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Kotaku is reporting that Crytek, the company behind the CryEngine technology and the Crysis series of visually high-end first-person shooters, is in advanced stages of a new social gaming network that they’re calling GFACE. Yes, GFACE. I’m as baffled as you about the name, “game+Facebook” maybe?

Anyway, what the service known as GFACE actually claims to do sounds pretty cool. It runs completely in the browser and lets you do all the sorts of social things you would expect from your Facebook, Google+ or Twitter – add friends, post about your interests, discover new people, and plenty more. You can also meet up with people online and enjoy media-type things together, sort of like how you can watch a movie with friends in an Xbox Live party.

And of course, you can partner up and play games together. But this is the surprising part – all the game’s are streamed from the cloud on GFACE’s end, similar to how the OnLive system works. There’s a drag and drop party creation system that Kotaku likens to Battlefield 3‘s Battlelog, and then everybody plugs into the game on GFACE’s servers from their individual locations.

The interesting bit is that the type of gameplay seems to scale depending on what device you’re using. Like the graphic above, someone can be playing a first-person shooter on their PC while other players are connected to the game via their mobile devices, but with secondary roles. The person on the iPad has a commander role from a top-down perspective and the person on the iPhone-lookalike is directing a support weapon.

It’s a pretty exciting prospect thinking about being able to play games with people online in this fashion, utilizing different devices and gameplay perspectives all in the same game. I need another social network like I need a hole in my head, but the other features of GFACE sound pretty interesting as well. That name, though. Yeesh.

You can see a video of GFACE in action at the original Kotaku article or the GFACE website. The UI is bananas, everything is so smooth and high-tech feeling. I’m actually eager to check it out. Right now GFACE is in closed beta, but whenever it finally launches it will be interesting to see if it’s able to make an impact in the fledgling streaming game market or the nearly-impossible-to-compete-in social network market.

[Via Kotaku]

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Relax those fists and wiggle your fingers. If you weren’t elite enough to get into the Steam Mobile [Free] beta and are experience some, er, anger issues over the whole deal, you don’t have to anxiously ball up your hands anymore. The beta process has ended almost as suddenly as it began. The app is now available for all as a free download.

We’ve given Steam Mobile another look, and aren’t noticing any features that weren’t listed as initially beta features. Text-based chat with friends, profile and group stuff, as well as game shopping and asset viewing are all included in the package. And yeah, we also bought a game from a toilet. If this isn’t the future, then what is it?

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I hope NimbleBit believes in the saying “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” because they’ve certainly been the target of a boat-load of industry drama lately with not one but three individual TinyTower [Free] knock-off “betas” landing on the Canadian App Store in the last week. First there was Zynga’s Dream Heights [Free], then Glu’s Small Street [Free], and this morning we discovered another clone by Glu, Lil’ Dungeon [Free]. The main innovation of Lil’ Dungeon seems to be that you’re building down instead of up. Aside from some new graphics, just like the other clones, all of the gameplay elements are identical.

What’s more interesting than Glu mashing the green button on their copy machines is that Zynga actually has responded to the recent controversy. VentureBeat not only scored a interview with Mark Pincus, Zynga’s chief executive of social games, they also managed to snag a copy of a confidential memo he sent around. The takeaway from the interview is this:

In essence, Pincus is not saying that it’s OK to copy someone else’s game. Rather, he is saying that a company can make a contribution to the canon of gaming if it takes an existing game and improves it. That company can reimagine the game and remove all the barriers that stand between the game reaching a billion people.
…

“You should be careful not to throw stones when you live in glass towers,” Pincus said. “When you pull the lens back, you saw that their tower game looked similar to five other tower games going all the way back to SimTower in the early 1990s.” …Read More

In light of this news, I got in contact with NimbleBit’s Ian Marsh for a rebuttal to Pincus’ claims:

It is a smart idea for Mark Pincus and Zynga to try and lump all games with the name Tower together as an actual genre whose games borrow from each other. Unfortunately sharing a name or setting does not a genre make. The games Pincus mentions couldn’t be more different. Sim Tower is a true “sim” with macroscopic management and fine tuning of a buildings facilities. Tower Bloxx is a timing based high score game.

If you take a quick look before “pulling the lens back” as Pincus suggests, you’ll find an innumerable number of details in the game that were painstakingly crafted to be identical to Tiny Tower. These are core gameplay mechanics and rules, not similar settings or themes that games in the same genre might share.

