Best Of FingerGaming: Equilibrio, Villagers, and Topple

Author: by Matt Burris

[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 Matt Burris.] This week's notable items in the iPhone gaming space include the Equilibrio developer diary's debut, Vivendi's Virtual Villagers: A New Home, and a review for ngmoco's Topple. Here are the top stories: Equilibrio Developer Diary "This column is intended to give you some insights about what’s going on in an independent game studio which is currently working on its first iPhone project called Equilibrio." Virtual Villagers: A New Home in App Store "Vivendi Games Mobile has brought their popular casual village simulator game, Virtual Villagers, to the iPhone in Virtual Villagers: A New Home ($7.99). The game’s main attractions are the puzzles and mystery on the island you play on, with each section of the island containing its own stories." Finger Gaming Review: Topple "Trends in the App Store has shown that quick, fun low-cost games are the ones getting the most attention and purchases. Topple achieves this by being a game you can quickly get into, have fun, and then exit when you have to. The goal is to stack a bunch of mischievous, depraved shapes as high as you can within a set amount of time without everything toppling over." Ikanoid Changes Name to Space Buster "Storybird had to change the name of Ikanoid to Space Buster due to legal threats from Atari, and to also prevent the same from happening from Taito, who owns the Arkanoid franchise." Beat Puzzlotto, Win A Possible $30,000 "The reason for the “up to $30,000″ statement is that it depends on when the game is solved. For each day the game hasn’t been completed yet, a $1,000 is added to the pool to be won, up to a maximum of thirty days ($30,000)." Spore: Origins LE, Free in App Store "For those of you that have held off on buying Spore: Origins ($7.99), EA Mobile has made available a free version in the App Store so you can try it out and see if it’s worth purchasing."