character might increase the health of all other Galamon of the same element, while another will increase all team members’ attack speed. Moreover, there is an elemental wheel that displays which elements – water, fire, wind, earth, poison – are stronger against others. Unfortunately, it is unclear as to whether or not this means they do extra damage to a weaker element. If they do, it seems negligible. Nonetheless, there are only a limited number of battles that players can engage in a day, so plan well.

As far as the battles themselves go, these are all automated with the two squads of four randomly attacking one another based on attack speed. There is no control here, so one can only hope their planning was enough. The frustrating part is that a lot of it comes down to luck. This doesn’t simply refer to missed attacks or critical strikes, but more that the enemy could happen to focus fire one target, while the user’s Galamon spreads their damage over all four. It’s extraordinarily annoying, because once a team member goes down, the chances of winning drop dramatically.

Regardless, once a battle is finished, players earn a chunk of experience and coins (more for winning). These are then, surprisingly, used within a virtual space element. Players actually get to decorate their spaceship as they see fit with bizarre alien, pirate, and ninja material. Additionally, the money can be used to buy equipment for the ship that can be used to upgrade their existing Galamon as well. Of course, this tends to take several hours. Also, both aesthetic and functional items are gated by level.

Money is also used to purchase packs of Galamon eggs with the packs containing rarer, and by extension, more powerful, creatures costing more. However, one also has to be a certain level to buy the higher level eggs. Once purchased, these can then be incubated and grown into fully functional fighters. As a side note, eggs can also be won, randomly, in battles.

On the social end of the spectrum, Galamon seems a bit lacking compared to some of its predecessors. The game still contains elements such as achievements, gifting, and leaderboards, but these all appear to be strictly limited to just friends that play with you. Additionally, it is also possible to challenge them directly to battles against their Galamon teams. Of course, while all of this is nice, one of the great aspects of games like Battle Punks or Ninja Warz, was that users could fight other players that were there same relative level. Granted, it is still basically the same as fighting the NPC creature planets, but it just doesn’t feel as gratifying.

In the end, Galamon is a pretty decent game that has a quirky, yet amusing style to it. Any game that lets you attack enemies with a wet fish certainly deserves some bonus points. All the same, Galamon feels off to a good start, and it would be surprising if it doesn’t do at least decently well.

Several of the latest games to grow large on Facebook appear on this week’s list of fastest gainers by monthly active users from AppData. These games flew under the radar during the last few weeks but are now getting quite big.

First, one note – there appears to still be some remnant effects from Facebook’s recent stats bug. A couple of developers have told us that Facebook is still reporting numbers that are too high for a few apps, and we’re flagging those apps which we believe to be potentially inaccurate in AppData. Facebook says it believes the recent reporting issues have been resolved but is investigating. For now, we’re not aware of any broader problem, but we’ll let you know as soon as we know more.

Here’s the full AppData list for this week:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Market Street	8,350,109	+1,621,294	+24%
2.	Mafia Wars Game	27,589,774	+1,590,825	+6%
3.	Texas HoldEm Poker	37,257,850	+1,513,638	+4%
4.	Zoo World	13,110,007	+1,124,695	+9%
5.	FarmVille	62,800,726	+897,178	+1%
6.	Car Town	3,064,396	+815,244	+36%
7.	Tattoo City	1,848,265	+797,922	+76%
8.	Zapapa games	3,799,088	+754,745	+25%
9.	Nightclub City	7,088,331	+606,986	+9%
10.	Café World	29,064,009	+573,957	+2%
11.	Millionaire City	5,298,590	+569,693	+12%
12.	Baking Life	6,493,032	+549,717	+9%
13.	Birthday Cards	9,909,191	+517,831	+6%
14.	snsplus	826,774	+512,588	+163%
15.	Toilet Paper Roll	2,034,675	+502,846	+33%
16.	Zoo Paradise	4,889,055	+486,846	+11%
17.	Fashion World	4,897,637	+443,125	+10%
18.	Games	6,055,569	+428,475	+8%
19.	Cafe Life	2,062,734	+417,727	+25%
20.	Armies	2,089,070	+415,403	+25%

Market Street is at the top of the list this week. A July release, the credit here goes to Playdom, for which it’s now the single largest game (although that’s mainly due to the rapid decline of Social City). Market Street has grown quickly, picking up eight million of its MAU in about three weeks. Players seem to be getting into the retail management aspects of our game, having left a couple dozen comments on strategy on our review.

