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!