What's Hot:

• Botanicula
• Ice Age Village
• Bubble Safari
• Marvel Avengers Alliance

If there’s one word that can be used to sum up Spacetime Studios, it’s “legendary.” After all, what else would you call the team behind games with names like Pocket Legends, Star Legends, and Dark Legends? Ok – maybe you could call them “productive” too. After all, only a few months out from the launch of Dark Legends, they’ve just announced their fourth release: Arcane Legends.

If you watched cartoons growing up (who didn’t?), chances are extremely likely you’ve grown up watching the Looney Tunes or Scooby Doo. These classic television series’ have seen so many reboots, re-runs, and adaptations that anyone from five years old to 50 has had a major serialized show feature these iconic characters. Warner Brothers, in hopes to create an iconic environment for children, has announced Cartoon Universe, a new online free-to-play world.

It’s no secret that Zynga has spent the year trying to diversify their portfolio a little farther than games with the word “Ville” in them. Whether it’s dropping a fine $200 million to acquire OMGPOP and Draw Something, jumping into the popular bubble-popping genre to make Bubble Safari, or putting one of its purchased entities to use to use with the brand-new announcement of Zombie Swipeout, it’s clear that Zynga is trying to branch out.

Crowdfunding sounds easy (just put up a page on Kickstarter and watch the bucks roll in for your new video game project), and on the surface, it may very well be so – at least in principle. But successful crowdfunding generally doesn’t happen by accident. If you look at triumphant gaming projects across the Web, you’ll find that many share several attributes in common, including one or more of the following building blocks:

Crowdfunding seems like a dream to many video game developers – just post up a pitch for an unfinished gaming project, and watch the pledges and donations roll in. But as veteran crowd funders will tell you, the actual process can be something of a nightmare, and success is far from certain. Certainly, crowdfunding can be a powerful too for launching and marketing any new business or startup. But before diving in, make sure you understand the benefits and risks associated with the practice.

Princess Emma has gone missing, and once-loyal knights conspire to seize power while all manner of bandits and beasts terrorize the kingdom! It's not yet in beta testing, but the upcoming KingsRoad, a Diablo-esque action-RPG epic set in the troubled fantasy realm of Deveral, already looks amazing. Players will battle enemies and collect gold and treasure in a world that spans forests, mountains and more - and yet it's all entirely Flash-based and takes place in a browser.

Welcome to the quick start guide for Bubble Safari, a new Facebook game from Zynga. In this arcade game you will find yourself aiming your bubble cannon at rows upon rows of colored bubbles in an attempt to clear the screen. Match colors and use special bonus bubbles to drop large sections of bubbles to score points and earn stars to unlock the next levels.

Zynga was one of the first well-known developers on Facebook, but that pedigree doesn't guarantee the company's future success; in order to stay competitive in the increasingly competitive social game arena, it's got to keep innovating. Of late, the mega-developer – best known for its “Ville” titles – is making new flavors of casual entertainment, and one of the best thus far is jungle-themed bubble popper, Bubble Safari.

If you want to be a retro looking game and play in a 50 pixel by 50 pixel space, then really you need to be pretty simple. There’s only so much that can go on in such a tiny spot. In Gunbrick, you play as a tiny square who can rotate left and right with the keyboard and fire a gun that sticks out of one of your four sides. You can’t move the gun, you can only change which direction it’s pointed by rolling around. It’s a unique mechanic and it’s put to excellent use over the course of the game.

Sometimes a game does nothing wrong, technically speaking, but still comes up wanting. MMO strategy game Illyriad is a prime example - everything from the game's interface to its resource-building is standard free-to-play strategy game fare, none of it too intrusive. The only problem? It focuses so hard on playing it safe, it forgets to deliver something worth playing.

Mark Turmell is a man who understands arcade games. As the brains behind Midway classics like Smash TV and NBA Jam, his body of work consumed more than its fair share of quarters during the coin-op glory days. So when social gaming giant Zynga decided it was time to move into the world of arcade-style Facebook games, they knew just who to turn to. Newly recruited by the Big Z, Turmell has taken the lead on Bubble Safari, an up-and-coming bubble-popping experience not unlike Facebook favorites Bubble Witch Saga and Bubble Island – or if you’re an old school arcade veteran, Bust-a-Move.

While they might be made by little teams, indie games have proven to be big business over the last few years. Shirking the traditional publisher/developer relationship, where games are made in 1000 person teams, indie developers are small groups of people (or in some cases, just one person) making games because it’s what they love to do – and Indie Game: The Movie is a celebration of that.