Social games developer and publisher Zynga today announced the release of its seventh game under the “With Friends” brand, an endless runner titled Running With Friends. The game should be available to download for free from the Apple App Store starting tonight and tomorrow morning.

Set in a cartoon-style re-imagining of Pamplona, Spain, the game puts players into the town’s famous Running of the Bulls Festival. Gameplay is very similar to Temple Run, Vector, Subway Surfers, and other games in the endless runner genre. It’s particular similar to the latter in that the device is oriented vertically, with the camera behind the character, allowing the player to swipe and tap in order to dodge obstacles across three lanes.

While it may be similar to other endless runners, Running With Friends is also adding several new features to the formula to keep it fresh. The social element of games has always been Zynga’s primary concern and Running With Friends is no different, allowing users to do as the title suggests and play with their friends asynchronously. The level for each round of the game is randomly generated, but players who compete with friends will compete over the same randomly generated level. The player who gets the highest score by running farther and collecting more stars, wins.

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Nimble Quest is a new iOS game from Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes developer NimbleBit. It’s available now from the App Store and, like the developer’s other titles, is a free-to-play game with additional in-app purchases.

Nimble Quest is a significant departure from NimbleBit’s two previous hits in several ways. First of all, while the aesthetic is still heavily based around retro-style pixel art, the higher resolution of the new game makes it look more like a title from the 16-bit era than the chunky 8-bit style of Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes. Alongside the change in aesthetic comes a change in play style, too — rather than being a relatively conventional “tap and wait” business sim both Tiny Tower and Pocket Planes, Nimble Quest is an arcade action game. Specifically, it’s a cross between mobile phone classic Snake and the venerable arcade RPG/shooter title Gauntlet — and it’s excellent.

Basic gameplay in Nimble Quest is very simple. Play begins by selecting one of several different hero characters, each of whom have their own strengths, weaknesses and special abilities. When the game proper starts, the hero character begins walking around an enclosed arena and is unable to stop. Swiping in a particular direction on the screen causes the character to start moving in that direction — though like Snake, it’s impossible to simply reverse your direction, and only horizontal and vertical movement is allowed.

Enemies spawn into the arena at regular intervals — some as individuals, others in snake-like formations — and the player must defeat them to progress. Each enemy defeated adds to a bar at the top of the screen, and when this bar fills the level fills with gems to collect for a few seconds before proceeding to the next arena, which has a different graphical theme and enemies. As players progress through the levels, they unlock new heroes that they can use as their “leader” in subsequent games. (more…)

Nitro is a new iOS game from Z2Live, Inc. It’s available now as a free-to-play download from the App Store, and carries additional in-app purchases of in-game currencies.

Nitro is an arcade-style racing game with a Gran Turismo-style car-upgrading metagame wrapped around it. Players compete in various races against computer-controlled opponents, Game Center friends or random online players and earn money and resources with which they can upgrade their vehicle or purchase new ones. As players progress through the single-player campaign, they earn access to more and more powerful vehicles with which to assert their dominance on the various racetracks available in the game.

The racing sequences unfold with some good quality, fluidly-animating 3D graphics. The visual fidelity isn’t up to recent releases such as Real Racing 3, but neither is it a bad-looking game — though it still requires an iPhone 4 as a minimum, so 3GS owners are out of luck. The game is controlled using a combination of touchscreen “pedals” for acceleration and braking — one on each side of the screen — and analog tilt controls for steering. The controls are responsive and work well. Steering hard in either direction causes a “drift” bar to appear on screen while the player’s vehicle skids sideways — filling this causes a speed boost when the car straightens up again, which is an essential tactic to use in tougher races. The player also has a nitro boost which can be used by tapping it on the screen at an opportune moment. For the most part, the races work well, but some walls seem a little too “solid,” bringing the player to a complete and immediate standstill after just clipping them rather than simply reducing their speed. If this happens, the races are often much too short to be able to catch up with one’s opponents. (more…)

Outland Games is a new iOS game from Uber Entertainment, creators of the popular Monday Night Combat series of MOBA games on Xbox 360 and PC. It’s available now as a $0.99 download from the App Store, with additional in-app purchases of in-game currency and booster items.

