OREM, Utah–Aug. 31, 2009 – NinjaBee and J. Kenworthy Entertainment, the creative team that envisioned and developed Cloning Clyde for Xbox LIVE Arcade, revealed today the title of their next XBLA game - Ancients of Ooga. Along with this announcement the developers also unveiled the first piece of concept art from the upcoming title.
“Ever since we released Cloning Clyde we’ve been bombarded with requests for a sequel,” said John Nielson, founder of J. Kenworthy Entertainment. “Although Ancients of Ooga is not a sequel to Cloning Clyde, it is what we like to call a spiritual successor because of how heavy an influence Cloning Clyde had on its creation. Just like Cloning Clyde, Ancients of Ooga is going to bring originality, humor, its own unique artistic style, and extremely creative gameplay to Xbox Live Arcade.”
Cloning Clyde was originally released in July of 2006. No release date has yet been announced for Ancients of Ooga.
PAX 10 Winner The Amazing Brain Train coming to WiiWare
OREM, Utah– Aug. 25, 2009 – Indie video game developer NinjaBee is proud to announce it has partnered with fellow indie developer Grubby Games to bring the 2008 PAX 10 Award-winning game - The Amazing Brain Train - to Nintendo WiiWare™, the Wii™system’s downloadable service, this fall.
“The Amazing Brain Train is a great example of some things that make indie games great – it’s highly creative, visually distinctive, and fundamentally fun to play,” said NinjaBee President and co-founder Steve Taylor.
More than a year of work has been put into fine-tuning The Amazing Brain Train and adapting it for the Wii. The result is a fun, ultra-challenging and addictive brain training game that is unlike any other in the WiiWare library.
“This is no ordinary brain game,” said Ryan Clark, co-founder of Grubby Games. “The Amazing Brain Train contains features never before seen in the genre. It’s a departure from the minimalist brain games we’ve seen in the past. You can forget about goal-less gameplay: The Amazing Brain Train is packed with quests, trophies and high scores that add an aspect of gameplay that other brain games just don’t have.”
Hosted by the diminutive genius Professor Fizzwizzle, the game takes the player on a brain-boosting adventure around the Professor’s cartoon world, stopping to solve challenges and help his friends along the way. Fueled only by mental energy, The Amazing Brain Train guides the player through 15 different mini-games in three addictive game play modes—quest, test and practice.
The ability to save personal, friends’ and family members’ high scores on the same console allows the player to come back time and again to challenge best scores and prove just how smart he or she is.
“Ryan showed me a copy of the game before it came out and after seeing it just once we said ‘This would be perfect for Wii,’” Taylor said. “That’s how this whole project got started. One of the cool things about working with small studios is having the flexibility to do something like this without a big negotiation or interference from a big publisher.”
The Amazing Brain Train was originally released for PC, Mac and Linux in May of 2008 and in July of that year, the game was selected out of hundreds of entries as one of 10 games to be featured at the Penny Arcade Expo.
About NinjaBee
Wahoo Studios, located in Orem, Utah, has been working with publishers to develop games since 2001. They have worked with such clients as Microsoft, Disney, EA, Real Networks and many others. Wahoo’s talented programmers, artists and designers produce creative games that effectively blend innovation, humor and fun game play. In 2004, Wahoo Studios established NinjaBee as an independent brand name. NinjaBee’s popular titles include Outpost Kaloki X, Cloning Clyde, Band of Bugs, Boingz, Doritos Dash of Destruction and A Kingdom for Keflings.
Based in Vancouver, Canada, Grubby Games was formed in October 2004 with a simple goal: To make accessible, polished games that are fun to play. Since then Grubby Games has done just that, producing a number of popular titles including The Amazing Brain Train, My Tribe, Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery, FizzBall and Professor Fizzwizzle.
This Saturday (Aug. 15) Xbox LIVE will hold and avatar-themed Arcade Afternoon event, which will feature two NinjaBee games: A Kindom for Keflings and Band of Bugs. If you're missing any multiplayer achievements for either of those games this would be an awesome time to go online and knock those out. Or just come and have a good time playing cool multiplayer games as your avatar. Plus, some of the NinjaBee team will be there. Let's meet up and play.
Every once in a while it's nice to hear from the brains behind the games. Steve Taylor, co-founder and President of NinjaBee/Wahoo Studios recently made an appearance as the featured guest on the season finale of GoGcast, the video game podcast produced by GatheringOfGamers.com (an online community and social network for gamers).
During the show's 90 minutes Steve opened up about how he came to start a video game company, answered questions about the development and gameplay of some of NinjaBee's most popular games and may even have leaked a little information about our next big (and not-yet-announced) Xbox Live Arcade game.
If you want to hear what Steve had to say, you can find and listen to episode 20 of GoGcast (the Season 2 Finale) here.
