N+Slick, Silverbirch/Atari
Review by Anthony
Review by Anthony
I really had no idea until I played N+, but being a ninja sucks. I thought it was all shurikens this, kunai that, acrobatic flips, and that cool thing where they spin in a circle and disappear into leaves. Nope. Apparently being a ninja means you’re placed in huge rooms filled with deadly mines that kill you instantly, deadly robots that kill you instantly, deadly seeking lasers that kill you instantly, and deadly heat seeking missiles that kill you instantly. And your only reward for being there? The ability to potentially escape and maybe grab some gold on the way... gold of which only exists to sustain your existence by seconds at a time. Dang! I’m sticking with the Vikings from now on.
N+ is made by Atari, appropriately, and is a delightfully old school platformer that’s best described as “filled with death”. Your goal on every stage is to open a door and then exit said door, but to do so means you’ll have to scale walls, make enormous leaps, avoid massive drops, bounce off unsteady platforms, and all the while avoid the myriad of things looking to kill you without any way to fight back. It’s simple, it’s hard, it’s brilliant, and it’s maddening. It’s apparently what being a ninja is all about, which means Dead or Alive was -way- off about Kasumi.
What’s good:
- The game has tons of levels, and despite always requiring the same general actions to complete, simple stage design changes keep it feeling different most of the game. Some have you making incredible jumps, some have you bouncing off walls crazily, some have you navigating dangerous moving platforms, others have you dodging malicious robots, and most include combinations of these.
- The controls are simple, yet lead you to pulling off some glorious maneuvers all the same. You’ll only be using the D-pad and the Jump button for the whole game, but through deft use of both of these, you’ll be soaring through the air, rapidly ascending walls, barely outrunning crazed robots, and generally evading doom the way only a polygonal ninja can. There were times with the combination of level design and controls that it felt truly awesome to see the little ninja flying around the screen.
- The DS gets a little bonus versus other systems here, as it allows both a close-up or scaled-back view of what’s the stage in tandem on the screens. Although most of the time the close-up view was more useful for navigating the intricacies, being able to always view the entire stage and its obstacles on the top screen was a much appreciated feature.
- The instruction manual was very amusing in its description of the game. Very cute addition.
What’s neutral:
- Condensing the game into five-level worlds at a time in lieu of individual levels may have helped it feel like a more “full” experience, but it sometimes meant that an excruciatingly hard level would be caught up in the mix of easier ones. That means you can’t save, stop or shut off the game until you beat the hard one, unless you feel like redoing the earlier stages. A quick save function to balance that out would’ve been helpful.
- I feel like they really missed out on an opportunity for more playtime. While 250 levels is great for the price, a challenge/mission mode could’ve added a lot of extra play to the game. On existing stages, you could be tasked with picking up certain pieces of gold, avoiding certain pieces of gold, making a missile follow you for some time, triggering points in a certain order, complete a stage without alerting an enemy, or within a certain time limit... there are so many simple things that could’ve been included without overloading the cart.
What’s bad:
- C’mon guys, you always give players an “are you sure” before having them quit a world. You’ll be dying hundreds of times in the game, and your A button is the quick button to restart from death. However, should you accidentally press X, you’re sent instantly back to the main menu without your previous-level progress being saved. They also mapped X as the “suicide” button, which can be useful for quickly restarting a level if you’re in a bad situation. But if you’re randomly killed a split second before you press it, it’s back to the menu for you! Ouch.
- The whole idea of collecting gold is completely underutilized. Every gold piece gives 2 seconds of time to you in the world, but in playing it, I never got even remotely close to running out of time. The levels are hard, but once you get it, they aren’t inherently time-consuming at all. Further, I’d unlocked all gold-collection related bonus content maybe halfway through the game, so the requirements for it were fairly low too. For being a prominent aspect of every level, gold sure didn’t seem to matter much.