Outland Games is an endless runner set in the Monday Night Combat universe, in which players take on the role of the series’ Assassin character as she attempts to traverse a perilous obstacle course and win her freedom. Gameplay is very simple, consisting of only two controls — tapping on the left side of the screen causes the Assassin to jump while tapping on the right side causes her to attack. The Assassin can “double jump” by tapping the jump button in mid-air, and using an attack while in the air allows her to suspend herself for a moment — a technique that is sometimes necessary to clear large gaps.

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Bips is a new Facebook game produced by Denki but wholly developed by Denki alumni at Ludometrics. The game was originally prototyped by veteran Scottish developer DMA Design (now Rockstar North, best known for the Grand Theft Auto series) back in the late ’90s, when it was known as Faster Worm Slow, and was subsequently released on interactive TV services by Denki. The new version is intended as a “21st century arcade game” — a title with retro sensibilities inspired by the games of the ’80s and ’90s, but with what Ludometrics refers to as “modern attributes.”

Bips’ gameplay is extremely simple. Players take control of a tiny dot that continuously moves at 45 degrees to the horizontal, either up and left or up and right. Pressing and holding the space bar causes the dot to reverse its vertical direction, and bumping into yellow walls at the edge of the screen causes it to reverse its horizontal direction. The aim of the game in each level is simply to collect all the sparkling dots in an attempt to score as many points as possible. Much like the classic mobile phone game Snake, a trail behind the player gets gradually longer as they continue to survive, but unlike Snake there is no means of crashing into your own tail. (more…)

Zynga has a way of doing things with its original games: observe the market for popular trends, then release its own highly-polished take on the genre. It’s honestly surprising that the company hasn’t turned its hand to the consistently-lucrative “match-3″ arcade puzzle genre before now, but Ruby Blast changes all that with a variation on the formula popularized by Wooga’s Diamond Dash.

Zynga’s approach often draws accusations of cloning, and it’s easy to see why — but in many cases, the company takes the time to add its own twist on the formula its new game has been “inspired by” rather than simply making an exact copy. In the case of Ruby Blast, the game combines elements from two different puzzle titles: the frantic group-clicking of Wooga’s Facebook-based Diamond Dash with the “digging” mechanic from the “Diamond Mine” mode in PopCap’s standalone PC and Mac title Bejeweled 3.

Gameplay in Ruby Blast is very simple and easy to understand, though Zynga feels it necessary for the player’s first two full games to have intrusive tutorials get in the way rather than just letting them play. Against the clock, players must click on contiguous groups of three or more gems to make them disappear. If the destroyed group is adjacent to a layer of bedrock at the bottom of the screen, the rock is also destroyed. If all the rock above the on-screen line is destroyed, the player “digs down” and is rewarded with additional time. Bonus items such as score multipliers and rubies (which act as experience points) may sometimes be found within the rock, and as the player gains in levels, they gain access to various powerups to make the process of clearing the board easier — though these need to be “charged” before use by matching gems of a specific color. Like most other “Blitz” puzzlers,  these powerups cost soft currency to activate. Up to three powerups may be used at any one time, but they are all level-locked and may not be acquired early through expending hard currency as in some other games.

The game monetizes through sales of both soft and hard currency. Soft currency is reserved for the activation of powerups, while hard currency is used to purchase 15-second “time extensions” at the end of a game or refill the player’s energy bar, which is expended five points at a time. Social features include the seemingly-obligatory weekly tournament and the ability to earn more rubies (and thus level quicker) the more of a player’s Facebook friends that are playing.

One of the most noteworthy things about Ruby Blast is its excellent presentation — though a high degree of polish is not unusual for a Zynga title. The game makes use of Flash 11, allowing the game’s special effects to be rendered by the computer’s graphics processor rather than the CPU itself. This means very smooth animation as well as visually-pleasing special effects such as the game going “out of focus” when the player performs a Facebook action such as viewing their notifications. It’s certainly a noteworthy step forward in presentation for Facebook titles, even if the gameplay is rather familiar.

The quick-fire play and addictive nature of “Blitz” puzzlers coupled with the good presentation and solid gameplay is likely to make Ruby Blast a big success on Facebook. It remains to be seen whether or not it will be able to dethrone the more well-established big-hitters of the arcade puzzle genre, however.

