The Download Munkey : Tracking the Treasure Down …

Just played through the demo of IO Interactive’s Mini Ninjas – an enjoyable but rather short little romp through a cartoonishly rendered medieval Japan. You control a party of three different Ninjas (more in the full game) and can switch between them at will – little Hiro who can possess nearby animals and then sneak past enemy guards, Futo a big brawny fellow with more than a passing resemblance to Mr Incredible from Pixar’s The Incredibles and Suzume whom I haven’t figured out her specialty yet.

While it’s nothing particularly innovative or challenging, Mini Ninjas is surprisingly immersive and engaging – I have played the demo over and over for more than five times, mainly trying to find all the secret areas and hunt down every single artifact.

Maybe it’s the goofy character design and animation, or the silly cutscenes or simply the lightheartedness of the game or even its soothing music which keeps me playing on and on.

Watching the exaggerated motion of the enemy samurai goose-step with armor clinking as they patrol along paths in the bamboo forest or chitter “Ninja Ninja” incessantly like insects as they swarm towards you, never gets old for me

Different types of enemy samurai ensure that a little more than simple button-mashing is required if you’re going for the brute force approach. As with IO Interactive’s Hitman series and with ninjas in general, the preferred way is to rely on stealth and use force only when necessary – sneaking past enemy patrols by creeping around in tall grass is a viable option even for big bad Futo although you’re always welcome to cut the enemy at your own discretion.

More devious gamers will be delighted to find that there are more fancy tricks at your disposal for every situation. You can sprinkle caltrops as a gift for pursuing samurai when you’re feeling nasty or you can always switch to Hiro and use his Spirit Form spell to sneak past enemy strongpoints as a harmless chicken to avoid shedding blood (especially your own ).

I guess Mini Ninjas won’t last long judging from the length and linearity of the demo but it’s a blast while it lasts (hey, it rhymes )

Download the demo and other goodies (click on the Castle to download wallpapers) at the official Mini Ninjas website.

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Shinobido Imashime Opening Movie
Katakijin – Stylish Ninja Hack n’ Slash Game
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Swords & Sandals 2 : Emperor’s Reign is just one in a series of five commercial Flash games in the Swords & Sandals universe by Australian devs 3rd Sense. As its name implies, it’s loosely based on the famous Roman gladiators – loosely because you don’t see purple-haired and blue-skinned gladiators in history books, do you?

The game starts with you customizing your fighter’s appearance and skills. Don’t be tempted to make your warrior a jack of all trades though, since an average fighter will find very few tactical options viable against the specialist heavy hitters or agile ninjas (yes, there are ninjas in here, another -1 for realism )

Once you survive your first fight against a fellow prisoner in the dungeon , you’ll get the chance to equip weapons, armour, potions and magic scrolls (the first Swords & Sandals has no magical elements so purists might want to try that instead) before heading to the arena which either ends in glory or death.

Duels are available at the arena to train your gladiator, the defeated losing a sum of gold rather than their lives. After advancing two levels, your fighter must participate in a tournament with other veterans in a fight to the death.

In the actual fight, both combatants can utilize strikes of varying force, pelt the opponent with projectiles from slings and bows or charge to take the fight to an evasive or retreating opponent.

Your skills and armour affect the effectiveness of your attacks and defences as well as the range of tactical options.

For example, a clumsy brute with low agility can only charge a very short distance which makes him defenceless against fast opponents armed with ranged weapons (thankfully, ranged weapons come with limited shots) Likewise, weaker fighters with low vitality and/or low defence skills may find themselves reeling from a single blow from a more powerful opponent.

Analyzing and exploiting your opponent’s weaknesses (view Stats before each fight) is vital for your survival in the gruelling tournaments, especially the final fights against merciless heavily armed bosses like the fearsome Son of Stylonius below.

Glory!

Death!

Play Swords & Sandals 2 : Emperor’s Reign (demo version) or buy for 19 USD.

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Katakijin is my favourite of the 10+ newly-discovered games I downloaded featured on the list of 365 games from Games Radar’s recent article about a year’s supply of freeware/open source games (and demos – unfortunately, they don’t exactly distinguish between the demos and the rest of the other games).

Created by Ultim8, Katakijin is a side-scrolling hack n’ slash featuring loads of ninjas – you control one particular black ninja who’s out to prove himself against a host of other ninjas with his dual katanas and flashy moves.