Moving down, Car Town is big news for developer Cie Games, which is not a prominent developer on Facebook; the press around the real-world auto manufacturer endorsements for the game may have helped its growth.

We’ll leave off there, but there’s plenty more of interest, especially regarding fairly new developers: Tattoo City, Zapapa games and Baking Life are all from independents, and are doing quite well for themselves.

Board games always seem like a sure bet for Facebook, being social by their very nature. The latest is by developer P-Kama, which just launched Rummikub for both Facebook itself and Facebook Connect, through Rummikub.com.

For those not familiar with Rummikub, it’s a tile-based board game imported from Israel, in which the object is to use all of their numbered tiles. Anyone who has played the analog version will likely be satisfied by the digital iteration. That said, it does suffer from some scale issues and minor quirks in learning the game.

Rummikub, which is also known as Rummy-O, Rummycube, Rummyking, and Rummy Tile, can be thought of as Scrabble with numbers. Each tile has a number associated with it, ranging from one to 13, and consisting of four different colors. In order to play the tiles, you must create one of two types of “Sets” called either a “Group” or a “Run.”

A Group consists of three or more tiles of the same number, but in different colors, while a Run is three or more consecutive numbers of the same color. The elements that add strategy to this are the “Initial Meld” (which means the first set the player lays down must equal 30 or more), timed rounds ranging from 30 to 120 seconds, and Joker (wild card) tiles that can be used in lieu of any other number.

In addition to these, tiles already on the board can be “Manipulated,” or rearranged to create new Sets, so long as there are no loose tiles left on the table. Obviously, this becomes a more advanced element to the game, but no worries for new users, as they can tailor their search for games based on relative skill level.

Of course, that is where part of the problems with Rummikub comes into play. The game relies heavily on the presence of other players to truly be fun. Because the game is new, its monthly active user count is only around 6,000 (though it is steadily growing). Even with its international presence, sometimes a decent game can be hard to find, despite its ability to connect with the stand-alone site.

The biggest problem was that most of the games found were empty with not enough joining to actually play, or when there were enough to play, no one would do anything for the full 120 second turn duration (which a surprising number of users were using for their game settings), which eventually just led to people leaving the game all together. Frustratingly enough, even joining a full game as a viewer, we sat there for a rather extended period of time waiting for something to happen.

In truth, this is not the fault of P-Kama and is really just a ratio to volume issue. With the currently low number of users, due to its newness to Facebook, episodes such as this can be chalked up to bad luck. It’s really just the nature of online games such as this.

The issue, thankfully, is mitigated to some degree by the ability to play against AI. However, it seems that other real players can join as well. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there should be an option to play solely against AI. At the very least, it would give new users a means to learn about the game a little more before facing off against real opponents.

As for Rummikub’s social elements, beyond the synchronous multiplayer, these consist of standard leaderboards and gifting. The latter does feel a bit forced for Rummikub, as it really consists of random, animated icons that feel rather irrelevant to the game itself. There is, however, a curious form of virtual currency, called Joker Credits, that is used to not only send these gifts, but also to join tournaments, change room themes (backgrounds), lock the room, and affect other game creation elements. Of course, it’s not only purchasable. It is also earned as a daily bonus for logging in.

Overall, Rummikub is not a bad game, and is a pretty strong translation from the analog, tabletop version. It’s a game that is easy enough to learn, but certainly takes a good while to really master, and the only significant issues with the Facebook application are those that stem from the very nature of online play itself. There are a few things the developers could do to mitigate those problems further. All the same, many quirks will likely resolve themselves, in time, as the app continues to increase in popularity.

