Today Playfish celebrates the launch of its latest game Crazy Planets, where we blast you and your friends into space for intergalactic battles on an epic scale!

In Crazy Planets all the action starts from the headquarters on your home planet where you recruit your own team of space troopers, specially selected amongst your friends, to take on the invading aliens and robots at full force. To make things even cooler, you can personalise your character by integrating your profile photo into your space suit.  Your enemies will definitely know that it’s personal!

Through battles and adventures you’ll discover remote planets where you can gather precious gems and metals to create new, more powerful weapons! Each weapon has its own behaviour and special powers, so building your team of troopers will require strategy and planning.

As team commander, you return to your home planet with new found riches to grow your world so it becomes the most powerful and renowned in the universe!

The true test for any space commander is, of course, how they can hold up in a battle against their peers. We’ll soon be introducing a real-time Multiplayer Arena where you’ll be able to put the tactics you’ve learned against aliens and robots to use against the ultimate competitor – your real-life friends!

With Crazy Planets, we set out to combine more active real time gameplay with elements of longer term growth and tactical depth. At the same time, we’ve aimed at creating a fun experience that feels fresh and creative, with the familiar playfish graphical style and approach to gameplay.

Throughout the closed beta we have received a lot of great feedback on how to improve the game (thank you, beta testers!). We have a nice roadmap of new features planned in the coming months, and as always, we look forward to hearing your ideas and comments about how we can take the game even further, so keep them coming!

So, assemble your troops and get ready for some explosive, out of this world fun!  Who will reign supreme in your galaxy of friends? Start your adventure now!

We sincerely thank you for all for your great contributions to Playfish’s I Play Here! competition. Once again, we were overwhelmed by your talent, passion and creativity, and touched by your continuing enthusiasm for what we do!

We asked you to take a photo of yourself holding up a Playfish logo. Exactly where you took the photo and what you were doing at the time was entirely down to you, and we had a lot of fun looking through all your entries to see all your fantastic and inspired ideas!

From all the amazing submissions, we chose our 50 favourites to become finalists. With prizes on offer for the top 10, we let YOU vote for the photos you liked the best, and here are the results!

So, let’s see who you voted for shall we?

The winner and proud owner of a shiny new Apple MacBook (making us all very jealous here at Playfish) is Paula from France, who took a spectacular picture of herself and a friend standing on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. At least, we think it’s Paula behind that cute Pet Society mask! Congratulations from Playfish, Paula!

Second place goes to Minerva from the Phillipines who seems to have been interrupted at an awkward moment while playing Pet Society. It’s a good thing she keeps a print of the Playfish logo with her wherever she goes or that could have been embarrassing! Minerva wins an 8GB Apple iPod Touch, which she’ll also be able to take wherever she goes. Congratulations, Minerva!

3rd place goes to Hathairat from Thailand. Hathairat wins a Playfish T-shirt, a Pet Society figurine, 25,000 Pet Society coins on Facebook and Pro Pack expansions for the Facebook versions of Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge and Geo Challenge. Hathairat’s photo was taken underwater, which we think might be an artistic metaphor for the aquatic nature of the name Playfish, or it might just have seemed like a cool idea at the time. Either way, the prizes are yours! Well done, Hathairat!

Additionally, Jermaine from the Phillipines and Angela from Mexico win a Playfish T-shirt, a Pet Society figurine, 20,000 Pet Society coins on Facebook and Pro Pack expansions for the Facebook versions of Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge and Geo Challenge. Well done to you both!

Finally, Laszlo from Hungary, Pirun from Switzerland, Annelies from Belgium, Enita from the USA, and Ario from Indonesia each win a Playfish T-shirt, 20,000 Pet Society coins on Facebook and Pro pack expansions for the Facebook versions of Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge and Geo Challenge!

Playfish congratulates everyone who participated in I Play Here!, and we thank you for your continued support. We hope you love playing each of our games as much as we love creating them for you!

Thank you all for your amazing entries to our competition where we asked where YOU play! With the entry period now closed it’s time for you to tell us whose entry you liked the most!

After much thought and sifting through all the many many amazing entries to the competition we chose the 50 finalists who we thought most deserved a place in the finals. Thank you to all of you who entered and a huge congratulations to the 50 contestants who made the final cut.

Now the voting is up to you. Which entry is your favourite? Which one makes you smile the most? Or laugh the most? Maybe you just like the way the photo was taken, or you wish you could play there too? Every vote counts, and with such amazing prizes up for grabs may the best entry win!

Vote for your favourite here!

Today we are proud to announce the release of our first social game for Android: Who Has The Biggest Brain? Like 15 million web users and countless iPhone users, Android fans will now be able to play together with their Facebook friends anytime, anywhere.