Ruby Blast is not yet listed on our traffic tracking service AppData as it is so new. Check back shortly to follow its progress with detailed breakdowns of MAU, DAU and user retention figures.

Play

Zynga doing what it does best — a highly polished twist on a well-established formula.

Zynga’s next arcade title, as our sources told us, is a match-3 game called Ruby Blast.

Ruby Blast is Zynga’s second social arcade game in as many quarters; the first being Bubble Safari, which is currently tied with Texas HoldEm Poker as the No. 1 game on Facebook by daily active users. Ruby Blast is the first collaboration between Zynga Seattle and Zynga China. We got to spend some time with the game in a hands-off demo during a recent interview with Design Director Jonathan Grant.

Ruby Blast stars an archaeologist named Ruby digging for magic gems in a tropical mine. The gameplay features classic match-3 mechanics: Players click on clusters of at least three matching gems, clearing them and causing the leftover columns to drop down. Bedrock at the bottom of the screen can be demolished by clicking on adjacent bomb gems, clearing all of the rocks delivers a time bonus.

Each match costs energy to play, and players can spend soft currency on up to three powerups to use during the round. When Ruby Blast launches, there will be four different powerups, but a fifth is  coming soon. Each powerup provides different types of play bonuses — like clearing large areas of gems or rearranging the game board — and can be triggered once players fill an energy bar on the right side of the screen, accomplished by clearing gems of the same color.

Grant says the game’s social mechanics are designed to foster competition with their friends. Player experience is earned by collecting rubies in the game, which are tracked via the game’s ruby leaderboard. Ruby Blast also has weekly tournament leaderboards, where players compete with their friends to earn high scores in the game. The weekly tournament leaderboards will clear each week and the top three scoring players earn in-game rewards like extra currency.

Match-3 games are certainly popular on Facebook right now, with Wooga’s Diamond Dash, PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz and King.com’s Candy Crush Saga all appearing on June’s Top 25 Facebook games list. What could help Ruby Blast stand out from the match-3 crowd, though, is its planned synchronous multiplayer mode. Grant won’t say much more about this mode, but he says it’s planned to launch in the game before the end of the year.

Zynga’s also hoping that Ruby Blast’s visual style distinguishes it from other match-3 games on Facebook. Zynga developed the game in Flash 11, allowing the developer to take advantage of Stage 3D technology. As a result, all the in-game special effects will be rendered by the computer’s GPU and the dynamic graphics will hopefully be more appealing to players than the pre-rendered effects that are normally used in such titles.

Ruby Blast is will launch on both Zynga.com and Facebook sometime later this week.

Arcade matching game Ruby Blast appears to be Zynga’s next new game, which would make that two arcade game launches in as many quarters for the social game giant.

Screenshots sent to ISG by an anonymous tipster don’t reveal much besides a customer service staging listing and a title page screenshot. The customer service page does not list Zynga-published titles like Pettington Park or Woodland Heroes, implying that Ruby Blast is an in-house developed title.

A Google search of “Zynga Ruby Blast” brings up a link to the app on Facebook — but following it turns up a Page Not Found result. Based on the title screen, Ruby Blast seems to be a match-3 game with a digging theme, perhaps similar to Tetris Stars where the goal of the game is to get to the bottom of a level as fast as possible by completing lines and activating explosive powerups. Its name suggests similar gameplay to GameHouse’s Blast franchise, which is currently led on Facebook by Collapse Blast.

Zynga’s is better known for its role-playing and simulation games like FarmVille or CityVille, but in the last 12 months, the developer has turned to other genres in an attempt to broaden its audience reach. In the arcade genre, Zynga released match-3 arcade game Bubble Safari early last month both on Facebook and its own platform, Zynga.com. On the Facebook side, the game is up to 19.8 million monthly active users and 6.9 daily active users as recorded by our AppData traffic tracking service. Bubble Safari is also currently ranked No. 129 on the Top Grossing chart in Facebook’s newly-launched App Center.

