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Today's Pixel love game is Persist by Jussi Simpanen

This game is a great example of minimal pixel art done very well.

Although only a short game (created in 48 hours for Ludum Dare), it is a very satisfying one to play and has some good variation through out.

We felt that the controls were just right for making those small important adjustments to the hero's movement whilst jumping for platforms.

Have fun!

Click To Play!

We will bring you another pixel love game next week!

Hi Nitromians!

We thought we would share some pretty interesting info about Test Subject Arena 2, just in case you'd missed it originally when playing the game at launch. We added some high-score messages to each of the challenges!

Originally, you could read a message on each of the challenge's highscore boards and we even saved screenshots so that we could show you all after the games release... which is now! :)

So for anyone that didn't spot them, here they are!

Blue's Challenge
Blue Rex Suit's Challenge
Professor's Challenge
Professor Rex Suit's Challenge
Dr Nastidious' Challenge
Green's Challenge
Orange's Challenge
Mercenary's Challenge

We thought it would be a bit of fun, our favourite message was for Professor in the Rex Suit!

Did anyone spot them before this article? Let us know if you did!

Today we want to talk about some advert changes that we have made. You may have noticed over the last couple of years that we experimented a lot with ads? Let's be honest here... you may have noticed about us experimenting in adding more ads to the site?

Firstly we would like to assure you that it was not lead by greed... we only put ads on the site to fund making the games you love to play. In recent years this has been much more of a struggle as both a lot of browser gamers and ad networks have shifted focus to mobile games. The lowest point for us in this is when we reluctantly turned on pop under ads... something we swore we never wanted to do!

You hopefully noticed that the pop under ads are no longer there? We switched them off a few days before the launch of Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage with the hope that it would lead to enough new revenue that we could keep them off. We are happy to say that so far, this has been the case!

So this we hope was the turning point to a better ad experience in the future on Nitrome.com. Today we have launched our next ad based improvement which was made to the preroll ads that show up before the games play. Now don't get too excited, they are still there. We like to think however that they are now a lot slicker and less intrusive. There should be less loading errors with this new system, there are more skippable ads and should now all pull in at the correct size within a new container that better lets the player know what's going on.

We don’t expect us having a new ad system to be something that you all want to celebrate but we hope you approve of the new system and agree that it works better and more slickly than the old one. We will continue to improve the quality of the ad experience where we can. Let us know what you think below!

If anyone experiences issues with the new preloader, please leave comments, email us or private message us. We will look into any problems found.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Do you hum the music to our games? Well, so does our musician Dave! In fact he hums them before they are even made.

Confused? Then read on...

We were surprised to discover that Dave rarely composes the tunes directly at the computer and often thinks of them at other times, sometimes even after he has gone to bed. If that happens, he needs to remember it later. The way he does that is to record himself humming the tune into his phone... genius!

Now we know what your thinking... show us, we want to hear. Well, we thought the same and Dave kindly agreed to share his hummed track along side the final track it became for the upcoming Icebreaker level pack update.

Hummed Version:

Final Version:

(did we just exclusively show a glimpse of the next Icebreaker track in a post about humming? Yup!)

Enjoy!

Hello all,

We know it's been a while since our last release but we've been hard at work on many things and so we are very happy to announce that today is the day we release Test Subject Arena 2!

We've had lots of fun playing... er... we mean testing this game! With up to 4 players fighting against each other (need Touchy for more than 2 players) simultaneously, this game gets frantic!

For those of you who want to hone your skills on your own, there is a single player mode. Where each character has it's own level to beat.

We hope you enjoy our latest addition to the Test Subject Universe. We'll be watching those high score tables!

Play Test Subject Arena 2: Click Here!

Happy gaming!

Hi Nitromians,

We have some special news for all our iOS fans out there! Our first update for Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage is now live!

In the 1.1 update we have really gone to work on adding our own unique take on achievements to Icebreaker.

We have an all new character called the watcher who sets you missions on little sign posts around the game.

Missions range from trying to strike a chicken enough times before it flys off screen to a pack wide treasure hunt and even a mission that will involve some detective work finding the Vikings that are ever so subtlety different....ooohhh! We have made every effort to go beyond what you would normally expect from achievements to something we really feel expands the game world!

We also took the time in 1.1 to fix a few bugs including one to do with iOS7 and magnet of the gods so if you were having problems there it should now work without a hitch.

We have a swanky new video to go with this release which you can check out...it's not strictly gameplay so it's worth a watch even if you have the game already!

