As a game, NES Games has nothing wrong with it. As a social game, there is much to be desired. Like many ports, the developers seem to just throw the ROM material up on the site and hope that the user figures out what to do with it.

NES Games has a lot going for it. Over a thousand NES titles, to be exact. This includes Duck Tales, the NES Game, which is the greatest game of all time. Additionally, the app has a user rating system, a tiny invite button, and a way to submit other ROMs to the list.

That said, the games are prone to crash your browser, some just don’t work, and the app suffers from a sloppy interface. It is what it is - more of a static website than a moving, breathing fiber in the social graph.

Gameplay: 10 (Duck Tales!)

Development: 3

How many games? 1440 by my count.

With the help of Zynga, Tyler sent her on a secret agent scavenger hunt within a special Scramble game containing the words “Will You Marry Me.”  Her mission was to decode the message before time runs out and save the world.

“I had been trying to think of a creative way to engage for a while,” said Tyler, remembering his planning process. “We like spy movies, so I decided to send her on a scavenger hunt where she would be a secret agent. The Scramble folks were nice enough to fill in a board with a ‘marry me’ message and it became a mission to decode the secret message before time ran out and she was discovered.”

How did it work out?

“I think she really liked it, at least that is what she told me!  She said yes,” Tyler grins.

The couple, who met in college at UC Santa Barbara, will be finishing their teaching stint at a community college in Conception, Chile, before they tie the knot later this year.

• Primarily contain “levels” and “worlds” created by users
• Grow more quickly since users are more likely to invite friends to play a game which they co-created
• Show better retention qualities since users are more likely to accept invitations from friends for games which their friends co-created

SGN’s new Name It is one of the first pure play games to take advantage of this idea (which SGN calls “wiki games”). Name It is a word game in which users play against their friends to think of words in 5 different categories, all starting with a given letter, before time runs out.

Since launching two weeks ago, players have already created thousands of answers and hundreds of categories. About 100,000 people on Facebook have played, and it’s growing quickly (with a 13% DAU rate).

Many other social applications (like various quiz apps) have done well on Facebook by creating a platform for users to create content and share it with their friends in a compelling, interactive way. I expect to see many more “UGGC” games succeed on Facebook in the coming weeks and months.

Scott Derringer is joining Zynga as vice president of product management from Yahoo! Inc., where he served as senior director of product management. Derringer will be responsible for developing online games and will report to CEO Mark Pincus. At Yahoo!, he played a key role in developing the company’s community strategy and overhauling Yahoo! Groups

Hugh de Loayza is joining as vice president of business development and will be responsible for developer relations, mergers and acquisitions and licensing opportunities. He will report to Andrew Trader, executive vice president of sales and business development. De Loayza is a games industry veteran having served as senior director of business development for Oberon Media building partnerships with EA/POGO, United Online, Verizon, ATT, Hewlett Packard and Hasbro.

Another entry in the “Why didn’t I think of that first?” category of Facebook apps, Pieces of Flair allows you to add customizable buttons called “flair” to your Facebook collection.

When it’s working (the profile page integration isn’t quite always working for me), Pieces of Flair provides another fun way to personalize your profile and send things to friends. While not quite a “game” per se, collecting items is an addictive hobby for many.

With Pieces of Flair, you can buy from a countless selection of button designs (many are user created) or make your own. The game’s economy (which lets you purchase and send pieces of flair) functions by users sending their favorite content to someone else, inviting friends to the application, or logging on once a day.

These are basic steps and good ways of retaining users. With over 400,000 daily active users, Pieces of Flair is growing quickly, and just got acquired by major Facebook application developer RockYou.

I only wish they’d think of a clever way to sell people these buttons in physical form. I’d buy a few of the buttons that say “Save Ferris!”

Gameplay: 6?

Developers: 7

Percent Complete: 60

• Second Life: $9.30/active user/month (largely due to land maintenance fees)
• Club Penguin: $1.62/active user/month
• Habbo Hotel: $1.30/active user/month
• Runescape: $0.84/active user/month

However, no data has been published from developers of “MMOs” running on social platforms. While several top Facebook game developers have been claiming “impressive numbers” from digital goods, would anyone like to predict exactly what “good” means on social networks?

SGN says it will use the funding to “continue to push the envelope on the quality of games being produced on the social web, with the vision of connecting people in a way never experienced before.”

