OpenFeint

Farm Break is a free, sheep-themed arcade puzzler with cute art direction and decent level design.

The game's central schtick--as revealed in a children's-book-style prologue slideshow--is that you're helping three larcenous sheep escape from a farm, by outsmarting and outmaneuvering the many traps (i.e., puzzles) set by the farmer. You alternately control three different sheep (Sally, Knuckles, and Big Jim, each with their own sounds and personality), using their various characteristics (e.g., Sally's strength, or Big Jim's ability to squeeze through small spaces) in tandem to defeat the game's 25 physics-based puzzles … Read more

After two months of waiting, Android users will be getting the first batch of OpenFeint-enabled games this week.

Among some of the notable launch titles will be Half Brick Studios' Fruit Ninja, MiniSquadron by Supermono, and Must.Eat.Birds by Mediatonic--all of which will feature the same version of the company's social-gaming platform offered on Apple's iOS.

OpenFeint, which can be found in many of the top games on the iOS platform, offers game developers a way to add things like achievements, in-game currency, and intra-network messaging to their titles. More recent versions also add things like cloud-based … Read more

Cross-platform social-gaming network OpenFeint is bringing out on Wednesday a new version of its service with a new invite system and time-based leaderboards.

Gamers running titles with version 2.6 of OpenFeint will be able to share a title they're playing from within the app, just as Apple does via e-mail from within the App Store and as competitor Plus+ does via its internetwork messaging system. New to OpenFeint is a way to send recommended games out as an SMS to a friend. These are sent not from your phone or game device, but from OpenFeint itself, meaning that … Read more

OpenFeint, the free social-networking layer that can be found on a large number of iOS games, is headed to Google's Android platform.

According to the company, Android developers will be getting the same version of the OpenFeint SDK that's available for iOS developers. The Android release will also include the game discovery tools, and a micropayments system that was introduced as part of OpenFeint X platform back in February.

iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users who have ventured onto the App Store in the past year have undoubtedly noticed OpenFeint's presence, as the service has been built … Read more

Gamers who use Apple's iPhone, iPod Touch, and now the iPad are likely to be looking forward to Apple's "Game Center" network, which was announced among the other updates as part of iPhone OS 4.0. But what about the companies that are running existing social networks for the platform?

It's not the end of the world, apparently.

Ngmoco, maker of popular game titles such as Rolando, We Rule, and Touch Pets, also created the Plus+ social network. It's built in to all of its own titles, as well as a select group of games from other developers. Ngmoco's chief publishing officer, Simon Jeffrey, told CNET that the company "has anticipated this move from Apple for some time," and that it should bring a "cleaner developer and consumer experience."

But what does that mean for the Plus+ implementation that has been built into more than 75 titles? "Plus+ took a strategic shift in direction a few months ago toward being a service, and less about being a set of social-gaming features," Jeffery said in a statement. "Plus+ is all about empowering monetization and discoverability mechanisms for the development community, and we have clearly demonstrated with games like We Rule that these mechanisms work."

Discoverability was, in fact, one of the biggest benefits of using services like Plus+, but it's also something Apple plans to offer within its Game Center. Plus+'s implementation was to show you what your friends were playing, as well as show off games that had just been launched. According to the very few details mentioned by Scott Forstall, Apple's senior vice president of iPhone software, during Thursday's press event, both of these things will be a part of the Game Center framework.

So does that mean that Plus+ is going to be more focused on advertising and the metrics of what users are doing within apps? If so, that's another area where Apple has delved into with its iAds platform.… Read more

The micropayment ecosystem on Apple's App Store is about to change. California-based Aurora Feint, makers of the OpenFeint iPhone developer platform--which is currently the most popular social-development network on the iPhone, is testing out a new version of OpenFeint, called OpenFeint X (ten) that brings its own microtransactions to the table.

This is notable, in that Apple has kept the bare minimum that users can spend on or within an application at 99 cents. OpenFeint is not trying to get around this policy for in-app payments, but it's giving developers a simple storefront architecture on which to … Read more

Until now, Apple has held an odd place in the gaming industry. Many of the hottest games for the PC have never sold as well on the Mac, due not only to a smaller market share, but also Apple offering only a handful of hardware configurations that can run the latest, graphics card-melting titles.

But on the iPhone and iPod Touch things have been different.

Apple now markets the iPod Touch as a gaming device. Both it and the iPhone 3GS contain updated hardware that can run 3D (and 2D) games quite well. On top of that platform, developers have … Read more