The GameStop Casual Digital Store, located at http://www.gamestop.com/casual, features the hottest and not-so-hottest casual PC games for purchase, download and play. Powered by RealNetworks, the store features casual and independent titles, from Nancy Drew to Plants Vs. Zombies, with thirty-one titles available for half-off to celebrate the launch of the new service.

“As the leading video game and entertainment software retailer, we continuously look for ways to bring our passion for gaming to the customer visiting us online,” said Tony Bartel, executive vice president of merchandising and marketing. “The new Casual Digital Store accomplishes this goal by appealing to an ever-expanding customer demographic looking for value in addition to trusted guidance to ensure they receive the best gaming experience possible.”

It sounds a great deal like the casual game download service Amazon.com launched in February, perhaps indicating that while GameStop isn’t worried about Amazon’s trade-ins, it isn’t too keen on being left behind when it comes to digital distribution and the casual market.

At the Develop Conference in Brighton, UK, Thomson gave a session titled “A Game is a Game is a Game”. He calls the term casual pejorative. “We may not find a particular type of game amusing or appealing,” he said. “But that doesn’t stop them from being a game of equal worth to those titles that we do.”

Thus, Thomson doesn’t want the word “casual” to be used. The label is frustrating for Denki, which is viewed as a casual developer.

“Make the game you love and people who enjoy the things you enjoy will be the audience,” he said, wrapping up his session. “If a game is fun people will buy it whatever the label.”

We’re not entirely convinced “casual” is a derisive label. Shovelware? Crappy? Those are derisive labels.

Gamasutra – News – Develop 2009: Denki Urges Ban On ‘Casual’ Label [Gamasutra]

Now it’s on the iPhone, and there’s goes all your free time. There’s something powerfully addicting about the part-pachinko, part-puzzle, part-crack downloadable game. Mercifully the short levels and basic gameplay lend themselves well to portable gaming; but you’re not going to want to put the game down.

Loved
Easy, Addictive Gameplay: Each level is a field of blue and orange pegs where the goal is knock out all of the orange pegs with only 10 shots. Like pinball, players control the initial shot of a little ball into the field of pegs, but after that, it’s all about physics as the ball ricochets off of pegs, walls and level-specific obstacles. (And no, the accelerometer on the iPhone doesn’t move the ball). Strategy comes in three different ways: you can predict the ball’s trajectory via a white dotted line, you can score power-ups or free-ball bonuses by hitting a green peg that will give you some advantage, or you can try and land your ball in portal that slides back and forth along the bottom of the field for extra points and a free ball. The difficulty ramps up steadily through as the game presents more complex fields of pegs that move or form shapes that make it difficult to line up shots.

Over-the-top Drama: In all versions of Peggle, there’s a drum roll when your ball is about to strike the final orange peg in a level, but in the iPhone version, the camera zooms in to capture the winning moment. This tiny tweak makes the subsequent fireworks, rainbow and blaring rendition of Ode to Joy that much more dramatic. It will probably also make you looks like a freak if you happen to playing the game on public transit with the sound turned up, so make sure to wear headphones.

Hated
Not As Precise As PC: In place of a computer mouse, the iPhone version asks users to use their fingers, dragging them across the screen to line up a shot before pressing a Fire button in the upper right hand corner. You can double tap a space on the field to zoom in and in place of a mouse’s scroll wheel, the game has its own slider on the right hand side of the screen that lets you make minute adjustments to the trajectory. It gets the job done, but it just doesn’t feel as precise as the PC version, particularly if you’ve got fat fingers that touch places on the screen you don’t mean to touch, like the far right side of the screen when you meant to hit the Fire button.

Even if Peggle iPhone’s touch controls aren’t all roses, though, the game is every bit as fun and addicting as it was in its other formats. I highly recommend it to iPhone users. Just remember to look up once in a while to make sure you haven’t missed your bus stop and try not to sing along to Ode to Joy.

Peggle iPhone was developed and published by PopCap Games. Retails for $US5. Played Adventure Mode to completion.

Electronic Arts is giving away 200 billion tokens to their Pogo players this month. That works out to about 12,600 tokens to each player to use toward virtual clothes and goodies for their avatars.

“We’ve received hundreds of stories from players that tell us Pogo.com has been a cost effective way for them to escape from their day, have fun and connect with friends and family”, said Pogo Community Manager Tahd Frentzel. “From a mum cutting down on long distance calls by chatting and playing with her military daughter stationed in Germany to couples having “date night” online while one is travelling on business, we are so proud to provide a fun and familiar place for people to stay close to those they love.”

Pogo introduced Pogo Minis avatars to the Club Pogo audience in 2005, and has since extended the online avatars to its free gaming site to allow even more people to express themselves while playing casual games. Free registration on Pogo.com is required and the deal ends on April 30.

“In these tough economic times, we want to give players a place to escape and relax at home without breaking their budget,” said Michael Marchetti, Pogo.com General Manager. “Pogo.com provides a great value by providing players a vehicle to play countless hours on games they love while connecting with friends and family — for free.”

POGO

Sci Fi has partnered with Acclaim Games and ZooKazoo to develop a series of online science fiction and fantasy games for their website.

