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After five years in development, a slew of industry indie awards, and even some polarizing controversy surrounding its creator, Phil Fish, Fez finally launched on Xbox Live Arcade a couple of weeks ago. And despite a growing list of game-breaking bugs, an atypical Friday launch (most new titles release on Tuesday), and Xbox Live’s less-than-friendly-to-indie-titles UI, Polytron’s retro-themed puzzle-platformer managed over 20,000 day-one downloads and a 90 Metacritic score, putting it on par with Limbo, another critically-acclaimed indie darling. Regardless of its faults or praise, however, if you’re taking Fez on its initial appearance, playing it only as the aforementioned puzzle-platformer, then you’re not really playing Fez, and your “Get to the end” achievement actually means you’re only halfway through.

As spring hits into high gear, we look forward to brining you all of the bloomin’ gaming news (get it? Because flowers are blooming and so are our artic…ah, forget it!)

This month’s feature story hits on two things the masses are loving the most – casual games and social media; a convergence that’s creating a super power toolset in the world of social influence.  We also took some time to jump into the Kickstarter rabbit hole for promising new games we’d put our money behind, and got sucked back into a little-known title called Angry Birds thanks to its evolving gameplay mechanics and marketing mix.

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Today is Thursday and tomorrow is Friday. For Denuo Chicago, this statement is more than just an exercise in keeping your days of the week straight. Friday = Roll Day, where each week one pair of Denuologists is responsible for bringing in breakfast. We are treated to wonderful meals ranging from bacon cupcakes, bagels, breakfast burritos, donuts, shrimp 'n grits - you get the idea. I would say that savory breakfasts are bigger hits than sweet ones, not because they aren't as delicious but simply because sugar crashes are not fun.

While most of us were asleep last night, Tim Schafer and his Double Fine crew were making hundreds of thousands of dollars, fifteen and thirty dollars at a time. Instead of pitching their next game to publisher after publisher in hopes of getting funded, Double Fine used Kickstarter to pitch their classic adventure title to those masses who would eventually want to play the release. Less than eight hours after launching their page they had already met their $400,000 goal, and had broken Kickstarter records for most funds raised in the first twenty-four hours and most backers of all time. Just under a day later and they’ve crossed the $1,000,000 mark with more than a month to go in the campaign. Needless to say, the experiment into collaborative development has been a success for Double Fine and their latest passion project.

Music and social media were surely destined to be together. Music is just way more fun when it’s shared. The perfect summary of this is the single best scene in the film High Fidelity. We love digging the same stuff, arguing over tastes, showing off just how musically savvy we are. Turntable is the first music site that gets this right and does High Fidelity one better: it kicks out that smug asshole behind the counter and puts the record decks in the hands of everyone. Play with Turntable a bit and you’ll soon realize this is a quantum leap forward in the quest to capture the real essence of being a music fan online.

It’s a quest that has been afoot since the web got 2.0’d and, in my opinion, can be split into 3 waves. Fan sites and MySpace helped change the game of music online in the first wave of social music sites. Suddenly there was a chance to comment on your favorite music with fellow fans, reach artists more directly and possibly even help shape who makes it big. Internet radio was just coming on the scene and you could easily hear programmers with much broader tastes than the evil overlords at Clear Channel Corp Inc. Radio looked like it was in trouble.