Game of the Day: Ninja Quest Online

by Alexander Armero, Posted Jan 24th 2012 10:33AM

In today's Game of the Day, you're put in a familiar situation. In Ninja Quest, it's up to you to rescue the princess who has been captured by the enemy. However, on this adventure, you aren't exactly a mustachioed, Italian plumber. Instead, you're the most ruthless killing machine in the ancient world: a ninja.

Using all sorts of devastating weapons, it's up to you to take the fight to the Bad Ninja Clan. These enemies have no fear and will show you no mercy as they try to cut you down. But failure is not an option, the princess's life is in your hands. So take up arms, and set out on your very own Ninja Quest below.

Click here to play Ninja Quest Online!
Did you manage to rescue the princess? What do you think of Ninja Quest?

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Tags: free games, free online games, game, game of the day, games, games.com, ninja, online games

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Ninja Saga, Diamond Dash Top This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU

It’s the first week in over a month that we haven’t seen a Zynga game on our list of fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users. Our top three spots this week are occupied by Ninja Saga, Diamond Dash, and Tetris Battle.

Diamond Dash made the jump to mobile early this month with a cross-platform iOS version. Just after the launch, Diamond Dash DAU jumped by 300,000 — which may be directly related to mobile users logging into the app with Facebook Connect. German developer wooga was one of Facebook’s launch partners for its HTML5-driven mobile platform, which does function on Android , so we expect to see Diamond Dash Android-bound sometime in the near future.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

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Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots lets the fur fly on iPhone, iPad this month

Well, the fruit will fly, too, no? The fruity fur? The furry fruit--ah, whatever--Halfbrick has teamed up with Dreamworks and THQ to release Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots, a brand new version of the hit mobile game for iPhone ($.99) and iPad ($1.99). The new game will release on Oct. 20, just eight days before Puss in Boots, the cat's self-titled big screen soirée, hits theaters.

Halfbrick has certainly been busy with Fruit Ninja, coming hot off the heels of Fruit Ninja Frenzy for Facebook. Sure, this is a branded game aimed at keeping the buzz for the upcoming film alive, but it sounds like the Halfbrick team has crafted a labor of love for the lithe feline. This new take on Fruit Ninja features two new modes--Desperado and Bandito--that look to seriously challenge veteran fruit ninjas.

Desperado is a new take on Classic Mode that packs new Magic Beans (an alternative to Bananas, we imagine) and new types of waves, while Bandito puts players through four tiers of unique, increasingly difficult slicing challenges. Judging from the game's trailer (seen below), we're looking at lots and lots ... and lots of bombs.

"The fun and adventure of the Puss in Boots world lends itself perfectly to the core gameplay of Fruit Ninja," Halfbrick CMO Phil Larsen said in a release. "We wanted to create something new and different for our fans while keeping the magic of Fruit Ninja intact, and we think Bandito Mode will keep even the most practiced players on their toes. It's totally rad!" Yup, that sounds like a guy from Halfbrick, alright.

Even if it is a branded game, are you psyched for a brand new take on Fruit Ninja? Where would you like to see the franchise go next? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

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Texas HoldEm Poker, 開心水族箱, Ninja Saga Top This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU

Zynga’s Texas HoldEm Poker, ????? (Happy Aquarium), and Ninja Saga top this week’s list of fastest-growing games by daily active users.

TV tie-in game Jersey Shore makes an appearance at No.8 just as the show on which it’s based prepares to enter its fourth season. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of growth the social game supports while new episodes air. The premier airs August 4.

????? developer Happy Elements has a second game on this week’s list of DAU gainers with ???? (Forest Adventure). The game is essentially a FrontierVille clone set in a jungle as opposed to the American West, though the style of the character customization feels distinctly different. It’ll be interesting to see if “regional reskins” like ???? transcend the clone label on account minimal audience cross-over.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

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Rocket Ninja’ Shr3d Engine Provides Boost in Social Gaming 3D Arms Race

Yesterday, we got our first look at a 3D social game engine that streams through Flash without the use of a plugin or download from developer Rocket Ninja in the game Wrestler: Unstoppable. The developer’s proprietary engine, Shr3d, marks another effort by developers to push the web technology that makes more sophisticated games possible.

When 3D first came to console video games, it changed both the way that players interacted with the games and the way the video games industry judged progress. An arms race emerged where the three largest console developers — Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft — spent the majority of their development budgets on creating bigger, better 3D experiences. This created an environment where game designers focused on crafting games that showcased the technology, effectively changing the types of games players had access to.

So far, the social games industry has been immune to the 3D arms race, instead focusing on an art quality arms race where developers looked for ways to create vivid, distinctive visuals that ran smoothly on Flash. We’ve seen developers explore ways to create these experiences through hiring highly specialized artists, experimenting with data storage options for art assets on client computers, and also with plugins that provide games with additional functionality like Microsoft Silverlight. Now, with Rocket Ninja’s new engine, we begin to see where the 3D arms race could make its way into social games as Shr3d creates a 3D experience without the use of plugins.