Chomp, a mobile mobile app search and discovery company, has its latest version out today, a big update that CEO Ben Keighran thinks will significantly improve the app ecosystem.

Apple’s App Store, as well as its smaller competitors, could use the help. As the app market has grown first from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of apps, a huge mismatch  has developed between the number of worthwhile apps and those that can receive any significant exposure through Apple’s own discovery mechanism, its App Store leaderboards.

When it started up this January, Chomp focused on collecting reviews and ratings for apps. Now it’s parlaying those into what Keighran says will be like a Google for apps, surfacing the best content for the user’s desire based on search terms.

The comparison to Google only goes so far, though. Google’s version of search works because most websites are still quite text-heavy. Apps are distinct programs that don’t necessarily involve text at all, beyond the name — which might not do much to describe what the app does.

Chomp’s search starts with the name and category that iDevice apps have been assigned, but it also mines reviews, both those left by earlier Chomp users and any left on the App Store entry. It then offers alternate search terms beneath the initial results, to help narrow down to what the user wants.

Quality is also more important for apps than for web pages — while users who are performing a search may just want a particular snippet of information, apps are often a paid-for experience that users want to know is worth their time. So Chomp has incorporated its existing user ratings into the search results, using them to help influence the rankings.

Keighran likens a search for apps to a looking for new music. “Everyone that has a collection of music constantly wants new music,” he says. “Everyone has a friend who’s always finding the latest apps … there’s new stuff getting discovered every day, and a core set of users influencing others around them to download more.”

Mobile game developers should find Chomp’s new version interesting, since the choke-point of the App Store has made development a risky proposition — developers can spend significantly on a new game, only to find that it flops due to not hitting the app store’s rankings. It’s not clear yet that search is the right solution, but Chomp itself isn’t putting all its eggs into search; the Chomp app still offers personalized recommendations, as well.

Although it’s just for the iPhone for now, Keighran says Chomp will eventually expand onto Android, and perhaps beyond. Unlike the web, serving multiple platforms will just be a fact of life for any app search engine. “The problem as it stands today is fragmentation and walled gardens, and that’s how it will be for the next few years,” he says.

Group buying startups, which let consumers get deals with local businesses en masse, are finding a new route to customers beyond the e-mail newsletter and prolific online advertising campaign.

They’re tapping into social games, in a marriage of two of the most lucrative revenue models to emerge off Facebook’s platform. Social gamers earn additional virtual currency by buying Groupon or LivingSocial deals while they’re playing.

“Farmville’s been called the new daytime TV,” said Terry Angelos, a co-founder and chief product officer of TrialPay. “Rather than spending time watching ‘Days of Our Lives,’ people are playing Farmville and seeing ads for local restaurants.” Indeed, many of TrialPay’s supported titles attract women aged 35 to 50 — a prime demographic for online shopping.

TrialPay, which started partnering with Facebook earlier this year to serve offers in exchange for the social network’s virtual currency Credits, has been working with group buying companies including Tippr, Mertado, LivingSocial and Groupon for the past six months. These companies have flourished over the past year, scoring valuations north of $1 billion. Groupon alone has sold 9.8 million coupons, with about $420 million in savings, in a mere 21 months of existence.

TrialPay gone from serving one deal a day to gamers in each city to providing up to 20 different deals per metro area. The consumers who follow through on the deals TrialPay serves in games like  Happy Aquarium, Sorority Life and Mobsters buy one about every two months, according to data the company analyzed over the last 60 days. (TrialPay wouldn’t say exactly how many transactions the company has facilitated over the last two months, except to say that its sample size was in the thousands.)

Some players are coming back to games every day to look at deals; one even purchased a deal every day for an entire month. TrialPay keeps a cut of the overall deal value or gets a fee for every customer they drive, depending on the partner. Angelos says the company’s commissions are “much better” than standard affiliate fees, which range from 4 to 20 percent.

