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OpenFeint, The Future of Mobile Social Gaming?
Nathan Krott, Associate Writer
March 10, 2010
If you have recently played a mobile game on an iPhone or iTouch, you most likely were prompted with a screen asking to enable OpenFeint or you'd miss some awesome features. Well, OpenFeint, is as advertised, the coolest thing since sliced awesome. Now this may seem OpenFeint is stuck up and thinks it's better than other Social Network type features, however, it really isn't that bad and truly adds a little more to the games people play on a daily basis. Let's go into some detail and go over what features OpenFeint provides its users with.
OpenFeint can be described as Xbox Live meeting Facebook and kicking things off with a beautiful relationship. OpenFeint supports hundreds of games and millions of users. OpenFeint features in-game achievements in which players can try to get to show off and have some self pride. Whether it's getting a 10-trick combo or eating 300 brains as a Zombie, the amount of variety of achievements to get is truly endless. What does every game need? Of course an arcade style high-score leaderboard. OpenFeint as just that and records a player's score and sends it to the leaderboards where people battle it out for the top spot. Also a great feature is the challenge mode. OpenFeint, through its interface, allows people to go head-to-head with their OpenFeint friends. In addition, OpenFeint advertises a free-application day quite frequently. So if you are looking for something new, OpenFeint will provide your heart delight everyday with countless great games that provide hours of fun. OpenFeint also of course has its forum where users can post their opinion and talk to other users. Lastly, you can't have a Facebook-esque clone without connecting to Facebook, right? Well OpenFeint allows you to post your recent news to both Twitter and Facebook. Not everyone uses these features, but there is still a very large market out there and OpenFeint pretty much took what was already there and combined it all into a friendly interface that anyone can use.
The best thing about this is that OpenFeint is free and therefore costs absolutely nothing. OpenFeint as an application allows you to keep up on all your achievements and posts on the forums, however, you don't need the direct application to have OpenFeint. Any game that OpenFeint supports will automatically keep track of your gameplay and earned achievements. The niceness of OpenFeint is there is no user-name/password needed as accounts are directly tied to the iPhone/iTouch. Each device is connected with an account number and from there a number can be changed into a user-name, but this is optional. OpenFeint is that really small little thing that will make your day when that "achievement earned" pop-up appears at the top of the screen. Give OpenFeint a shot and enable it as it offers a lot to a variety of people and most will enjoy it.