Why are there 5 different business types like Tiny Tower? Why do 5 people fit in an apartment instead of 4 or 6? Why are there VIP elevator riders that perform the same functions as Tiny Tower? Why do businesses employ exactly 3 workers and produce exactly 3 products that are stocked in exactly the same way as Tiny Tower. Even the tutorials at the beginning of the game follow the exact same steps.

All of these things are poorly hidden underneath an uninspired veneer which has become Zynga’s trademark.

It’s hard to disagree with the NimbleBit guys on this one, and it’s equally difficult to find the “improvement” Zynga claims to have packed into Dream Tower. From where we’re sitting, it seems that the main “improvement” that they’re seeing is the Zynga dog in the top left corner of the Dream Tower app icon.

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They say that bad luck comes in threes, and that definitely seems to be the trend in last week’s news cycle. First Zynga ripped off Tiny Tower [Free], then Glu fired up their copy machines, and then some similar although unrelated drama hit the land of Triple Town [Free]. Gamasutra is all over this recent story, but I’ll provide a quick rundown-

Spry Fox’s Triple Town hit the App Store a couple weeks ago and it was clear that we loved it in our review. It’s even sort of an interesting take on the free to play model, as you can download and play the game for free and play for a limited number of turns. You can buy more turns with in-game coins which you can earn (and buy with real money) or just download the unlimited turns unlock for (currently) $3.99. If you don’t play much, or get bored easily, you might not ever need to buy anything… But once you get to the point where you need unlimited turns, chances are you’ve gotten way more than four bucks of entertainment out of the game anyway. I like that.

Anyway, according to the Spry Fox blog, they’ve filed a copyright infringement suit in federal court against 6Waves LOLAPPS due to Yeti Town [Free] which actually beat Triple Town to release by nearly a month. It’s the same sad story we hear way too often on the App Store in that Yeti Town relentlessly copies absolutely every aspect of Triple Town.

Per Spry Fox:

Yeti Town, as launched by 6waves, was a nearly perfect copy of Triple Town. We’re not just talking about the game’s basic mechanics here. We’re talking about tons of little details, from the language in the tutorial, to many of our UI elements, to the quantities and prices of every single item in the store (how exactly did 6waves “independently” decide to price 200 turns for 950 coins, or 4 wildcards for 1500 coins each? That’s quite a coincidence!)

This exact copying is also one of the things that really amused me about all of these Tiny Tower clones which all featured 5 categories of skills, 5 people per apartment, 3 people to a floor, 3 products per floor, 5 elevator upgrades, and other exact copies of core game mechanics. Unfortunately, you can’t copyright a game idea, which is why companies like Gameloft are able to do what they do. Yeti Town is different through, as allegedly Spry Fox was in intense negotiations with 6Waves to publish Triple Town on the App Store which abruptly ended when Yeti Town was released.

As part of this, 6Waves had closed beta access months before Triple Town went public and had been “pumping [Spry Fox] for private information” which included design ideas, Facebook launches, as well as revenue and retention figures. This sort of elevates the Yeti Town clone to an entirely different level of shadiness, at least in my eyes.

If you want to read the full text of the lawsuit, you can here. Now, let’s all go back to making our own original games, eh?

[via Gamasutra]

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Let’s wind the clocks back to Tuesday when news hit that Zynga was relentlessly ripping off NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower [Free] with their Canadian pre-release “beta” of Dream Heights [Free]. Dream Heights is basically identical to Tiny Tower in every way, except for the lack of the Bitbook and a different art style. News of this spread like wildfire, and it wasn’t long before even the mainstream media was reporting on it. (These are crazy times we live in, I tell you.) Well, Zynga has been silent on the matter as far as we can tell, which you’d think would result in a dead story.

Not so fast though, as Glu also seem to be anxious to hop on the relentlessly ripping off Tiny Tower bandwagon with a similar Canadian release of Small Street [Free]. Small Street is arguably an even bigger knockoff than Dream Heights with the only changes being the tower laid vertically into a street and the elevator car replaced with a taxi.

Fans of Tiny Tower will find these screenshots curiously similar:

I guess when it rains it pours in regards to cloning NimbleBit games. The only question left, is which company is going to release their own Tiny Tower knockoff next?