> Continue reading on Inside Facebook.

As Facebook adjusts how users can access applications — and how developers can access users — smaller social networks are trying to find new ways to spread their games. For MySpace, the latest addition is improved search.

MySpace has broken out its search by verticals: people, music, videos, games and so forth. In a blog post on the change, the company uses the example of a search for “Mobsters.” Before the update, only eight unordered results were returned, with the last being the content most searchers would be interested in.

Now the search box has auto-complete, and there are 21 results, headed up by the game Mobsters.

A change in search doesn’t seem particularly important at first. But it does highlight the ongoing adaptation of MySpace’s strategy. The network is now just as much a content portal as a social network; effective discovery mechanisms are vital if it’s to succeed.

That difference could mean allow a developer to pursue a different strategy on MySpace than Facebook, as well. While Facebook developers remain focused on virality, MySpace offers a chance of success based on content — assuming, of course, that users will actually go looking for a farming or mafia game through the network’s own discovery mechanisms.

For mobile game developers, Apple’s Game Center may be one of the most important developments this year. The social networking platform is coming to users with iOS 4.1, and available to developers now as part of 4.1′s third beta, which AppleInsider recently looked at.

Now that more of Game Center’s features are coming to light, it’s becoming evident that Apple is building something closer to an existing game network like Xbox Live than a standard social network.

The initial sign-in to Game Center uses the Apple ID, but users will be identified to each other by a nickname. Apple likely expects players to connect with people they don’t know for real-time multiplayer, unlike Facebook’s asynchronous games, which are played mainly by real-life friends.

However, there’s also a prominent “Find Me By Email” option, which suggests that Apple is also hoping to connect people who do know each other — thus taking advantage of both game networking styles. At the moment, there’s no obvious tie-in to Facebook accounts.

Since every iDevice user will potentially be part of Game Center, it should prove valuable to existing social platforms like OpenFeint and Plus+, which have had to ask players to sign up thus far.

Those services seem to be counting on Apple giving access through an API. Since Game Center was announced in April, the independent platforms have been working on new features beyond leaderboards and challenges — which should be part of Game Center — to differentiate themselves.

While many games try to make themselves more complicated, a older iPhone title called Angry Birds proves that simplicity is often the most lucrative solution. Developed by Rovio Mobile, this quaint physics-based puzzle game has frequently found itself at the top of the iPhone’s paid app list. Even its more expensive iPad rendition, Angry Birds HD, has remained consistently within the top ten.

With simple controls and an even simpler concept, the socially integrated Angry Birds is a puzzler that quickly becomes addictive with its excellent sense of style and visual appeal. As good as it may be, however, the $0.99 application is not perfect with moderately annoying accuracy problems and the occasional “brick-wall” puzzle.

Long story short, strange looking green pigs have stolen the eggs from a very temperamental group of birds in an attempt to cook them. As they retreat back to their various “fortresses” (and the term is used loosely in most cases), it is up to the birds to use themselves as projectiles to take their enemies out.

Each level — and there are about a metric ton of them — consists of different structural layouts that contain a few of the green pig guys. In order to complete the stage, the player must launch their angry birds from a giant slingshot in order to take out every last one of them. The catch is that one has a limited number of avian ammunition.

This is where physics takes over. Using these limited shots, players must figure out and target specific weak spots in each structure in order to effectively take out all the enemies. Furthermore, each structure is made up of different materials such as glass, wood, or stone. Depending on the material, it will more easily topple, break, or hold more weight. Moreover, these could be round, angled, or flat, so where one strikes makes a huge difference.

Each piece of the structure, as well as the pigs themselves, has a set amount of health. It isn’t a matter of having to directly hit them, but with force them to incur enough damage from falling, debris, or the bird itself essentially vaporizing. In order to help do this, players will periodically acquire new types of birds, with special abilities, to use in higher levels such as a little blue one that splits into three birds when tapped. This doesn’t make the puzzles any easier, but adds another layer of thought to solving each one.

