Life on the high seas is dangerous, especially if you’re a robot pirate. Even if the law doesn’t string you up, a little bit of sea-spray will corrode you as surely as acid. What’s a robot sea-dog to do? Why, live life to the fullest, of course! That means taking down your enemies, picking over the skeletal remains of their ships, and then using that scrap to make your own ship the biggest, ugliest, floating fortress that ever sailed across Neptune’s front lawn.

Sudoku need not exclusively be the domain of tired-eyed, funny-smelling old men whiling away their bus commute with a newspaper and a pen. Sudoku can be exciting. It can even be cut-throat. Battle Sudoku Against Friends Free demonstrates that there can be bad blood (and land mines) between the lines of the classic Sudoku grid.

Earlier in the week, we reported that social games giant 6waves Lolapps laid off most of its internal development staff (essentially, the "Lolapps" half of "6waves Lolapps") in order to re-focus on its efforts on publishing third-party games. Hang on tight, 'cause the earth's still moving: on Friday, Arjun Sethi, the former CEO of Lolapps, announced on his blog that he's leaving 6waves Lolapps entirely.

Social gaming company 6waves Lolapps announced earlier today that it has laid off much of its internal development staff. Instead of developing games in-house, the company will focus on publishing games by third parties.

6waves Lolapps, perhaps best known for their Facebook game Ravenwood Fair and their very public kurfuffle with SpryFox, has announced new publishing terms for its development partners, offering $100,000 to help market their mobile titles.

Facebook has seen its fair share of farming games over the past few years, but 6waves' latest title, Astro Garden, adds one more to the list. That said, it’s actually one of the more impressive variations of the genre. Though it contains many of the standards players have come to relate to this simulation style, its premise and polish are far more interesting than its cohorts, with a good bit of creativity as well. Nevertheless, the core play is still fairly basic leaving the appeal of the game dependent on one’s opinion of such sims in the first place.

Last week indie studio Spry Fox, developer behind the cross-platform hit Triple Town, announced that it was filing a lawsuit against 6waves Lolapps claiming that the publisher's game Yeti Town was a copy of Triple Town. 6waves has since responded and denied copying the game.

With the rampant plagiarism that goes on in game development, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later. David Edery, CEO of Spry Fox, has just confirmed on his blog that his company has filed a copyright infringement suit against 6Waves LOLAPPS in regards to the latter’s release of Yeti Town, a game that clearly borrowed everything that was original about Spry Fox’s Triple Town, slapped on a fresh coat of paint, and made it to the App Store first.

The backlash against Zynga for its (pretty blatant) plagiarism of Tiny Tower may have been one of this week's big stories, but it certainly isn't the only recent case of game companies ripping each other off. Late last year, 6waves Lolapps was accused of doing the exact same thing, and now the company's finally defending itself.

Games typically slip us into the leather shoes of wizards, adventurers, and dragon-slayers, but rarely do we see any love given to the merchants who equip those men and women before they go off to seek their fame, fortune, and possibly a nasty manticore sting. It's time to give shopkeepers their due with Swords and Potions, a Facebook game that lets you don the apron of a young medieval merchant.