The big story last week was Zynga’s falling stock, which dropped all the way to $5.02 at its lowest ebb. Pundits blame the decline both on Facebook’s lackluster IPO and disappointed investors and on Zynga’s own failure to release another high profile game on the order of CastleVille or Draw Something. In its Q1 2012 earnings report, the developer announced higher-than-ever bookings and an outlook of $1.425 billion to $1.5 billion in total bookings for the year. Zynga’s second quarter ends on the final day of this month.

We’ve reached out to Zynga for comment and will update this story when we hear back.

Pettington Park is a new Google+ release, developed by Loot Drop and published by Zynga. The game is a markedly different experience from the developer’s other recent release Ghost Recon Commander, but as other developers and publishers are starting to abandon G+ as a viable social games platform, will this title have what it takes to survive on Google’s social network?

Pettington Park is a game that tasks players with building a successful amusement park for either the dogs or cats faction, who are locked in an eternal struggle for supremacy. The player selects their faction and designs an avatar of the appropriate species upon starting the game for the first time, and is unable to change this choice once play has begun — though their avatar can be outfitted with alternative clothing items. Faction choice determines which team players will be on in the game’s light player-vs-player elements, and also affects the ongoing narrative that runs through the game’s quests.

There are lots of things to do in Pettington Park. Primarily the player will be concerned with securing a source of income in the early stages of the game, which comes from constructing arcade machines. This is accomplished in the same way as building structures in similar titles — structures are placed from the shop, and then require several clicks’ worth of energy plus some collectible resources to complete. Players may ask friends for resources, but most can either be scavenged or purchased, meaning solo players are able to make progress without running into a form of friend gate.

Each arcade machine comes from a particular region, most of which are groan-inducing animal-themed puns on real-world countries, and placing decorations from that region near the relevant arcade machines boosts their profitability and the potential for high scores — for all the machines are playable, offering a variety of minigames ranging from takes on pachinko to match-3 puzzlers.

Pettington Park’s non-player characters will occasionally wander over and play the arcade machines, providing the player with a slow source of income. But if the player wishes to compete in the “cats vs dogs” component of the game, they will have to play the games themselves. This costs “tokens” to accomplish. Tokens are an in-game currency that is reserved purely for playing the arcade machines, and are stored separately from the player’s energy, soft and hard currency stocks. Additional tokens may be acquired by visiting friends, allowing social players to make larger contributions to the “war” effort. Upon completing a play session, the player’s high score is tallied and boosted by any nearby appropriate decorations. The player is then given a rundown of how cats and dogs are shaping up against each other in the overall war effort, and is then encouraged to play more either to secure their faction’s lead or to retake the top spot from their opponents. A detailed weekly “challenge checklist” allows players to see how the two factions compare in terms of specific game high scores, number of plays, number of machines built and total scores. The challenges reset every week, allowing for balanced competition.

Pettington Park is clearly trying to provide something a little different from conventional building games, and in that respect it succeeds quite well. The inclusion of the playable minigames helps break up the monotony of clicking on things to harvest resources, and also provides players with something to do while their energy restores. The player-vs-player component (or, perhaps more accurately, faction-vs-faction) also helps provide an incentive for players to check in on the game more regularly, particularly if they are competing against a friend in a rival faction. The game’s story — in which the player’s avatar is an important character with its own dialogue rather than a passive, silent observer — is gradually revealed through some of the game’s quests, also adds an element of intrigue to the proceedings and further incentive for players to keep playing.

The only question looming over the game is whether it will be a success in the long run. As we have already seen from Wooga’s departure and EA’s closure of Bejeweled Blitz, developers and publishers are seemingly starting to lose faith in G+ as a viable platform. At present, Pettington Park does not feature many avenues of monetization — at present, hard currency is only used for speeding up the “reboot” of an arcade machine after its income has been collected, a couple of vanity items for the player avatar, and energy/token top-ups. For the game to be profitable, it is going to need to attract a decent-sized audience. Judging from the in-game statistic on the number of “Pawchinko” machines built — the first arcade machine players are given access to — there appears to be something in the region of 12,000 players playing at the time of writing, though this is obviously an imprecise calculation. Whether or not the game will be successful in the long run depends entirely on whether Loot Drop and Zynga are able to acquire sufficient users to make the game sustainable. If they can’t, it would be a shame not to see the game launch on Facebook instead — it’s a good quality experience that offers something a bit different from the usual.

