Your weekly wrap-up (in this case, making up for a few weeks!) of casual, social and video gaming news. Got a news tip? Send it to robin@funtank.com!

Game Releases
One of our biggest games of the month launched yesterday – RIFT! You play as a cute little robot designed with one task in mind: to bring cake to your blubbery master. The puzzle-platformer comes with 20 levels (20 additional are available with Mochicoins). If you’re enjoying the game, don’t miss the interview we posted with the game’s creator, Jan Rigerl.

In the last few weeks, we also launched Football Superstars, Crunchball 3000, Ballery and Clockwords: Prelude. The latter three feature new trophies as well!

Rounding up Candystand game news, we finally released Electric Box Level Pack Vol. 2 — a set of ten Electric Box puzzles from our own community. Some of them are pretty challenging – we dare you to conquer them (or don’t and post new ones instead!).

The video game world saw the launch of this fall’s defining hit games. And guess what? They’re all sequels. Modern Warfare 2, the follow-up to 2007’s critically acclaimed first-person war shooter, shattered day-one sales records across all forms of entertainment (including the premiere of The Dark Knight) as it shook up blogs and news stations with discussion of its controversial airport terrorism scene. Co-operative zombie apocalypse game Left 4 Dead 2 — sequel to last year’s Valve hit — also debuted this week, as well as Assassin’s Creed 2, Ubisoft’s return to the DNA memories of one hapless Desmond Miles (hidden blades and rooftop parkour runs in the family, apparently).

Oh right, and there was a new game with some guy named Mario as well.

News

Facebook’s social games developers, most notably Zynga, maker of Farmville, Mafia Wars and Cafe World, have come under fire lately for incentivizing offers from scammy companies in exchange for in-game currency and items. Facebook took it a step further this week by banning two offer providers themselves. Will this slow development of these games, even as they grow userbases exponentially?

Player Highlights

Congrats to our Facebook fan Beckey Sanders-Devore for winning this week’s T-shirt drawing! She and a friend will receive tees of their choice from our Candystand merchandise shop.

Also a big thanks to Twitter followers @Reahani, @LarryEisner, @Alison_Claire and @PROTIPZ for pimping our games this week!

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the guys at Valve should be blushing red right about now. We mentioned our new game, R.I.F.T., and its similarity to 2007’s hit puzzle-physics game Portal before, but it wasn’t until today that we discovered another homage: an Easter Egg cheat that generates heart-stamped boxes identical to the one players took care of (and then well, if you played the game… you know what happens) during a level of Portal. Check out the video below to see it in action, then hit the jump to see how we did it

Continue Reading…

Having trouble with our puzzle-platforming cake-fetching-robot game, RIFT? Here are the video walkthroughs for all twenty levels of the game, which just launched today.

We’re gearing up for the launch of this week’s new release, R.I.F.T.! The puzzle-platformer will debut on Candystand.com Thursday morning, along with brand-new trophies. We had a chance to interview lead designer Jan Rigerl about the game.

“I knew I wanted to create a platform game and I wanted portals in it, also I wanted some weird maybe slightly disturbing humor in it… We wanted a robot with tracks and big arms to grab boxes, only after the graphics were done and we put it into the game did we realize that it looked a lot like Wall-E.”

Read the full interview after the jump >
Continue Reading…

Stuck on a game? We post walkthroughs, cheats and hints on our blog, (you are here). Look for upcoming tips and tricks straight from the developers who make our games, as well as roundups of the walkthroughs that we find around the web.

Add games to your favorites list for easy access. You’ll see heart icons around the site when you’re playing a game, and if you log in, you’ll be able to click on them to add games directly into your favorites list. Your favorites list is available on your profile page, as well as towards the bottom of the main page of Candystand.

You have a public profile, sharable with friends! Want an easy way to show off your world ranking, trophies, latest activity and favorites to other people? Go to http://www.candystand.com/users/[yourusername] — you don’t even have to be logged in to see it.

Our critters have names! Mouse (pink), Hopper (red), Monster (purple), Fraser (yellow), Flipper (orange), Skully (the one with bolts), Cathy (green), Big Blue (blue). They are featured in several of our games: Pocket Bike Racing, Critter Pinball and Bombs Away. You can also get them on a t-shirt! Speaking of which…

We have a T-shirt shop! You can buy all sorts of merchandise from tees, mugs, caps, aprons and mousepads featuring your favorite Candystand critters as well as some of our most popular games. Show your Candystand pride by buying from the Candystand Shop!


Missed the first five tips and tricks? Read them here!

As previously announced, we’re bringing one of our most popular tower defense games to the iPhone and PSP! Original Vector TD designer David Scott got his hands on a preview build of the game on his iPhone — check out the video below! We’re still working on tweaks to both iPhone and PSP versions — expect both to hit just after the holiday season.

Thanks to handy Wordpress plugin WPtouch, browsing our blog on your iPhone (it also works on the iPod Touch, Android, a selection of Blackberries and a few other phones) has never been easier! If you visit blog.candystand.com on a supported device, you’ll be treated to a stripped-down, fast-loading version of the site, which means you’ll never miss an update while you’re on the go.

Here’s what the site will look like on the iPhone/iPod Touch:

As you see in the third screenshot, you can even comment directly from your phone, too!

Let us know what you think of the new interface in the comments. Do you usually browse Candystand from your phone? Or any other sites?