The first game, Tales of Magic, is expected to launch on SciFi.com this spring. The deal is an offshoot of Sci Fi Ventures, a subsidiary of the television channel that hopes to transform the channel into a “global lifestyle brand.”

Acclaim will be creating an exclusive Sci Fi label to jointly develop new games with plans to “extend these properties to other platforms, products and forms of media.”

I’d be much happier about the deal’s prospects if their first game were something bigger, like a Battlestar Galatica title.

Sci Fi Launches Ventures for New Games, Online Destinations [AWN, via Twitter]

If you’re not already on board with PopCap Games’ brand of casual thrills, you’ve never played Peggle. But you will bow before PopCap, as the publisher is expanding its casual efforts in a big way.

Forbes writes of PopCap’s plans for 2009, some aspects of which we’re already aware of. It’s bringing Peggle to the Nintendo DS and Xbox Live Arcade this year, as well as dropping more guaranteed cash cows like Bejeweled Twist on portables.

But its nefarious plans don’t stop there.

It also plans to ship Plants vs. Zombies, described by the publisher’s VP as a real-time strategy game with notes of “tower defence games and collectible card games—but in a casual context.” Sounds like heroin.

Also en route are more time wasters, like Bejeweled Blitz for Facebook, the ultimate in shirking.

Considering PopCap is one of the few publishers thriving so expertly right now, we’d think they have a pretty healthy year of domination ahead of them.

‘Peggle’ Publisher Expands [Forbes]

Amazon.com has officially launched the beta version of their Game Downloads section this morning, offering more than 600 casual titles for digital download, each under US$10.

Kotaku spoke to Greg Hart, Vice President of Video Games and Software for Amazon.com about the new service, who explained that offering casual games for purchase and download via the popular online shopping marketplace is a boon to both customers and developers. Customers benefit by having a safe place to download their games with the same quality and convenience they’ve come to expect from Amazon.com, while casual developers who have never released a retail box have the online equivalent of a big box retailer where they can display their wares.

Customers are able to download and try any game sold through the service for 30 minutes, after which they can either purchase the full game or forget they ever played it. As a special promotion good for the first week only, customers can download full versions of Jewel Quest II, The Scruffs, an Built-A-Lot completely free of charge.

So why casual games, instead of just going for an all-encompassing online store model like Valve’s Steam?

“Casual Games are a natural fit with our demographic,” explains Hart. “We have 88 million active customers who can appreciate the convenience of the true amazon shopping experience combined with the casual games experience.” The man makes a very good point. The person who spends a great deal of time browsing Amazon.com is open to new experiences on their computers, and quick, inexpensive casual games delivered by a trusted source should prove extremely popular to the shopping masses.

That’s not to say that the Game Downloads section won’t expend into other, more mainstream titles in the future. “We always want to offer the widest selection possible, just like we’ve done with our boxed games over the past two years.”

So don’t worry, Valve. With Amazon focused strictly on providing inexpensive casual titles to the shopping masses, they are no threat to your digital download empire at all. For now.

Amazon Game Downloads [Amazon.com]

With the economy in a downward spiral, more and more people turn to cheap entertainment to keep them occupied, resulting in the free casual gaming sector thriving like never before.

In the search for cheap entertainment, it doesn’t get cheaper than free. Ad-supported casual games websites across the internet are reporting record numbers of users flocking to their free games, mindless of the advertisements that once might have kept them from playing. According to comScore, around 86 million people regularly play games on sites like Pogo, Yahoo! Games, and Disney Games – a 27% increase over the previous year. ComScore’s director of gaming alternatives explains that the increase in players has led to increased interest from the advertising sector as well.

“The growth in display ads in the online gaming category not only underscores the assertion that gamers are increasingly accepting of ad-supported games, but also that the advertising community is recognising the value of this highly engaged audience,”

Along with ad-supported casual games, free-to-play massively multiplayer games supported by the selling of in-game items for real-world cash are also on the rise, with many companies, such as EA with Battlefield Heroes, rushing to get a piece of the action.

I suppose it is good to see more and more people using their PC for gaming. I just wish the circumstances behind it were a bit different. Once you lose your house, that laptop battery is only going to last so long.

As Economy Sours, Gamers Turn To Free Online Alternatives [redOrbit]

“We are entering a future that many in the game industry are still denying and fighting against,” says Clickz’s Kevin Carney, “We are watching the icon of gaming, the console, quickly and ungraciously bow to the internet.”

You see, it is not just any old casual gaming – it is web-based casual gaming with an advertising-based revenue model. “Here’s the beauty of this transition: advertisers are the prime movers. Online games are typically funded through advertising revenue,” continues Carney.

Carney’s theory may be slightly filtered through the web marketing-based publication he is writing for – most of his readership stand to gain from a boom in casual games, after all – but he does make the case that improvements in gameplay don’t necessarily follow from improvements in console power.

Anyone out there ready to trade Gears 2 for Zoo Keeper?

“Consoles are facing competition and extinction” [Casual Gaming]

The irRegular Game of Life [Kongregate via IndieGames]