Wait

A good game that is very much worth playing, though whether or not the choice of Google+ as its launch platform was a smart one remains to be seen.

TubeHero from JamRT has been available on Facebook for some time now, but a brand new multiplayer update looks set to revitalize interest in this innovative rhythm game.

TubeHero is, as the name suggests, a take on the popular Guitar Hero series of music games that were popular on home consoles a few years ago. Basic gameplay involves hitting keys on the computer keyboard (or a USB guitar controller) as colored “notes” move down a highway towards the player. The more accurately the player hits the timing of the notes, the more points they will score, and the more notes they successfully hit without making a mistake, the higher their score multiplier will rise.

TubeHero’s twist on the conventional formula is that it makes use of YouTube videos for its background music. This provides the game with a wide and ever-changing library of music to use rather than limiting players to a fixed setlist or requiring them to purchase new songs individually. Players who set a world record on a song are able to “capture” it for a token (earned through play or purchased), and are encouraged to return and assert their dominance over their favorite tracks every day, otherwise their “hero” status will expire.

The new multiplayer component of the game allows up to four online players to compete simultaneously on the same song. Unlike the solo play mode, there is a much more limited number of tracks available for play in multiplayer, presumably to make it easier to find opponents. Even with just five tracks available at the time of writing, however, it was sometimes difficult to find anyone to play against — though this situation will likely change as more users come to the game and give it a try.

While single player makes use of an energy system to throttle play, multiplayer sees players each contributing tokens to a communal pot, with the winner receiving them as a prize. This allows players to compete in multiplayer as a means to earn more tokens, though at a rather slow rate. It also allows players to play against live opponents while waiting for their single player energy to restore.

There is a major issue with multiplayer at the time of writing, though this is more to do with the player community than the game itself. Out of 10 multiplayer sessions played, not one of them saw an opponent staying in the game until the end of the song. This is a common problem with online gaming, as some players decide they would rather quit out of a competitive match than accept a loss. Some online games penalize players for dropping out of a game before it has finished — often an effective deterrent to this behavior — but there does not appear to be any such penalty in place in TubeHero aside from the fact that the quitting player loses the tokens they gambled on the multiplayer match.

A broader issue with TubeHero’s gameplay is that the notes the player is tapping out on their keyboard or guitar have little to do with the background song bar keeping roughly the same tempo. In the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series of console games, the notes the player had to play on their instrument followed the melodic and rhythmic shape of the backing track — and the game’s sound engine would also mute the part of the track the player’s instrument was supposed to be playing if they made a mistake. Since TubeHero is simply processing YouTube videos and generating levels based on them rather than using specially programmed tracks, there is no means for the game to do this, meaning the game’s note patterns have a more random, disconnected feel, and there is less audio-visual feedback for a player while they are playing than in specialist titles.

In order to acquire and retain users for the multiplayer component in particular, something needs to be done about players dropping out of games early, and more players need to be encouraged to join the competitive community. These are considerations which any multiplayer game needs to make, and at the time of writing it does not look as if TubeHero has taken any steps to deal with these issues.

Since there is no direct interaction between players at all, a better implementation of multiplayer might have been to use an asynchronous solution, where players compete against “recordings” of opponents on a set of songs that changes regularly. Weekly tournaments could be held, with token prizes on offer for winners. An implementation such as this would wipe out “rage-quitting” players and help deal with any potential difficulty in building up a player base in one fell swoop, but would also require a fundamental rethinking and rebuilding of the current multiplayer game structure.

As it stands, TubeHero is an innovative music game that makes clever use of the Internet to provide a fun and varied — if flawed — experience for rhythm game fans. The multiplayer mode needs some serious work to be viable, though the simplicity and popularity of the concept may see it enjoying some success in the short term. For now, it’s one to keep an eye on and see if players take to it.

TubeHero currently has 1,200,000 monthly active users and 70,000 daily active users. Follow its progress with AppData, our tracking service for social games and developers.

Wait

A decent game, though the new multiplayer mode needs some serious work. Keep an eye on this one to see if players respond positively to the new additions.