“We are proud to be announcing the Bezos Expeditions investment,” said Shervin Pishevar, CEO of SGN. “Mr. Bezos’ knowledge and experience lends itself to the growth and expansion of the social gaming ecosystem. His participation in our funding will allow us to continue capturing new demographics in gaming by distributing the highest quality games available on the social web.”

“SGN has the expertise to bring gaming into entirely new markets.” says Steve Campbell, CIO of Bezos Expeditions. “There’s an obvious benefit to gaining such deep traction in the social networking area.”

As a fellow investor in SGN, Greylock Partners‘ David Sze today said “SGN is a force to be reckoned with in the gaming space. We are looking forward to Bezos Expeditions joining the SGN investors group.”

Now with Bezos on board, SGN has built an even stronger investor group. David Sze is a board observer at Facebook, and Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel holds a board seat. Bezos has also made investments in Pelago (makers of Whrrl), Twitter, Kongregate, TeachStreet, Powerset (recently acquired by Microsoft), ChaCha and 37signals.

So how do you effectively cross-promote a game?

By genre. Make sure that players of one game will actually want to play the other game. For instance, there’s a significant overlap of users between Scrabulous and Scramble because they are both word games. Yes, it’s shocking. People who like to play one word game also like to play another word game. However, they are not necessarily going to want to play Chess. Or Speed Racing.

By demographic. Courtesy of the casual game industry, we know that women like card, puzzle, word, and quiz games. And men like action and strategy games. Obviously there are exceptions, but as a general rule, these stereotypes hold. Use them to your advantage.

These make a lot of sense, but they’re also not unique to the social platform world. Are there ways that knowledge of the social graph could enhance cross promotion conversion rates significantly?

Some initial ideas:

• Synchronicity - “Your friend Jimmy is playing XXX right now. Do you want to join in?” This was a big part of what worked for us at Xfire in the beginning. (Would be a killer Facebook Chat API use case.)
• Multi-player recruiting - “Joe, Jane, and Jim will soon need a 4th player to join their group so they can achieve XXX in XXX game.”
• Endorsements - Simply applying the Social Ads concept to your game bar more explicitly

Will these get you offer some genre or demographic barriers, or will they only get you second order effects?

A puzzle game that asks you to clear the board of bricks, the game is more challenging than it first appears. You can only clear bricks that are in groups either horizontal or vertically touching. Initially this makes clearing the brightly colored bricks easy, but in the end you’ll inevitably be left with bricks of differing colors on opposite sides of the board and no where to turn. You only have a certain number of magic wands you can use to clear single bricks, and a poor use of clearing bricks early will mean you’ll be burning those wands early and often. You run out of magic wands and you lose.

I must admit this is one of the more challenging Facebook puzzle games out there. The Flash animation isn’t anything spectacular- only a handful of colors and very little game variety. It may keep some puzzle players coming back for more, or it may turn off casual gamers just as easily. The developers have a leaderboard set up, but a lot of the players on the boards keep complaining about inflated scores - suggesting that people have figured out a way to cheat.

There is also a tournament mode and a “collection” tab which can only be unlocked by inviting friends. The tournaments don’t work and this indicates to me the developers may be napping on keeping up with the application. The boards are littered with insults and offensive comments too, and while I don’t normally discredit a game for such behavior, I do think it’s an indication of how committed the moderators are to maintaining the community.

The puzzle aspect is compelling, but not enough to differentiate it from more well-developed Flash games… and the community aspect isn’t exactly “welcoming.”

Gameplay: 6

Development: 3

Difficulty: 8

Two Towers is a head-to-head numbers strategy game. Each segment of your tower has a number, and your goal is to make the numbers go from lowest to highest from the top to the bottom. Each turn, you have ten seconds to switch the number in the random player square with one of your segments. The first one to get their tower correctly aligned wins.

It’s immediately clear that there are some flaws with this game. The English tutorial isn’t translated very well, and is rather brief in its explanation of how to play. The Flash animation is adorable, but I was pretty confused what was going on the first few rounds. Just starting the game is a challenge due to the reliance on other players.

The interface for duels is confusing at best. There are three different mountain ranges to play in that are divided up according to their difficulty, but once you select one, you’re whisked away to a room to find opposing players, of which I could find almost none. I know this game has some popularity and some players, but I’ve had difficulty proving that.

Still, I give the developers props for the application being playable in three languages. The animation is great, the turn-based head-to-head gameplay is a great social element (when it works), and the challenging elements of the gameplay ensure replayability. The game is obviously in its beginning stages, and hopefully more players and their active input will result in a more streamlined finished product.

Gameplay: 6

Developers: 5

Potential: 7