jp
Home Talks and Slides My GameLog Research and Projects Publications Resume Teaching
Back  //   GameBreadth Project  //   Game Ontology Project  //   GameLog

Ninjatown (DS)

Status: Finished playing
I started playing this game on Tuesday 13 April, 2010  //  I stopped playing this game on: Saturday 1 May, 2010
Current opinion of this game
Tower Defence with cute ninjas. It works most of the time, although it's take a while for it to get challenging.

April 26, 2010 12:02:36 PM
This game only got really interesting towards the end. Perhaps the last 8-10 missions or so became a real challenge and required further planning and more careful tactics in order to win. This was a good thing.

I've since finished the game and haven't really debated whether or not to go back to it. There isn't a "sandbox" mode or a "neverending horde" mode either so there isn't much of an incentive to go back other than to try to improve my score on some of the levels...but to what end? I though it was strange that these additional modes weren't implemented because they seem to be the ones where I could really get into exploring and examining all of the different ninja types as well as the support buildings. During the regular campaign I always felt that there wasn't room for trying things out since I had to ensure that I wasn't going to fail. No margin of error, essentially.

In all though, I think I have a greater appreciation for the "other style" of tower defence games. Namely, those that only let you build in pre-determined locations. I think that Plants vs Zombies is like that, so I guess I might check it out now.


April 22, 2010 10:15:16 AM
I hadn't realized that the game is based on a bunch of plush toys. Well, sort of. I don't know which characters were developed for this, but still. From plushie to videogame? The game's quite decent to play, so it isn't exactly the case of a brand slapped onto a game.

April 15, 2010 11:42:23 PM
I picked this up out of curiosity. I played a fair amount of the (free) Desktop Tower Defence game when it first came out, so I wanted to what playing it on a DS would be like. I assumed that all DTD games were the same, but they're not.

One of the things I liked most about DTD was the "free" mode where you essentially build your own maze and hope for the best (while upgrading it as creeps are taken out). Ninjatown does away with that with pre-determined building locations and a pre-set path the enemies will walk through. Success is thus dependent more on choosing the right ninja huts to build and when to upgrade them than the careful design of a layout for enemies to navigate. The upside of the set-maze and predetermined locations is that you can create scenarios with different characteristics. I'm roughly 70% done with the game and perhaps the last 8 missions or so have been interesting from this perspective. I guess in all, that's a good thing.


 
kudos for original design to Rodrigo Barria