I am not much into those elaborate shooter/warfare games, or much of any console games these days. Even my kids so far are keeping it old school and play their Lego Batman and Lego Star Wars game on a good old fashioned PC where you use the space bar to throw the Batarang and the tab button to change characters. And then every once in a while they’ll accidentally get into the area where you change the setting and all hell breaks loose while they madly pound on the space bar while getting attacked by Jokers goons, only to continually see Batman jump around and continue to get pummeled. It should be funny, but with all the bat tears that ensue, it’s not so much… maybe I really should break down and get a PS2 or Wii.

Since my kids hijack my computer every night, I am usually stuck with finding something on my iPhone to pass as entertainment. I was surfing around to see if Area Code had come out with a new mobile LBS game recently. If you’re not familiar with them Area Code was an early developer of some popular LBS games such as Plundr, Sharkrunner, Crossroads and Pac Manhattan. I didn’t see anything new which was LBS related from them, but they did build a cool tetris meets soduko game for the iphone called Drop 7, which is fun and addicting and an easy way to burn through 30 minutes of downtime.

I finally came across a game for iPhone called Agency Wars by SGN which was announced recently at this years SXSW. The game is more of a text heavy strategy, role playing game… low on the action graphics but slick nonetheless… where you can play the role of a secret agent, acquiring assets and carrying out your missions against bad guys and other agents. The game takes on a new dimension by introducing a social and location aware element to completing the missions.

Many missions can only be completed with the help of another player, or “contact” in espionage lingo, and the link into Facebook via Facebook Connect helps you make “contacts” out of those already in your social network.

Other missions use the phones location determining abilities, to only allow you to complete missions if you haul yout butt out of the house or office to a specifc place in the real world and fire up the game there. It also uses the phone’s location awareness to find nearby ‘contacts’ that can help you complete missions. Luckily for me, it seems designed for the lazy agents as well, with many missions conveniently located within just a few blocks of where I am. So after dropping the kids off at school the other morning I decided to follow my instructions and swing by a local cafe in southern Moscow (in this case the location of the cafe was the Empire State Building) and take out the leader of the neo Soviet Liberation Front. Luckily there is a Starbucks there as well, so I could kill two birds with one stone… and it gave me somthing to do while I waited in line too!

In fact the guys from SGN could probably do a three way partnership with Starbucks and the folks at Neoreader to drive gamers from store to store buying coffee and scanning codes off of coffee cups in a self perpetuating coffee, espionage, virtual world, game nirvana guaranteed to keep the unemployed tech geeks as busy and wired as ever.