During the post-mortem panel for the "Super Monkey Ball" iPhone game, SEGA's Producer of Digital Content Ethan Einhorn told would-be iPhone developers to not "play price wars" with their apps. He advised to keep the highest price you can while staying in the top 50 and resist the temptation to drop your price prematurely; "Super Monkey Ball" saw a boost in sales during the holidays. He added, "A $10 price point is not reasonable." Eihnorn also said to consider the pros and cons of "Lite" versions, free demos of the full-priced product. While he said they were good for new, complex games, developers should "think twice" before putting a "Lite" version; many users may feel that just a small taste of the game is enough, impeding possible impulse buys.

During a panel titled "Post Mortem: 'Super Monkey Ball' iPhone," Ethan Einhorn, SEGA's Producer of Digital Content, talked about the different things they tried with the game before it launched with the release of the iPhone App store last year. One idea SEGA of America had was to have the monkeys collect apples instead of bananas as "a fun reference" to the Apple iPhone platform. Einhorn added, "The Japanese development team said quite reasonably, 'Monkeys eat bananas,' so let's leave it at that."

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My MTV News colleagues who cover the hip-hop beat recently showed me the raw footage of an amazing interview they conducted with Charles Hamilton, an up-and-coming rapper signed to Interscope who really, really liked the Sega Genesis. They've been nice enough to give us this exclusive clip.

Simply put, we need more rappers like Charles Hamilton. The man knows his video games. And he's.. creative.

Hamilton's so Sega-crazy that he's releasing a mixtape, called "Sonic The Hamilton," which chronicles his adventures of him living life as Sonic.

"I'm not crazy," he told us. Read more...

If you've been complaining about the controls in "Super Monkey Ball" on the iPhone, you might want to download the patch from late last night.

Sega has taken some criticisms to heart and made the game much easier to control. The "dead zone" -- the space you need to hold the iPhone where no movement occurs -- has been made significantly easier to find.

The "dead zone" appears to rest at about a 45-degree angle with the patch.

However, there are scattered reports that the patch will destroy saved games. As I'd deleted the game to conserve space, I can't personally confirm if this is true.

But if you were avoiding "Super Monkey Ball" because of its control issues, maybe it's time to boot it up and give it another try.

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Crucial 'Super Monkey Ball' iPhone Patch Coming

It's only taken a month for the iPhone* to prove its potential as a gaming platform.

Just a few weeks ago, Apple launched the highly anticipated application store on iTunes, and companies have flooded users with games.

Like any platform, some are better than others, but the store's numbers don't lie -- people want iPhone games.

Of the top 100 paid-for applications last night, 40 of them were games. Of the non-paid applications, the number was nearly as high -- 38. Together, games account for 39% of the total application downloads for the iPhone.

That's not to say that everything about games on the application store have been a success story. For every success ("Super Monkey Ball"), there's almost inevitably a bomb. In fact, Sega had one themselves…

* iPod Touch, as well

Read more...