THE PLUS ONE: ROLANDO 2 SHOWS ITS SOCIAL SIDE

And one last Rolando 2 update to close out the week, but here, creator Simon Oliver takes us not simply on a tour of its worlds, but rather on how ngmoco’s Xbox Live-ish Plus+ service will be utilized. As it turns out, even a platformer is as ripe for challenges and leaderboards as a competitive FPS or tower defense game.

And: earlier in the week, ngmoco posted this update of one of the game’s most smartly integrated features (from the perspective of the iPhone as a uniquely converged device), in which NinjaTune’s Mr. Scruff — who provided the beats for the original Rolando, as well — here gets his own dedicated character and ‘Music Shack’, which serves not just as a soundtrack jukebox, but which takes you directly to the song’s iTunes entry to purchase with a double-click.

And lastly: the newly unveiled avatar creator might seem a superfluous ‘gimme’ addition to the website, but it again very smartly doubles as an iPhone wallpaper generator, a personalized icon creator for your Plus+ profile, and comes housed in a ‘hot or not’ style open competition for users to vote each up or down (though poor Locke here is currently suffering in the polls underneath snaggletoothed Obama-landos and more than a few disfigured Jackson tributes). Even if its brand of colorful platforming doesn’t quite strike your personal fancy, you have to admit that they’ve got their social engagement down to a science more than nearly everyone in the App Store.