ISG interviews Rocket Ninja CEO Oded Pelled, CTO Randy Fish, and Executive Producer Neil Haldar on the implementation of Shr3d and what 3D means for the social games industry.

Inside Social Games: Wrestler: Unstoppable was originally a 2D fighting game experience. How did you introduce the existing player base to 3D without overwhelming them?

Oded Pelled: When we launched [Shr3d] on Cinco de Mayo, the game was in 3D for all users. The game by default [now] appears in 3D for all users. [The upcoming] sound features will only be for 3D, and in the next month, there’s not going to be a 2D option. There’s going to be 3D animation with sounds, or there’s going to be basically [a mode] with animations turned off.

ISG: Did you experience any early performance issues by introducing 3D into the game?

Pelled: The unique thing about Shr3d is that it works with Flash version 10 and it works with low performing machines, so we’re very pleased to [report] that we don’t get complaints about performance issues. So far.

Randy Fish: The animations are pretty small. I think most of the size of the download is actually in some of the models, in the texturing. And in the background in the arenas. I’m not sure what the total size is of an actual character, but we have a pre-loader, so by the time the match starts, you’ve got all the assets you need. The characters themselves are very small. Right now we’re relying very heavily on the browser’s caching mechanisms and that’s been working very well. Our Flash engineer worked on Shr3d almost almost completely with a four-year-old laptop that’s basically a netbook just to make sure that we’re addressing [possible performance issues].

ISG: Now that you can render everything from animations to actual items in 3D, will you add more premium decoration features as a revenue stream?

Pelled: We haven’t yet. We have 10 new [arena] venues coming in the next few months. Some of them are very, very cool. There are more venues in different locations and obviously a person will have to buy them.

ISG: A lot of social game developers are beginning to think of 3D as an arms race. What is your attitude toward the rise of 3D in social games?

Pelled: We believe that Shr3d is giving us a competitive advantage because we’re not counting on people downloading any plugin or software, like Unity, which no doubt offers significantly higher capabilities. But how many people download the client, the plugin? You’re talking about less than 1% of Facebook users. So in that race, we’re not talking about the future, [we're talking about the present]. We’re out there with the game and it’s in 3D and it looks very impressive. And it works on low-performing machines.

So there are going to be more [developers] coming in. We believe that a lot of them will require plugins and software. That’s going to be a challenge, especially when you’re talking about a social platform with a relatively short attention span. People need to get a game — maybe from a viral share — and instantly start to play. Not [be asked] to start a download or go to this, install this.

Neil Haldar: To add onto that, I would say that a lot of developers get caught up in 3D for 3D’s sake. I think I can envison an arms race where developers are trying to build lots of stuff in 3D. More than they need to. I think the philosophy that we took with the acceleration of Wrestler has been very specific. We haven’t built the whole thing in Flash; we’ve used a lot of HTML so that it renders really clear on a low-end machine. And we remain most compatible with older machines. I think that’s the probably the right way to allow us to scale with our own technology. It doesn’t require a download.

Fish: I think from the ground up we focused on lower polygon models. In doing so, we allow the download sizes to be much smaller. So basically it’s not going to look console quality, but the time to get started is much quicker. It looks pretty good. But the emphasis was on getting people [into the game]. You don’t download a 250 megs of assets in order to get started. Or a gig. Or World of Warcraft.

ISG: Is Shr3d something Rocket Ninja would consider licensing to other social game developers for their own games?

Pelled: Right now, that’s not part of our strategy. [Shr3d] is definitely a big competitive advantage. Part of our strategy [is to be] an accelerator. The more games we come to an agreement with a developer on, [the more we'd use the engine]. Mostly likely, we would buy [the game], or reach some kind of business terms [with the developer] so that  they can benefit from [our] proprietary technology. It’s case-by-case scenario. In this specific case of Wrestler, we bought the game and we actually even had the developers join the company, so it’s a full acquisition.

[Editor's Note: What Pelled means here is that Rocket Ninja is not interested in handing over the engine to other developers to experiment with, much the way that Epic Games does with its Unreal game engine in the console and PC video game space. Rather, he's talking about a case-by-case agreement process where Rocket Ninja would acquire or partially acquire a single game at a time to give it the acceleration treatment with the Shr3d engine the way it did for Wrestler. So far, Rocket Ninja has not announced plans to acquire any other new games.]

ISG: Just before Rocket Ninja bought Wrestler, the company announced a $3.5 million round of investment. How much of this funding went into development on Shr3d versus what Rocket Ninja spent on marketing the game?

Pelled: So far, we’ve barely even started marketing. We bought the game in December. We really started work on it in January. The last four months have been devoted to the acceleration part, which is broken into making the game 3D, introducing new mechanics, introducing new virality components [...] And two three weeks from now, we’re going to open the floodgates and start to expand [marketing]. So far, not even 20% [of the funding] went to marketing.

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