There are well over 3.5 billion mobile phones in use today. That is one phone for every two humans on planet Earth, in other words, mobile phones have become the most ubiquitous  platform in the history of mankind. Even the world’s 1.5 billion web users seem a small audience in comparison. Stats like this get us excited at Playfish where our mission is to change how the world plays games, no matter where they are played.

We’re committed to new and innovative platforms and are excited about our Android launch. We believe there is a revolution underway, transforming how games are played on mobile phones, through social network connectivity and friend-centric experiences.

Who Has The Biggest Brain?  is  available to download from the Android marketplace today, with Geo Challenge and Word Challenge to follow soon. We hope you enjoy it and would love to hear your feedback!

We’re so proud to see people from every corner of the globe enjoying Playfish games, and now we want you to show us exactly where YOU play! And to entice you, we’ve got some amazing prizes to give away!

Here’s all you need to do. Print out a Playfish logo and take a photo of yourself or you and your friends holding it. Now where you take the photo is up to you but the more fun, crazy and unexpected the shot the better, so put on your thinking caps and show us what you can come up with!

When you have your photo the rest is easy! Just follow the instructions to send us everything we need to enter you into the competition and youll have a chance at winning one of the amazing prizes!

This competition is open for submissions between the 5th and the 27th of May 2009. After that well select our top 50 finalist snapshots. Then YOU get to vote for your favourite!

So, where do you play?

We’re really proud to announce that Pet Society is now the most used app and game on Facebook with nearly 3 million daily active users and we’ve been working hard around the clock to keep bringing new features and additions, but we’d also like to show you something else we’ve been working on.

Cooking’s great. First you get to choose which ingredients to use. No more eating around the pickles. Next you get to use fun things like blenders. And then you actually get to eat it! But then there’s washing up. And drying. And putting away in closets. Kind of takes the fun out of it, doesn’t it?

So why not make your friends do it for you with Restaurant City!

First we’re going to give you your very own restaurant. You can name it, decorate it, fit it with all the equipment you need, and customize every little detail right down to the chimney pot. Or chimney pots. Or just make it one big chimney pot. The only limit is your imagination. Next up, we’re going to add a pinch of friendly rivalry. How about say a street full of your friends’ restaurants, all vying for the same customers? In fact, why not take a walk and check out the competition? You might be able to pick up a neat trick or two. Add a liberal sprinkling of different dishes which you can put on your very own menu — each requiring a different set of ingredients which you’ll need to find and trade with your friends — and you’ve got a recipe for some delicious fun!

So now you’ve got the smartest, best equipped restaurant on the block, you’re going to need to find someone to cook for you. That’s where your friends can help you out. You can choose who works for you and what they have to do. And if you’re feeling generous you can even let them take a break once in a while.

You can even buy new clothes for your character, to make them as smart or ridiculous as you like. It’s worth it just to see the look on your friend’s face when your character turns up for work at their restaurant wearing a cheese shaped hat!

We hope you like the art style we’re using in Restaurant City. We chose to go with a cartoon style because it’s easier to get great results in Flash, and choosing to work in three dimensions make the possibilities for you to customize your avatar endless.

So what are you waiting for? Click here to play Restaurant City now! We think you’re going to love it! And last but not least, a big thank you to everyone who’s been testing the beta version of the game. We’re still not ready to move the game out of beta yet but we’re enormously grateful for all of your suggestions to help make the game absolutely perfect, so please keep them coming so we can make the game work exactly as you’d like!

We’ve been delighted to watch the continuous growth of Pet Society – our social virtual world on Facebook and MySpace. Since launch 8 months ago it has grown steadily to become the biggest game on Facebook by daily active users. Around 3 million people play every day, and around 11 million played in the last month alone. Today we’re delighted to announce passing another milestone – 1,000,000 fans! And it’s the first game on Facebook to get there!

‘Love’ has always been an important success metric for us at Playfish. Our teams across our studios work hard to create games that our players love to play together as much as we love to create them. ‘Love’ is, of course, difficult to measure in numbers, but there is one metric on Facebook – fans. And today we’re proud that Pet Society has passed the 1 million fan milestone as the first game on the platform! That means that over 1 million players have found the ‘become a fan’ link in the game and chosen to register themselves as a fan of the game.

As ever, we’re hugely grateful to all our players and their support and help in our efforts to evolve the game and make it better. We appreciate that the game has a monthly population that’s bigger than Belgium if it was a country and around the size of Ohio if it was a state. So we’re working hard on adding features, items and new exciting things to do in the game!

