A new version of the popular and wildly addictive Desktop Tower Defense has been released.

The new version includes new Ink, Snap & Boost Towers, New Morph & Dark Creeps, New Trickle, Random, 15 Tower & Splash/No Splash modes, 10K mode is now 100 levels. The Bash tower is improved and the interface has been overhauled.

The new version delivers a more complex game that provides new challenges for regular users.

I’m siding with Jason Kottke on the changes: a lot of the changes make the game more complex without delivering more fun; trying to succeed with a number of the new features is plain difficult and literally means having to relearn the best way of playing the game. The in-game advertising with the letter K appearing on creeps referring to a sponsor is intrusive and a step too far. Many will enjoy the new challenges of Desktop Tower Defense, but for others it will lose its appeal.

Previous TechCrunch coverage here.

Desktop Tower Defense, the addictive and evil game that Jeremy Zawodny wrote about and which subsequently led to me losing several working days to “testing,” has been played 15 million times since launching in March. So says the creator, Paul Preece, to the WSJ today.

Preece, who’s started his own company to create more games, says that up to 4,000 people are playing at any one time.

Preece, whatever you create next, I hope I never hear about it.

Click here to play the game, and write off the rest of your day.

Paul Preece, the designer of the wildly addictive Desktop Tower Defense has quit his day job and is teaming up with David Litsky; the designer of FlashElementTD to develop online games full time.

Desktop Tower Defense currently ranks at just over 6,000 on Alexa. According to a report at Gigaom the game had 4 million unique visitors on 20 million page views in April.

Michael Arrington has written previously about the addictive nature of the simple yet compelling game. It has spurred competitions, hacks and a large loyal following.

Preece and Litsky have set up a blog to document the new company. At the time of writing the front page included a sneak peak at the new towers to be included in the next version of Desktop Tower Defense.

(via Kottke)

Desktop Tower Defense illustrates that you don’t need fancy graphics or big budgets to build highly addictive online games. In Desktop Tower Defence, all of the main graphics are hand drawn.

I first discovered this on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog, where he warned “The lack of posting here in the second half of this week (especially to my linkblog) has been a direct result of attempting to beat this highly addictive game. Whatever you do, please DO NOT click the link and start playing that game. You may find yourself in the very same time warp that I did…”

So of course I clicked on the link and have been “testing” the game ever since. It’s free and Flash based, and very simple. Bad guys come at you in a highly predictable way. You build defenses that take them out. If any get through, you lose a life. I’ve gotten to level 72. Can’t get past it.

Until this, Kdice was my addictive online game of choice. Now, I have them both open in separate browser tabs.

If you do get hooked, and want some advice on how to get up into the higher levels, watch this YouTube video.