Love it or hate it, you have to admit that for a little while, Flappy Bird was everywhere. There's even a secret stage in Super Mario Run that I'm pretty sure is winking at the game. Nobody seemed more surprised by the game's explosive popularity than its creator, Dong Nguyen, who ended up pulling Flappy Bird from the App Store at the height of its popularity. Since then, he's kept on doing what he was doing before: making pick-up-and-play games with cute art and aggravating difficulty. For his latest game, Nguyen teamed up with Japanese publisher Obokaidem, a mobile-focused team with a number of ex-Konami employees in its ranks. The result is Ninja Spinki Challenges!, and it's set to release later this week.

I had the chance to try the game a little bit ahead of its release, and while it's certainly a little more polished than Nguyen's previous titles, Spinki's got its creator's fingerprints all over it. The main character is drawn from the cast of Swing Copters, and the gameplay focuses on performing relatively simple actions in increasingly challenging circumstances. At the same time, this is a kinder, gentler game than Nguyen's previous releases, at least initially. The game has two modes, but you'll have to play a little of the first to unlock the second. The first mode is the Challenge Mode, where you'll play one of six different mini-games. There are five sets, making for a total of thirty stages. Clearing a mini-game in one set will unlock it in the next set, wher...