Ninja Town for the Nintendo DS is a cute introduction to the tower defense genre of strategy games. You must defend against the evil Mr. Demon as he tries to infiltrate Ninja Town.

If you've played tower defense games before this one will be intuitive. If not, a short bit of explanation is due. A tower defense game involves waves of enemies coming into a pre-defined area. The defender — the player — must balance how much room he has for defensive structures with what types he can build versus what types of enemies are attacking, as well as account for how much currency he has.

In Ninja Town, the currency is "ninja star cookies". You're the wisest ninja in the town, and so you float serenely over the town, watching over it and deciding where to place buildings that will control various forms of ninjas that defend your town. Some just fight — others will slow down the enemies, while still others might play as a sniper, shooting wasabi peas at the bad guys.

If the bad guys succeed in their mission, you lose hearts or life. Lose all of them, and that's the end. In the beginning, it might be something simple — let 10 demons get past your defenders and you lose. As the game goes on, however, it gains complexity, so instead of just having them enter and exit you might have to (say) defend a central structure, like a candy factory.

While it would probably be wrong to say that Ninja Town brings anything extraordinarily innovative to the world of tower defense games, what it does bring is a nice, cute sense of charm, as well as making what appears to be a fun version of it for the Nintendo DS. The version we saw was approximately 90% done, and they're shooting for a fall 2008 release for the game.