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Man, these digital platform companions apps come out of nowhere. Today, Valve, the creators of Half-Life and everyone’s favorite PC download platform, Steam, announced Steam Mobile [Free]. It’s what you think it is, which is to say, it’s a companion-y type of experience that’ll let you chat with Steam friends, view Steam groups and profiles, check out video game screenshots, and just about anything else Steam-related, including sales.

Best part? It’s available right now across iOS and Android. Worst part? This particular version is still in “closed beta.” To get in, you’ll need to sign into Steam through the mobile app as a way to “express interest in the beta.” Users will be rolled into the beta eventually.

Steam sales are deadly for our collective wallets under normal circumstances when we’re sitting at our computers. I’m not sure I’m ready to live in a horrible future where I’ll be able to impulse-buy $2.99 PC games from the toilet.

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Per the nearly standard operating procedure of “beta testing” wide-scale free to play titles, Canadians and “Canadians” can now get their hands on Zynga’s latest iOS game, Dream Heights [Free]. It doesn’t take more than a few quick glances at the screenshots and iTunes text to realize that Zynga has firmly focused their copy machines on NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower [Free]. It’s really incredibly just how blatant of a clone this is, as Zynga has gone far beyond just copying the premise of the game- They even directly lifted the restocking mechanics, elevator upgrades, UI elements, and more.

NimbleBit’s Ian Marsh has taken to twitter with an image that perfectly exhibits just how shamelessly Zynga’s “inspiration” is for this new free to play title of theirs with side by side screenshots and a hefty amount of trademarked NimbleBit snark.

Take a look:

(Click for full size, with many more comparisons.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out. Historically speaking, Apple has had a very hands-off approach to even the most blatant of clones on the App Store. But, we are talking their very own game of the year last year that’s being mercilessly knocked-off here, by Zynga of all companies. I doubt much if anything will actually happen, but I’m not sure how Zynga couldn’t stir up a hefty helping of bad blood amongst anyone who realizes that such a large company is lifting ideas straight from a three (3) man development studio.

We’ll have to see how Dream Heights does once it eventually sees its worldwide release. The amusing (and sad, to be honest) part of all this is that per another tweet, Zynga once attempted to acquire NimbleBit. If you can’t buy ‘em, clone ‘em?

Canadian App Store Link: Dream Heights, Free

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Red Zebra Game’s Raid Leader reminds me a lot of Mika Mobile’s Battleheart [$2.99]. Like that game, it’s a real-time strategy RPG hybrid that seamlessly blends these two styles of play into a series of trying instance-based conflicts. Where the two depart the most dramatically is in the name: raid.

In Raid Leader, you’ll be taking a knight, a mage, and an archer, against a variety of damage-eating, MMO-like bosses that all appear to have special mechanical hooks. For example, there’s a yeti-like monster with a freeze spell that turns its target into a block of ice. In order to break out, you’ll have to tap on the screen. There’s also a worm that, much to the archer and mage’s chagrin, spawns mobs of life-sucking blood leaches all over the battlefield.

Speaking of the battlefield, battle is pretty simple — just click and drag. When you click on a character, you’ll be able to assign actions like healing or attacking to friend or foe. Some monsters have area of effect attacks, and for those, you’ll have to move the party around all over the screen, or figure out intricate formations to lessen the blows. It’s tactical-light, but effective as Battleheart proved.

One noteworthy thing I’ve learned in my time with Raid Leader is that you can’t go into auto-pilot during fights. You can wipe, and wipe pretty fast, if you (a) don’t honor things like blood leaches, (b) keep all of the party alive, and (c) master the game’s skill system, which lets you take two different skills per character into fights.

The latter point is particularly noteworthy: as you progress you’ll earn currency to buy new skills, and those skills will be essential to countering specific bosses actions and battle needs. Skills, then, are more of a mechanical extension of recognition and exploitation, as opposed to being strictly about preference. It’s a neat and entertaining change of pace.

In my preview session, I didn’t push too far into the main campaign — which of course, revolves around a princess and her need for three heroes to defeat a great evil — but I get the sense that balance might be Raid Leader’s biggest hurdle. Hard and fun is great, but hard for the sake of it isn’t. MMOs seem to screw this up all the time, so Red Zebra needs to be extra careful here.

Raid Leader is being published by Crescent Moon Games as a Universal app, and it’s expected to be released “soon.” It’s currently in beta.

