The Ninja Blog

Now you can enjoy those trips to the doctor’s waiting room with BTD in your pocket!

This is live in New Zealand at this point and probably Australia. It looks like the release date of Oct 3rd means a literal rollout at 12am through the territories!

Southern hemisphere win!

For more updates on Ninja Kiwi Games follow us on twitter here—>

Okay, the game is functionally complete and undergoing minor tweaks now, and will be released on October 26th 2009.

As usual comments are welcome but please don’t bother asking for new features or a closer release date, neither will happen at this point in the game.

Here’s the first 17 levels

And here are levels 18-25.

Enjoy!

For more updates follow me on twitter here –>

It seems like all developers and their dogs have had a crack at the highly entertaining Match 3 genre of games. We have our own popular Bloons Pop3 as our hat in the ring, and here’s another genuinely clever and entertaining approach.

The story behind Freebees is simple and fits well, you need to rescue a certain amount of bees from their cells by matching colours together to form collections of 3 or more, when you do this the cells become grayed out and the bees are released. What’s neat is the cells can be recycled by placing a cell of the same colour next to the grayed ones, this brings them back into play (sans bees) by allowing them to be used again to make matches.

It’s an innovative take on the game and definitely worthy of a feature here. The levels are all dynamically generated too which means if you get stuck on a certain level you can continue to play lower levels until your skills develop.

You must have a look at Freebees, the thumbnail does not do it justice Play now!

For more updates on Ninja Kiwi games follow us on twitter here>

It’s not often that I find a flash game that is both incredibly engaging and fun, but also has mechanics that are difficult to work out.

Clockwords is a fairly simple game with a simple story. You play an inventor of a magnificent clockwork machine that can be used to decode anything. Evil inventor wants to steal it’s secrets. Machine has adapted to defend itself by turning words quite literally into weapons to fight off the evil mechanical spiders…

The mechanic involves you typing words which are fired, defense game style, at the incoming spiders. You can type any words you like but you will deal more damage if you use the special letters that are given to you. Use all the letters in a group and you unlock another channel.

The more complicated part of the game involves the mixing together of letters in your inventory to make more powerful letters. Personally I find this part of the game a bit too confusing and the game works really well without it. A great way to get the brain spinning nicely!

Play Clockwords now!

For more info on Ninja Kiwi Games follow me on twitter here>

Life took an interesting turn this week. Over the past couple of years I’ve had emails from people young and old who claim they are hooked on BTD in it’s various forms. To develop a game that is described as “addictive” in our business is a good thing, and often a mark of success. But what’s it like being a parent of a kid addicted to a certain game? This is something I’m starting to learn first-hand…

My oldest boy (Luca) is well and truly hooked on BTD4. He played BTD3 plenty but he was only 5 back then and had had a fairly sheltered life from games up until that point. Now he’s (I suppose luckily) beta testing BTD for the iPhone and BTD4 at the same time he is well and truly nuts about it. Come to think of it my youngest Elliot is also in love as far as a 3 year-old can be, he no longer wants to be Batman, he claims to be Super Monkey (Really? Should I get some t-shirts done??).

Not only is Luca pretty good (rather embarrassingly he managed to get further on the dreaded 3 track Ice map on the iPhone than me) but if he’s had his time allowance (which admittedly varies depending on the day and how much testing I need done ) he’ll continue to play Bloons Tower Defense. Offline. Yeah, what now?

Like all kids with huge imaginations and a completely one-sided exposure to games (well he is a junior Ninja Kiwi) he is trying to convince his brothers, cousins and friends to play Bloons Tower Defense. The middle boy Owen, he can see the flaw in a live action version of the game. He wants to play Power Rangers instead, or Star Wars. But BTD Luca, really?

I asked him how it works, and who gets to be the Bloons etc, but of course, the Bloons are “imaginary, come on Dad”. So each player (mostly this is just Luca) gets to pick a tower they want to be and proceed through the upgrade path to Bloon dominating power.

Now I didn’t really put this post up to form a parents support group, as a parent I actually think games like BTD are great learning tools for children. The reason I put it up was so that if any parent wondered if they really had a problem with their son/daughter playing too much BTD (and trust me BTD4 is hella addictive) they could cast their minds back to a little boy who decided that anything can be made more fun if you can just cram some BTD into it. Even offline

For more updates on Ninja Kiwi games and crazy ramblings follow me on twitter here>

Ok, strictly speaking this game is about a month old, but that’s my fault I entirely forgot to put it up and I love it. The developer reminded me sweetly twice in fact, so here it is, Skylocopter 2!

This is a level based puzzler involving cute graphics and an engaging play style. The objective is to guide the chubby little helicopter around the level, collecting cash and avoiding sky-mines and nasty tunnel walls etc. Being a helicopter with the aerodynamic ridiculousness of a bumblebee, crashing or bumping into walls, getting blown up etc has dire consequences. Thankfully you have the opportunity to spend your hard one cash on upgrades to allow you so survive a bit more of a beating.

Oh, and if you like the music, it’s because the developer doubles as a nightclub DJ.

Play Skylocopter 2 now!

For more updates on Ninja Kiwi Games follow me on twitter here>

Okay, todays game falls into that creative mind bending genre of puzzle games where not only do you have to solve the puzzle, but you have to modify the environment in order to get to the “exit”.

The Wizard’s Notebook is a clever little game where your very words come to life. The objective is to move your little stick figure, platform-game style, to the star using the arrow keys. The environment can be changed by typing words such as “water” into the area a little boat is sitting in, this in turn will float the little boat up to a switch that will bring a wall down to allow you to access the star (which is the level “exit”).

What I really like about the game is the way things come alive. A sketchy pencil outline of a cat is drawn across the screen by you “creating” a mouse to act as bait. This mechanic is incredibly engaging and fun.

What I don’t like, well I did find some irritating framerate spikes which meant the game ran less than smoothly on my near-new desktop pc. That said, it’s simply too good a game to pass up.

Play The Wizard’s Notebook now!

For more updates on NInja Kiwi Games follow us on twitter here>

Final testing underway now, hope to be submitted to Apple for approval next week!

Watch the vid.

For more updates on Ninja Kiwi Games follow us on twitter here

Ahhhh I love this. Two awesome new puzzle games in just a few days!

In Guardian Rock you play the role of a square temple idol protecting the temple from the destructive explorers. To quote Indiana Jones “This belongs in a museum!” Really? How about leaving it where it is?

There are lots of levels to work your way through as well as some free and pay-for stuff in the Mochi store. The game is beautiful pixel art and the 8-bit soundtrack is extremely catchy.

Play Guardian Rock now -> here!

And if you want updates on Ninja Kiwi Games follow us on twitter here!

Little Farm is a really compelling little puzzle game, and I’ve been hanging out for a new game like this to put up after the recent burst of Actions Games and the like.

The mechanic is simple, click and drag the mouse to create a rectangle encompassing at least 2×2 crop tiles. Each corner must contain the same 4 crop types. When you do this (and release) the crops wither go to the truck driving along at the bottom of the screen (crops matching the crop type on the truck will go in) or to the compost heap.

Little Farm is very well polished, with great graphics and sounds, and would offer some fairly stiff competition to casual downloadable titles.

There are a bunch of upgrades that you can buy as well as unlock as you progress through the game. If you can play for LESS than 5 min, you have more willpower than I!

Play Little Farm Now > Click here!