Ninjatown is a tower defense game for the Nintendo DS, starring a whole bunch of Shawnimals characters. The whole game is absolutely adorable, with great animations, and lots of strategy. I was expecting to be able to play this while listening to music or podcasts, but it's surprisingly involved. If even one enemy gets through, you won't get an A. In stages where you're protecting an object, just one strike from an enemy will take you down to a B rank. The enemies are fast, so you need to constantly be scrolling around the map watching for anyone who breaks through your defense, and be ready with your special powers (you can use wind to blow enemies back, or fry them, etc.). Here's a quick summary of the game by the developer:

You step into the shoes of Ol’ Master Ninja, tasked with defending Ninjatown from waves of enemies trying to make their way through the town. To stop them, you construct Ninja Huts along their path, from which Ninjas will emerge to engage the enemy. Building each hut costs you Ninja Star Cookies, the currency of Ninjatown, and as you defeat enemies, you earn more cookies. You then re-invest these cookies into building and upgrading huts to deal with the ever increasing waves of enemies. You can also build something we call Modifier Buildings, that will endow any adjacent huts with a special ability. These include buildings like the Training Dojo, which can increase your attack power, or the Tea Shop, which makes your units move faster.

That’s only the basics though, among the new gameplay elements we introduce are Ol’ Master Ninja (OMN) Powers, which are unlocked throughout the game and help to supplement your defensive abilities. These give you powers like Get Off My Lawn, where the player blows into the microphone to push enemies around on the map, or Magnifryer, which lets you direct a beam of scorching hot light on your enemies.

The ninja huts you build are what you'd expect — slow powerful ninjas, fast weak ones, snipers, ice/fire ninjas, and so on. There are also building modifiers, which raise the attack power of the surrounding ninjas, increase their range, or get you more cookies (money). You can upgrade the huts, but that takes time, so you need to do it between waves, or hope you have enough ninjas out there while upgrading.

I just beat the game, getting A ranks on every stage (with the help of strategies on a couple stages). It's an incredibly fun game, and its biggest fault is its length! It's not that it's so short, but it's so much fun it leaves you wanting more, and there were so many obvious, easy ways to extend it!
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Why has it taken me this long to post a review for GHWT? Is it because:

1. I didn't buy it until just now, because I've been broke
2. the blistering speed of the new songs melded my hands to the guitar, leaving me unable to use a computer keyboard
3. I've been so addicted to GHtunes that I've spent every moment creating and playing new songs
4. although we bought it on day one, it's not very good so we haven't beaten it yet, and instead simply unlocked all the songs with a cheatcode and played the ones we liked in quickplay, then went back to RB2

Yes, it's the last one (though I've played it more than that). How can a game that seems almost identical to RB be so much worse? It's the little things…
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