The controls are smooth and responsive which makes controlling and watching your nimble ninja leaping and running on walls extremely enjoyable. The sprites are very nicely animated which add tons of style to the combat – your foes explode in showers of blood and flying katanas (can’t believe each tiny ninja has so much blood in him ) If you’re still not convinced, just witness how your ninja makes his grand entrance into the game below

Style isn’t the only plus point for Katakijin since melee combat is quite tactical too – mashing of keys won’t help a single bit here since your ninja isn’t strong enough to stand and duke it out with multiple opponents at a time. Mixing evasive manuevers such as rolls and dashes with your attacks and parries will ensure that you don’t get cut to pieces in the first couple of minutes into the game.

The default keys as follows:

Movement
Move with cursor keys
Tap left or right twice to dash
Tap down twice to roll (good for evading attacks)
Press Z to jump.
Hold Z when jumping towards a wall to wallrun

Fighting
Press X or C to slash with your katana
Hold C for an alternative chargeable slash attack
Press Space to throw shurikens
Block attacks with Shift. Note that blocking two consecutive strikes stuns your ninja and leaves him vulnerable to enemy attacks. You can cancel out enemy attacks by pressing X when you anticipate an attack.

Download Katakijin or read more on GameRadar’s 365 Days of Free Games. There’s another (probably older) version of Katakijin at 64digits which is pretty fun too (comes with unlimited shurikens)

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Wallpapers for a Nintendo DS game Ninja Town featuring a bunch of cute harmless-looking ninjas. Character designs are done by Shawnimals who dabble in all sorts of cutesy stuff – plushes, buttons, tees, etc.

© Shawnimals

Found out about this game via a trailer released at Gametrailers for Games Convention 2007 . While there’s the standard introduction of the key characters in Ninja Town, there’s no hint whatsoever of the type of gameplay to expect from this title.

Some captures from the trailer below.

Ninja Town under attack!

Ninja consultant. WTH! Does he throw pie charts instead of shurikens.

The requisite wise old ninja master.

The ninja clan

Download the wallpapers (more at Shawnimals) or check out the GameTrailers video for Ninja Town.

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The Xbox 360 game Ninja Gaiden II has definitely broken the world record for the highest number of official downloadable wallpapers available. Not 100, not 200 but over 6000(!)

The premise of Ninja Gaiden II’s Embrace The Blade dynamic wallpaper generation feature revolves around the selection of weapons and equipment from Ryu Hayabusa’s rather impressive armoury.

You have to select 3 out of the 8 melee weapons (and yes, the order matters) , 2 of the 4 projectile weapons available and finally one of the ninpos (I assume they’re martial techniques )

The available choices are listed below. I’ll explain the significance of the numbers beside each item in a short while.

Melee Weapons

© Team Ninja / Microsoft

00. Lunar Staff
01. Tonfa – These weapons were originally used by farmers who were forbidden to bear arms.
02. Vigoorian Flail – An interesting variation of the nunchaku with sickles in place of batons.
03. Dragon’s Claw and Tiger’s Fang – The legendary Miyamato Musashi was the most famous proponent of the dual sword techniques.
04. Falcon’s Talon
05. Dragon Sword
06. Kusari-gama – The sickle is used to finish off opponents whose weapons were ensnared or disarmed by the attached chain. A famous proponent of the kusari-gama being Yamada Shinryukan according to the book Secrets of the Samurai (pg 317).
07. Eclipse Scythe

Projectile Weapons

© Team Ninja / Microsoft

00 Shuriken
01 Windmill Shuriken
02 Incendiary Shuriken
03 Fiend’s Bane Bow

Ninpo

© Team Ninja / Microsoft

00 Art of the Inferno
01 Art of the Wind Blades
02 Art of the Piercing Void
03 Art of the Flame Phoenix

Here’s a couple of the generated wallpapers.

© Team Ninja / Microsoft

A typical wallpaper link looks like the URL below:

http://www.ng2pvp.com/wallpaper/1024×768/n_01-0203-020603_1024×768.jpg

The first 2 digits after n denote the ninpo type, the next 4 digits the two projectile selected weapon codes (six combinations 0001, 0002, 0003, 0102, 0103, 0203 since order does not matter here) and the final six digits signify the 3 chosen melee weapons (order does matter here so 020100 and 000102 will generate different wallpapers).

As you can see, there’s a mind-staggering number of possible combinations as mentioned earlier (or more precisely a total of 6048(!)). If you’re just as obsessive as me in collecting every single possible wallpaper, you can either click your mouse to death for over 6000 times or load this handy text file with all the possible URLs into your favourite download manager. (my favourite is the open source Free Download Manager). Just be prepared to allocate around 500 MB for all the wallpapers.

© Team Ninja / Microsoft

There’s also another wallpaper of Ryu Hayabusa exclusive to the official site in 1024×768 and 1280×1024 resolutions (scroll down on the main page, nearly missed this one)

Download the Ninja Gaiden II wallpapers.

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