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Rift, a fairly popular MMO from Trion Worlds, has a mobile companion app. Earlier this December, the studio pushed out a free “beta” build that lets Rift users do all sorts of cool stuff, like, for example, chat in real-time with friends and guild mates, as well as peruse “the latest wall postings.”

Rift Mobile [Free], as it’s called, also comes stocked with a trio of mini-games — Planar Invasion, Craft Critters, and Shinies — that give players, and apparently not just ones with a Rift account, a “chance” to win in-game crafting and artifact loot. These games all seem pretty simple, but hey, loot.

Trion describes this release as the “first stage” of an overall Rift Mobile rollout. The final launch, accompanied by an Android app, is expected in Q1. We’re pretty stoked to see where this goes — no-one has really nailed an MMO companion app, so it’ll be fun to watch it grow and, hopefully, become truly awesome.

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Raising Big Poppa Pump hasn’t been easy. He gets hungry at weird times and doesn’t sleep through the night. He also isn’t the cleanest pocket monster I’ve ever owned. But I have a feeling that all this time spent grooming, teaching, and playing with him will lead to something truly rewarding. I’m talking about evolution, man — an incredible change that takes place because I’ve proved that I’m an awesome owner.

Big Poppa Pump is my little monster dude in Hatchi, Portable Pixel’s game for those of us who remember the Tamagotchi so fondly. The two games — and I use that loosely — are pretty similar. You hatch an egg that contains a monster, and then that monster becomes your digital pet. As an owner, you’ll be responsible for feeding, cleaning, entertaining and even applying first-aid to the little one.

Functionally, this is all really simple to do. If your monster’s “smarts” bar is low, and his energy is high enough for an activity, you click the book button to raise it. If his “hygiene” is low, you hit the baby button to give it a bath. If his energy is low, or if you just want a break, you can hit the lights and that puts him to sleep.

The sleep mechanic rolls in a little save state trickery, by the way. When you put a Hatchi down and exit out of the app, upon returning you’ll notice a slight visual hitch and then magically see the energy bar fill according to the amount of time he’s been doing the bed thing. My experience with this varies; sometimes Big Poppa Pump needs hours of rest, sometimes just dozens of minutes.

Most of my day with Big Poppa Pump isn’t spent doing anything thrilling, complex or even all that fun, which is why I hesitate to call this a game-game. In the mornings, I wake him up and grind until his needs are all completely met. I continue to do this through the afternoon until he gets too tired and needs that big nap. At night, I try to tire him out so he doesn’t wake up angry, unclean, and unsatisfied at 2AM.

My greatest fear as an owner is that he’ll die in the night, which is something that can happen. “Yes, it can die if you don’t look after it,” Portable Pixels tells us. “It will get sick first and you can use the first aid to cure Hatchi.”

It’s hilarious, but I really, really, really don’t want Big Poppa Pump to bite the dust. I’ve somehow bonded with the thing, as silly as that sounds, and the competitive part of my brain wants to see an evolution based on my meticulous play.

Big Poppa Pump isn’t evolving as fast as I’d want it to for our preview coverage, so I asked Playable Pixels how it works. “You’ll need to feed, clean, play with and generally look after your pet to ensure it grows up,” it tells us. “[Pets have] several different forms they can evolve into depending on how you look after them.”

That’s as much detail as we’re getting at the moment, but as you’ll see in the article, there are some pretty hip forms. Big Poppa Pump is getting a lot more exercise than he needs, so here’s to hoping that he evolves into a gigantic muscle monster.

That’s the experience as it stands now — train, wait, train, wait some more, and then receive some sort of evolution. In the future, though, Playable Pixels hopes to add a lot more content, including a social component, if sales are good.

“Initially its a retro theme, but we’ve had lots of ideas about bringing it into the mobile era. Taking him on day trips for example, or socializing with your friends Hatchis,” it tells us.

“One of our beta testers said she would give her left arm for a graveyard for all her past Hatchi’s, and one of our developers wants a defibrillator. Its really a side project inspired by a reddit post back in September.”

Portable Pixels says its been “fairly overwhelmed by the response” so far. In an effort to keep up with it, its set up an e-mail address for people to be notified when the game is hitting and for feedback purposes. That address, if you’d like to get in on this, is: hatchi@portablepixels.com.

Currently, the game is on track for a January 15th release at $.99 for iPhone and iPod Touch. A Universal version isn’t slated to happen yet, but it could if “the need is great enough.”

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