It’s old school, it’s crushingly hard at times, it’s glorious when everything comes together, and it’s utterly silly in its concept. The animation is modern, but the graphics are simple, the music sounds like it came from a mix of good and bad Atari games, and of course there’s nary a bit of plot to be found. You’re a ninja, you run around, you jump, you evade, and you die until you successfully do the first three.
N+ is a very simplistic, yet great little time-waster that still manages to impress and be a blast to play, as long as you’re not ready to rip your hair out at those stupid ninja-seeking robots.
N+ is made by Atari, appropriately, and is a delightfully old school platformer that’s best described as “filled with death”. Your goal on every stage is to open a door and then exit said door, but to do so means you’ll have to scale walls, make enormous leaps, avoid massive drops, bounce off unsteady platforms, and all the while avoid the myriad of things looking to kill you without any way to fight back. It’s simple, it’s hard, it’s brilliant, and it’s maddening. It’s apparently what being a ninja is all about, which means Dead or Alive was -way- off about Kasumi.
What’s good:
- The game has tons of levels, and despite always requiring the same general actions to complete, simple stage design changes keep it feeling different most of the game. Some have you making incredible jumps, some have you bouncing off walls crazily, some have you navigating dangerous moving platforms, others have you dodging malicious robots, and most include combinations of these.
- The controls are simple, yet lead you to pulling off some glorious maneuvers all the same. You’ll only be using the D-pad and the Jump button for the whole game, but through deft use of both of these, you’ll be soaring through the air, rapidly ascending walls, barely outrunning crazed robots, and generally evading doom the way only a polygonal ninja can. There were times with the combination of level design and controls that it felt truly awesome to see the little ninja flying around the screen.
- The DS gets a little bonus versus other systems here, as it allows both a close-up or scaled-back view of what’s the stage in tandem on the screens. Although most of the time the close-up view was more useful for navigating the intricacies, being able to always view the entire stage and its obstacles on the top screen was a much appreciated feature.
- The instruction manual was very amusing in its description of the game. Very cute addition.
What’s neutral:
- Condensing the game into five-level worlds at a time in lieu of individual levels may have helped it feel like a more “full” experience, but it sometimes meant that an excruciatingly hard level would be caught up in the mix of easier ones. That means you can’t save, stop or shut off the game until you beat the hard one, unless you feel like redoing the earlier stages. A quick save function to balance that out would’ve been helpful.
- I feel like they really missed out on an opportunity for more playtime. While 250 levels is great for the price, a challenge/mission mode could’ve added a lot of extra play to the game. On existing stages, you could be tasked with picking up certain pieces of gold, avoiding certain pieces of gold, making a missile follow you for some time, triggering points in a certain order, complete a stage without alerting an enemy, or within a certain time limit... there are so many simple things that could’ve been included without overloading the cart.
What’s bad:
- C’mon guys, you always give players an “are you sure” before having them quit a world. You’ll be dying hundreds of times in the game, and your A button is the quick button to restart from death. However, should you accidentally press X, you’re sent instantly back to the main menu without your previous-level progress being saved. They also mapped X as the “suicide” button, which can be useful for quickly restarting a level if you’re in a bad situation. But if you’re randomly killed a split second before you press it, it’s back to the menu for you! Ouch.
- The whole idea of collecting gold is completely underutilized. Every gold piece gives 2 seconds of time to you in the world, but in playing it, I never got even remotely close to running out of time. The levels are hard, but once you get it, they aren’t inherently time-consuming at all. Further, I’d unlocked all gold-collection related bonus content maybe halfway through the game, so the requirements for it were fairly low too. For being a prominent aspect of every level, gold sure didn’t seem to matter much.
It’s old school, it’s crushingly hard at times, it’s glorious when everything comes together, and it’s utterly silly in its concept. The animation is modern, but the graphics are simple, the music sounds like it came from a mix of good and bad Atari games, and of course there’s nary a bit of plot to be found. You’re a ninja, you run around, you jump, you evade, and you die until you successfully do the first three.
N+ is a very simplistic, yet great little time-waster that still manages to impress and be a blast to play, as long as you’re not ready to rip your hair out at those stupid ninja-seeking robots.
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