To add more depth to the game, scores, and a star rating from one to three for each level are determined by how many shots the player has remaining and how many parts of a structure has been destroyed. Furthermore, for the collector type of player, there are also “Golden Eggs” that are apparently hidden about the levels and act like a sort of secondary achievement system.

Moving into complaints, one of the few problems is the general accuracy of each shot. This isn’t to say that the physics are off, but it is a bit difficult to be precise with repeat shots as the aiming is incredibly sensitive.

In order to shoot, one has to pull back on the slingshot with their finger and adjust its trajectory before releasing. The issue is that even the slightest vertical alteration can send the bird way off course, and since the screen is so small, it’s extremely hard to tell where you are aiming (even with the dotted trajectory line that represents the last shot). It’s an issue, obviously, resolved with the larger iPad version, but forking out an extra $4 for just that, doesn’t seem like a good enough reason.

A lot of the early levels can be surprisingly difficult as well. For hardcore puzzle fans, this probably isn’t a big deal (in truth, this is just picking nits), but it is very easy to get stuck and frustrated. Unlike other iPhone puzzlers we’ve seen in the past, such as Blockoban, there are no noticeable hints or help, which can lead to eventual frustration.

On the social end of things, Angry Birds also comes with integration to the same social network Modern Conflict came with, Crystal. With it, players can find other friends using methods such as Facebook or Twitter, view recommendations for other games, and compete in a huge number of leaderboards based on individual level high scores. In addition to this, the game also has unlockable and sharable achievements.

Overall, Angry Birds, for the iPhone is a fantastic puzzle game and comes highly recommended for fans of the puzzle genre. Its overly sensitive accuracy issues and lack of puzzle help or hints are issues, its true, but at worst they are minor. In the end, if one has an iPhone and a dollar, then Angry Birds is one app to add to the collection.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Facebook— tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

• Slide’s History Indicates Google’s Social Plans

Monday, August 16th, 2010

• Big Prize Giveaways Focuses on Facebook Promotions
• Facebook Buys Chai Labs, a Semantic Search Startup Founded by a Former Adsense Leader
• Facebook Plans to Add Image Polls to Questions Application
• “Better Facebook” Browser Extension Lets Users Customize Their Facebook Experience
• Amid All the New Hires, a Few Early Facebook Employees Slip Out the Door
• We’ll Be on Location for Facebook’s Wednesday Press Event

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

• Top 20 Facebook Pages: Music, TV and More People with 10 Million Fans
• Facebook Third-Largest US Video Site Behind Google and Yahoo
• Facebook Apps in Taiwan Dominated by Younger Users, with Some Surprises
• Facebook May or May Not Be Growing As Quickly This Summer, Third Party Measurements Show
• Shopkick iPhone App Lets Users Earn Facebook Credits for Walking Inside Businesses

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

• Payvment Builds E-Commerce Into Facebook, Launches Enterprise API
• Facebook Rolls Out New Look For The Third-Party Like Button
• Facebook Anticipated to Launch Long-Awaited Location Features Tonight
• Facebook Status Update Tagging Now Automatically Suggests Matches for People, Pages and Other Content
• Live-Blog: Facebook Launches Places Location Service, Partners with Third Parties
• New Facebook for iPhone Application with Places Coming Tonight
• Facebook Introduces New Privacy Norms Around Location With Tagging
• Facebook Taking the Platform Approach to Location With Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Booyah
• Facebook’s Places Location Service Is Using Maps from Bing
• With Facebook Places, Serendipitous Interactions with Friends Will Increase

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

• Initial Facebook Places APIs Going Live for Platform Developers Thursday Afternoon
• Facebook Job Postings this Week: Recruiting in India and Seattle, Legal and Online Operations
• Facebook Moving Toward IFrames Over FBML for Canvas Apps and Page Tabs
• Facebook Platform Roadmap Update: App Tabs on User Profiles, Rest API to be Deprecated Soon
• Facebook Places: A Guided Tour of Features and Privacy Settings
• Highlights This Week from the Inside Network Job Board: AdParlor, NaturalMotion, EA, & More
• Recent Facebook Apps in the United States Target Niche Audiences for Growth, Monetization

