Blog Posts by Mike Smith

Cityville: quite popular

Facebook smash Farmville has become synonymous with the spectacular success of
social games, rocketing to prominence since its June 2009 debut with over 50 million regular players. It's even been blessed with its own "For Dummies" book, launching in February.

Popular though it is, it's about to be eclipsed, says blog InsideSocialGames, by its 18-day-old baby brother Cityville.

Cityville, which launched on December 2, shares much with Farmville -- including
its developer, Zynga, which Farmville helped propel to a market valuation in excess of $5.5 billion. Much as the name suggests, Cityville tasks players with developing a
city rather than a farm, building housing, businesses and roads,

The Kinect For some, Kinect is just a neat new way to play games.

For others, it's a challenge.

Packing a high-tech collection of cameras and sensors and attached to a tantalizingly universal USB plug, it was only a matter of time before imaginative hackers figured out how to talk to its hardware and unleash its full potential.

We didn't expect it to be quite so quick, however. The first efforts at homebrewed Kinect-using systems came within days of its November release; a month later, the web is packed with a bewildering variety of insane tech-demos for Kinect applications we're pretty sure Microsoft never even dreamt of. Here's some of the most imaginative.

[Related: Kinect sued over mixed martial

Humble Bundle: warm fuzzies

Fed
up with disappointing, big-budget, $60 video games? A new bundle deal
offers you the chance to get five of the indie world's biggest hits for
whatever price you feel like paying -- and much of the proceeds are
going to charity.

"Humble zndie Bundle 2" includes Braid, Cortex Command, Machinarium, Osmos, and Revenge of the Titans, and it's currently on sale on the Humble Bundle web site. The games are all DRM-free and are considered some of the best-regarded independent efforts released in the last few years. Purchasers can
assign their money between charity Child's Play, advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the games' respective development teams.

So far, over 100,000

Super Mario All-Stars

Platforms: Wii

It's-a-me!

Happy
birthday, Mario. It's been 25 years since his genre-defining appearance in
Super Mario Bros. on the NES, and this week sees a compilation of four of his
best-loved appearances releasing on the Wii.

Super Mario: All-Stars is actually a re-release of a SNES compilation of the same
name, which bundles Super Mario Bros. 1, 2, 3, and the game released in Japan
as Super Mario Bros. 2 (but in the U.S. as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels).
It's a bit baffling, we know, so suffice it to say that what you get is a
collection of four NES Super Mario platform classics ported to the Wii with
very little in the way of changes and updates.

But that's not to

Papa Smurf: not gonna take it any more

When
acclaimed indie game designer Jenova Chen -- the brain behind Zen masterpieces Flower and Flow -- figured out he could cheat his way to success in iOS social hit Smurf Village, he was the envy of his fellow
players in a matter of hours.

But as any Smurf will tell you, cheating is not very smurfy.

Chen, who had been playing Smurf Village to investigate the formidable
popularity of social games, found out he could fool the game into
thinking time had passed by altering his iPad's internal clock. That let
him build up a level 21 village -- an impressively high level -- in a
matter of hours, he told Kotaku.

Don't try it at home, though. Papa Smurf is onto you.

After an update issued by

Infinity Blade: a looker Not only is it probably the best-looking app on the App Store, it's now the fastest grossing to boot.

Yup, one-on-one fantasy swordfighting game Infinity Blade boasts graphics
courtesy of Epic's Unreal engine -- the same tech that powers hits like Bioshock 2 (Buy | Search), Mass Effect (Buy | Search), and Gears of War (Buy | Search) -- and now Apple's Game Center indicates nearly 300,000 people have downloaded the game in its first
four days of availability. At $5.99 a copy, that equates to a take of a
record-breaking $1.7m -- and in a market where it's difficult for
anything priced higher than $0.99 to gain any traction, that's a real
feat.

It may only be part of the story. Epic's Mark

Mass Effect 3

The music industry has the Grammys, Hollywood has the Oscars, and the
video game world has, for better or worse, the Spike TV Video Game Awards. Packing the Los
Angeles Convention Center with celebs, legendary game developers and eager press, this year's award ceremony is over and
done with -- and we've got the complete list of winners (and losers).

The night's undisputed champion was Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption,
winning "Game of the Year" in addition to "Best Original Score," "Best
DLC," and "Best Song." Musician José González put in an appearance to
celebrate the latter, performing his work "Far Away," well known to fans
as the memorable song playing as Red Dead's protagonist first

Download Bejeweled 3 - Popcap

It's been lauded as the most popular puzzle game of the century, but as Bejeweled 3 debuts on an unsuspecting public, is there really anything
left to do with its enduringly popular match-three gameplay?

Actually, yes. Lots.

Rather than make major changes to Bejeweled's formula (a path trodden by 2008's
Bejeweled Twist, with limited success), developer Popcap opted to heap on a
variety-packed selection of new play modes. Four are available immediately, and
a further four await you; you'll unlock them during your first few hours' play.
Check out a few of our favorites.

Download Bejeweled 3 Now

Zen
mode

Ever Bejeweled your way to a higher state of consciousness? While achieving true