If you were on the fence before this may convince you to take the plunge and if you already have the game what are you waiting for update now!

Get Icebreaker: Click Here!

Todays Pixel Love goes out to Enough Plumbers 2 by Glen Forrester.

The concept of having many expendable heroes all trying to achieve the same goal is great fun when executed well and we feel that Enough Plumbers 2 really pushes the scope of what can be achieved with this idea.

You start the game by diving into the toilets to make your way through various well designed levels finding out early on that sacrificing your plumbers is something very unavoidable. Fear not! As long as one of the heroes is alive you may still pass the level.

To help you on your way, you get power-ups that let a single plumber take on new abilities, abilities that are very important in completing the levels.

This game has a lot of depth and we feel it is a great choice for some Pixel Love!

Play Enough Plumbers 2: Click Here!

Have fun, we will bring you all another Pixel Love next week!

It's been a little while since we talked about Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage's Android plans so we wanted to give you a little update.

To recap we currently have a team working on the Android version and the iOS team have been working on two updates for the game in the form of an Achievements/Challenges based update and the next level pack!

All areas are progressing smoothly but this time we want to let you know a little more about the Android side of things.

The basic port of Icebreaker was up and running on Android in about a week but even then we knew it was going to be hard work to get to the point that we could actually release it. There are many, many small differences that have an impact on the Android build. The most obvious is the screen sizes and resolutions available on Android compared to iOS. The game has two set levels that it scales to and it does not follow a character so getting this working has meant a lot of adjustments and testing...Peter literally has a pile of Android devices on his desk covering all the major variations we are supporting. Beyond this there is a proper testing team hired that go through everything we do with a fine tooth comb so even more devices are tested on beyond what we have in the office.

We have (touch wood) sorted out everything for the screen sizes now and it's been tested to verify this. There are however still more things we need to do. By the time this is out we expect the iOS version to have received an update and we want at launch the Android version to be every bit as good as the iOS one. Currently the Android build does not include any of this so we need to merge the more up to date iOS game data and Android data to make a build that contains updates and Android specific elements. We also plan to hook the achievements to Google Plays achievement system!

If you missed the previous news we're pleased to say that we also plan to launch the Android version on the Amazon App Store. There is a little work to hook a few things up here too but we felt it was worth it to get it on as many devices as possible!

Finally we want to best set peoples expectations correctly for which devices you can expect us to support. We built Icebreaker on iOS to run on a 3GS and it took some optimising to make that run well. With that in mind your phone would have to be a better Android equivalent device. The same goes for screen dimensions...if you have less than 480 x 320 pixels then it was too hard to cater for sorry. To give you some real life phone examples we have tested it personally on a Samsung Galaxy S2 and it runs fine. For those interested here are the full list of devices we tested it on internally at Nitrome:

Full list of devices tested by Nitrome:

*Please note that the list of devices used by the actual testing team Rovio supplied is far, far greater!

The other things that affect the support of your device are the processor. We only support arm7 devices (which is the same as the iOS build).

Operating system wise we require 2.3 (gingerbread) or above in order to run.

We know you're going to ask about price but we're not revealing that until release I'm afraid but I wouldn't expect any nasty surprises.

So that's it for now. Unfortunately it is still impossible to say when we expect it to be ready but we're making good progress!

Hi Nitromians!

Today's Pixel Love game is... Naya's Quest created by Terry Cavanagh.

This is a real mind bender of a game. You set out on your quest making your way to the "edge". Along the way you will have to traverse some very tricky levels, using your trusty cross-section scanner as a means to better judge your next move. We thought the concept of this game was great, and fell for nearly all of the illusion based traps!

Play Naya's Quest: Click Here

Terry Cavanagh also has a fast paced, frantic avoidance game out for iPhone that we also think is awesome. Check Out Super Hexagon

Have fun everyone, we'll bring you more pixel love next week!

It's been a little while since we talked about Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage and we're currently planning some updates to give you news on how the various areas are progressing. There is one little bit of information though that we couldn't keep to ourselves until then!

So people know we're working on an Android version right? But everyone expects that this just means Google Play store. We are of course bringing it to the Google Play store but those of you out there with Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD need not fret as we have you covered too! That's right we will also be bringing Icebreaker: A Viking Voyage to the Amazon App store at the same time as Google Play!

We have also got a photo of the game running on those devices! Click here to see the photo

Icebreaker Update: Kindle News - Click Here!

We're going to have a full Android update about the progress next week so expect more then!