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Two of Southpeak's DS games that they were showing off at this year's PAX look like they will kick up some dust when they come out. These are Ninja Town and Big Bang Mini.
Ninja Town is inspired by the classic Tower Defense games where the player must lay out a series of towers to protect the screen from waves of bad guys who follow a set path or road. The principle is the same in Ninja Town, except instead of towers, you build ninja huts and the bad guys are red creatures apparently spewing from a recently erupted volcano.
You start off with a specific number of throwing stars (these act as currency), and you use them to buy or upgrade your huts. As you kill more bad guys, you will earn more throwing stars and you will be able to better buttress your defenses during the somewhat constant flow of enemies.
Not only does the game come from a classic and fun gameplay mechanic, but the very simple, 2D graphics are just fun to watch. In fact, much like the gameplay, the visuals heark back to a more basic, almost 8-bit visual style and will definitely appeal to any player who doesn't believe everything has to have tons of polygons.
The game will feature more than 35 single player maps, and each map will feature multiple waves of enemies before you can continue to the next map. There are also going to be an additional 8 multiplayer maps (1 to 2 players).
The other DS game, Big Bang Mini, also takes a simplistic approach. Here, you will control a simple shape on the bottom screen. You move it around by dragging it with your stylus. The only real reason to move your “ship” is to avoid falling sparks and enemy fire. The real challenge comes in not only avoiding those deadly pixels, but also flicking your stylus towards enemies on the top screen in hopes of hitting the various graphical bad guys.
The game will feature nine different worlds themed after everything from a classic arcade layout in New York City, to Chinese fireworks. Big Bang Mini also has five different gameplay modes which include Arcade, Challenge (really, really, really hard mode), Versus Multiplayer, VR Missions and Relax.
From the bit of gameplay that I got to sample, it definitely looks like Big Bang Mini - well, let me just say I can't wait for its release in January because it looks like one of those little games that you can just pick up and put down as you need since levels don't really last all that long. |
