Best of FingerGaming: From The Sims 3 to My Brute

[Every week, Gamasutra sums up sister iPhone site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by editor in chief Danny Cowan and authors Tim Lockridge, Louise Yang, Jonathan Glover, and Eric Caoili.] This week, FingerGaming highlights notable releases like The Sims 3 and My Brute, and details the upcoming release of Mass Effect Galaxy. Featured reviews for this week cover Trivial Pursuit and G. - Top-Selling Paid Game Apps for the Week "The Sims 3's victory this week is significant, considering its relatively high price point of $9.99. Even big-name releases like Peggle often fail to take the top chart spot at any point in their sales lifespan -- 99-cent titles traditionally outperform their higher-priced competition in terms of daily download numbers, if not actual revenue." - Review: G "Think of Scorched Earth, but in space. Players specify the angle, force, and after-burner of rockets firing out of a base ship. Once the rocket leaves the ship at its pre-determined trajectory, it falls in the hands of gravity of nearby planets and masses." - Interview: Monster Pinball Developer Matmi "Matmi's first title, Monster Pinball, released late last week, sees the the marriage of the firm's trademark character-based contemporary art with something surprisingly substantive: a pinball game with a genuine, mechanical heft." - Bulkypix Brings Multiplayer Combat Title My Brute to iPhone "My Brute is a multiplayer combat coaching simulator, with a heavy emphasis on stat-building and experience grinding. Players guide customizable characters up through the ranks of an online leaderboard, defeating opponents and recruiting pupils along the way." - Student iPhone Developers Get $25,000 DARE Award "Stony Brook's DARE competition challenges students to create and develop new business enterprises. For the contest, the Orellis prepared a business plan and gave a presentation to a panel of judges detailing their future plans for Sobits, an iPhone-focused development studio." - BioWare Explains Challenges of Mass Effect Galaxy's Development "The iPod touch and iPhone are pretty powerful game devices, but even so, we had to pick and choose how strongly we were going to pursue cinematics, voice over, special effects and so on. We figured that an animated 2D graphic novel-style presentation was the best way to tell our story on this device." - Top Free Game App Downloads for the Week "Digital Chocolate tops this week's charts with Rollercoaster Rush, a recently released action title adapted from a Facebook application. LOLriffic Stuff's trivia party game What Would You Choose? follows at second place, as the Pipe Dream-like puzzler Toobz-Free comes in at third." - EA's The Sims 3 Premieres in App Store "The Sims 3 includes many of the same features enjoyed by PC users -- players can still build and customize a Sim character from scratch, and gameplay involves similar character development goals and milestones." - Chillingo's Knights Onrush Now on App Store "Knights Onrush includes 12 castles to defend, 11 enemy types (Wizards, Cataplts, Assassins, and more), defensive structures like a squasher and flamethrower, different landscapes, an endless siege mode, and a madness mode." - Review: Trivial Pursuit "The unassuming nature of Trivial Pursuit ultimately makes it a fantastic iPhone port, featuring a wealth of modes, a serious challenge, and some fantastic visual flair."