Sales come and sales go on the App Store – especially around the holidays – but in all our App Store sale coverage, we’ve never seen anything quite like this. EA has put 68 games on sale for 99 cents, including brand new releases, $12.99 iPad games, and more!

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There’s an endless variety of business management sims to play on Facebook, so it’s quite an achievement when a developer comes up with a genuinely novel twist on the formula. My Shops has you trying to manage an ever-increasing variety of shops located on a single avenue, instead of endlessly micromanaging a single store. This is a very intuitive way to change up the formula, but surprisingly, there’s very little on Facebook right now that really plays the way My Shops does. Some elements of typical timer-driven sim play are there, but there’s also a lot of strategy and even some action.

Mighty Pirates is a Facebook game developed by CrowdStar. Explore the high seas, fight with other pirates to steal treasure maps, fill up your treasure room, upgrade your ship and go on quests to become the best pirate. These are just a few of the things you can do to get started playing Mighty Pirates by referring to this quick start guide.

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The idea of taking a board game with you but without all the bits and pieces is definitely appealing for families. Table Twister makes its best attempt to give you this, but only at the level of Hungry Hungry Hippos. The games are fun, if not short-lived and repetitive. But whether you’re actually able to play them depends entirely on the device you’re using.

It was only a matter of time. Reportedly making billions of dollars a year and having spurned a rumored $6 billion acquisition offer from Google, GroupOn’s group buying model is being copied and adopted to every market and every corner of the world.

OpenFeint, among the most forward-thinking companies in the mobile game app space have announced the launch of Game Channel and a new feature called Fire Sale, in an attempt to bring Groupon mechanics to the Apple iTunes Store and Google’s Android Marketplace.But, with a few twists since Groupon does not control the commerce portion of Apple’s and Google’s Store.

Apple confirmed this morning that the Mac App Store will open for business on Jan. 6, allowing people to download and run apps on their Mac OS X computers. It's an announcement that could potentially revolutionize desktop gaming in the same way that the App Store revolutionized mobile gaming on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

All of our misguided labeling of people as “casual” and “core” gamers has become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The folks who played Pac Man in bars in the 70s didn’t consider themselves casual gamers, because no one was telling them to. These days, even the most infrequent gamer is inundated with messages online and in the world around them about games. They find “casual games portals” and see ads for “hardcore games on the iPhone!” These terms aren’t unheard of anymore, but they are unclear, and as a result we’ve all internalized our own meanings for them. What’s more, we’ve all labeled ourselves. The prominence of gaming in recent years has made our gaming habits part of our personal “Identity” – it is impossible to avoid.