Part four in our series of monthly reviews from 2008 (if you're wondering why part four is September, well, we only launched in June...)

September was a fairly slow month, if truth be told. Perhaps everyone was settling down from the summer's App Store fuelled hypecloud.

However, there was stuff to report on. Such as Zed buying Flash Lite games developer Mobitween, as part of its wider strategic shift to start distributing its games through operators, rather than its own D2C subscription service.

Meanwhile, US firm Mpowerplayer raised $2.5m of Series A funding for its widget-based mobile game demos technology, which aimed to make it easier for people to discover and buy mobile games on the web.

There was plenty of activity on the licensing side, too. EA Mobile snapped up the rights to Tomb Raider: Underworld, following Eidos's exit from the mobile games industry. Hands-On Mobile also renewed its lucrative deal to make Guitar Hero mobile games.

Atari called in the lawyers on several indie developers who'd released Breakout clones on the App Store - a decision that made more sense later in September when Atari launched the official iPhone version of its retro classic.

One indie developer was doing rather well out of the App Store though: Steve Detemer revealed that he'd made $250,000 from his iPhone game Trism since July. It was becoming clear that being early onto the App Store was a profitable business.

One company having more of a struggle with profitability, it seems, was porting specialist Tira Wireless. Despite a seemingly healthy roster of customers, the company bowed out in September with barely a whimper.

Ad-funded mobile games firm Greystripe announced perhaps its most high-profile deal yet, inking an agreement to distribute its catalogue of free mobile games through NBC Universal's network of mobile internet sites, including those for NBC.com, Bravo and The Sci-Fi Channel.

Digital Chocolate was surfing the cross-platform zeitgeist wave (we think) in September, meanwhile. The publisher brought its Facebook-based Party Island community to mobile, with the first in a planned series of connected games.

Finally, Glu Mobile and Namco Bandai became the first two mobile games publishers to announce their first Android games - Bonsai Blast and Pac-Man respectively - with both due to be made available for free through Android Market as soon as the first Android phone launched.