Ninja does electric boogaloo, read all about it

By Martin Kingsley

The protagonist is hard to spot - but he does exist

Simplicity is the key to enjoyment, in my book.

A simple concept done well is worlds ahead of an overly dense concept produced poorly, and it is this very philosophy that pervades Metanet Software's debut effort, N, a game so entirely basic yet utterly addictive it boggles the mind.

In a world of decadently rich 3D modeling, 32-bit colours, pixel shaders and 162 player servers, N bucks the trend.

It's 2D, made in Flash with a filesize of just over 1MB, uses a basic palette comprised of blue, black, red, gray, white and two, maybe three shades of yellow and features a ninja-hero who is no more than a vague eight-sided black polygon (in the two dimensional sense of the word).

Despite all this, you can't help being drawn to it. N's premise, like it's design, is dead-simple: as the above-mentioned indeterminately-shaped ninja, you must race to clear sixty episodes, each made up of five levels, of their separate caches of gold before the timer runs out. You have ninety seconds on the clock and unlimited lives, not to mention that each piece of gold is worth two seconds and that your remaining time is carried over into each level until the end of the episode.

Sounds easy, right?

Well, it would be, if it weren't for the legions of killer robots, swathes of landmines, and let's not forget, platoons of roving gun turrets, electro drones and gauss cannons, all hoarding the precious gold in what could be described as an extremely over-zealous manner. It's a give-and-take relationship between ninja and deadly robot: you can't shoot back and they can't perform death-defying acrobatics.

It is worth noting, while on the subject, that N is one of the few Flash games to implement a successful physics engine, complete with rag-dolling and collision detection, an impressive feat considering the complexity involved in such a task, and the game benefits massively from the effort that was gone to. Falling from a mountaintop headfirst into a landmine has never been so much fun.

Leaping, wall-climbing, sliding and generally breaking the laws of gravity and momentum, N is Lode Runner for the new millennium, super-charged platforming goodness on crack. With 300 levels and a constantly updated online high-score list, it provides almost endless replay value, and I only have two gripes, both small:

1. Being Flash, N is a resource-chomping beast, as it works entirely from processor power without help from the graphics card, so anyone with below a 1GHz CPU is definitely going to feel the pinch. Still, just tell yourself you're upgrading for Half Life 2 when you purchase that dual-CPU Dell server and you should be right as rain.

2. Frustration. The amount of times you die when another second would have netted you the episode, when you jump a second to late and fall flailing to you death, when the robot was a tad faster than you expected, is obscene. Some without patience will find this a massive turn-off.

Still, if you have the computer and the mindset, there's no better way to spend your coffee break.

Game: N
Players: 1
Online: No
Developer: Metanet Software

Rating: 90%

(Ratings Key/Explanation)

N is available now. Download it here.