Friday, August 20th, 2010

• Chinese, Arabic, Spanish Language Apps in This Week’s Top Emerging Facebook List
• How Marketers and Businesses Can Start Using Facebook Places
• Marketplace For Facebook and Oodle iPhone App Launches, Has Room to Improve
• RIM Updates Facebook For Blackberry App With Confusing Push Notifications
• Facebook Roundup: Apple, Places, Hot Potato Acquisition and More

Mafia Wars: Las Vegas hits 10 Million – Two weeks after the Mafia Wars: Las Vegas expansion launched, Zynga has reported that 10 million players have now visited the new virtaul city. As promised, the company promptly blew up a four ton armored truck to celebrate, out in the Las Vegas desert and with the help of none other than Snoop Dog. The video was streamed live, and can still be viewed at the Mafia Wars website.

Namco Bandai Joins Social Gaming – Based in information from Spong.com, the games developer Namco Bandai has confirmed that it will be moving into the social gaming market with two announced Facebook titles currently in development: City of Football and Treasure Abyss.

Pantene and H&M Join MyTown – A few weeks ago, Booyah introduced its product check-in feature to the mobile app, MyTown, and has registered over 350,000 product check-ins. This week, Pantene and H&M have joined in, allowing there products to be part of the possible scanning.

In addition to this, Booyah also announced that MyTown has checked-in more than 3.1 million registered users across the United States with more thatn 15 million check-ins, from players, each week, with a greater density of them occurring along the eastern coast. An image of check-in locations can be found here.

Space Empires to Come to iPhone & iPad – Earlier this week, the folks over at Nvinium Games announced that their recent release of Space Empires: Battle For Supremacy will be coming to the Apple iPhone and iPad devices. Any specific timelines have not been stated.

Brave Arms Offers New Updates – The Facebook first-person shooter, Brave Arms, got some updates this week. Now players will be able to more easily invite their friends to games with new, personal invites. Additionally, the quirky shooter also got some in-game upgrades in the form of “zany” melee options such banana peels, axes, and plungers.

Kaixin001 Experiments with Open Platform – The Chinese social network Kaixin001 is looking to stand up against big time competitors such as RenRen and 51.c0m by opening its platform to select third party, social game developers, says China Social Games. This is a move set forth to help compensate for Kaixin001′s slow development time.

Israeli Startup Launches Video Chat on Facebook - Israeli startup Rounds is launching a video chat platform for Facebook. With it, users will be able chat in real time while going about their normal Facebook activities.

[image via VentureBeat]

Chrome Store to Take Small Cuts – 1Up.com displayed the presentation from Google at GDC Europe this week. Interestingly enough, the Chrome Web Store will not only allow for users to purchase web applications for the Chrome browser, but will also support trials, subscriptions, and in-app payments and appears to include some social features. Furthermore, according to the presentation, Google will only take a 5% “processing fee” with no additional revenue share. The store is slated for an October launch.

MOL Global Plans Social Game Focus – Though the Malaysian payments company has been working more with virtual currency such as Facebook Credits, the social networking site is taking even more steps into social gaming. According to paidContent.org, the network told the Philippine Star that it was planning to shift itself to more of a “social gaming portal.”

Ayeah Games Gets Seed Funding – Founded earlier this year by Doug Levin, a new social gaming company called Ayeah Games announced, this week, that it has closed a round of seed funding. Though the amount is not disclosed, it will be used to develop “social reality games.”

Zynga Gets Charged with Vandalism – Zynga may have gone a bit overboard with the Mafia Wars: Las Vegas marketing. Reports from SFWeekly have stated that the company is now in trouble with the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office where Deputy City Attorney, Alex Tse accuses them of several “documented acts of sidewalk vandalism.” The accusation refers to several fake bank notes that had been glued to the city’s streets.