Please keep the feedback and suggestions coming. We can’t always reply to every mail and forum post, but we do read them and value all the comments we get!

At Playfish, we’re huge fans of iPhone and the iPod touch. We speculated last summer that the iPhone would make an impact on social games. So we’re today very excited to be part of the launch of Facebook Connect for the iPhone and iPod touch and proud to announce our first games, downloadable from iTunes, that let you play with your Facebook friends any time, anywhere. Read the official press release here.

Our first title, Who Has The Biggest Brain? – played by over 15 million people so far, is available for download now in the iTunes Store. It features the full pro-mode of the game – 12 mini games, a practice mode, a performance calendar, and the ability to connect and compete with your Facebook friends, see their pictures, scores and check their brain profiles. The game is of course fully optimised for the touch screen interface and you can even unlock a mobile exclusive achievement to show off online! Read about the full feature set here.

Additionally, Word Challenge and Geo Challenge will be available for download on iTunes by summer. As with Who Has The Biggest Brain? both games take full advantage of the touch screen interface. The games have feature sets similar to the fully unlocked Facebook pro versions you’re familiar with, but add content exclusive to the iPhone and iPod touch. And – most importantly – they let you play with your Facebook friends!

We believe Facebook Connect for the iPhone and iPod touch will revolutionise how games are played on mobile. Instead of playing to kill time, you can now play to interact, express, communicate or compete with friends – which are far more interesting emotional drivers to play games. Being a launch partner for Facebook Connect and offering games for the iPhone and iPod touch is an important step in Playfish’s mission to change how the world plays games by creating experiences that are more social and connected. We’re very grateful for Facebook’s support and, as always, look forward to your feedback and ideas!

We’ll be releasing a few updates and tweaks over the coming weeks so be sure to let us know if you have ideas of how to make Who Has The Biggest Brain? on the iPhone and iPod Touch even better.

Some screenshots are below. To try it out yourself, download the game now from the iTunes Store! And be sure to let us know what you think!

Here are a few of my friends with bigger brains than me!

Look familiar? Facebook Connect lets you log in to your Facebook account

The game features 12 touch optimised minigames and fast game play

Based on my perfomance online and on mobile, I’m officially an Alien

It was almost exactly a year ago when we wrote a blog post celebrating our 100,000th install on Facebook for Who Has The Biggest Brain? – our first title.

Today, or last week to be precise, we passed the 50 million registered players mark. Quite some growth in less than a year! We also recently passed the 4 million daily active players mark – up from around 40,000 a year ago.

We’ve been amazed at the response from our players to our 6 released titles – Who Has The Biggest Brain?, Word Challenge, Bowling Buddies, Pet Society, Geo Challenge and Minigolf Party – all developed by our three internal studios.

Facebook users were the first ones to have access to our titles and that shows – we now have 5 out of the top-10 games by activitiy on the platform. But our recent launches on MySpace, Bebo and Yahoo have grown quickly, too!

Social gaming is a hot topic at the moment. Just this month we were featured in EDGE magazine as well as listed as one of the top-10 most promising start-ups in the UK in the Financial Times (UK’s leading financial newspaper – clip below). And it seems the rest of the games industry is slowly but surely starting to catch on – social gaming has suddenly popped up as a major topic in key games industry conferences including GDC 2009 and Develop 2009.

So lots to celebrate and lots of work ahead – we still feel we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible and are working on a lot of fun things in all our studios. A very exciting time for the industry and for all of us at Playfish!

So you probably think you’re pretty hot on geography now. All those late night Geo Challenge sessions are finally paying off. You could now be blindfolded, dropped off in a random location in Siberia, and you’d be home in time for lunch, having stopped by in Kyoto because you heard it was nice at this time of year.

But we’re not done yet.

Allow us to introduce the Geo Challenge US Pro Pack.

Test your knowledge of states and cities in the good old US of A with four brand new mini-games which will push your geography skills even further.

First we’re going to check your state hopping skills with State To State. Can you guess which state sits between the two you can see?

Next up is Car Conundrum, where you’re going to be tested on your knowledge of state flags. You may be surprised how many you know!

Thirdly we’ve got City Blitz, where we give you a map of the USA and you have to stick pins in it, just like that map on your bedroom wall you used to have. Except this time instead of sticking a pin in Orlando because you went there once on your holidays, we’ll tell you where to put the pins which we’re sure you’ll agree is much more fun.

And finally City Sorter, a favourite at Playfish, quizzes you on which towns can be found in one particular state.

In fact the only bad news is that people in the UK won’t be able to play the new US Pro Pack until March, so spare a thought for them when you’re virtually road tripping through the states of America! Have fun!