While taking a sabbatical from Rayman/Tonic Trouble, I played a game that my awesome wife bought me as a present when we moved house. When I got my first computer in university (an iBook G4) I was obsessed with finding software and games from wherever I could, preferably free. A friend passed along the cool free flash game N and I got hooked. Having already played I Wanna Be The Guy I had a taste for polished 2D platformers with excellent control that are super hard but not too punishing in that retrying is extremely easy. Super Meat Boy and to a lesser extent Rayman Origins later delivered a similar feeling.

Although I’m dismayed that the upcoming N++ is at this point a PS4 exclusive for some reason, I wanted to support Metanet and see what they’d done with this upgrade. The DS version doesn’t have the various extra level packs that the Xbox 360 version has, but well I’m not buying an Xbox am I now? I also found out that the DS one had a community and level sharing features that had quickly been shut down by the publisher Atari; the Nintendo WFC is gone now anyway so it’s moot. Having so many features in the menus that simply don’t work anymore is disheartening, but I mainly just wanted to play the levels anyway.

So how are they? To put it simply, they’re much easier than I remember the Flash version being. I barely got through half the stages in that one before becoming stuck on a whole range of available levels. Whether I have better skills now (unlikely), the controls suit it better (possible), or it was just tuned easier for more broad appeal (likely), I didn’t find it too bad to complete every one of the 50 chapters (5 levels each). However, entering the cheat code for the “Atari level pack” is essential as it opens a set of 5 chapters that retain the diabolical challenge that I remembered.

One of the tentpole features of this release is the updated graphics. Sound is basically untouched but the game looks fancier with a lot more detail on the objects and backgrounds. It’s possible to switch back to the Flash game’s “pure” style, but I liked the new style, only preferring “pure” for when I was stuck on a hard chapter and needed to concentrate without the extra complexity which could be slightly distracting.

This game is really just about the gameplay and presenting you with platforming challenges in a robust engine, and with that it succeeds. The game plays just as I remembered: like a dream, and the level designs are top-notch. If anything I had more fun than with the original, since I was actually able to finish it all. The DS works pretty well, showing the whole level on one screen and a close up on the other screen. This is an unfortunate side effect of the screen size but they made the best of it.

Speaking of the specifics of this port, there are quite a few minor UI niggles, such as the cursor defaulting to “new game” instead of “continue”, and menus generally being a bit unclear. The post-death physics and animation are also definitely inferior to the Flash game’s, which is a shame.

Still, despite a few annoyances and half the game’s features being unavailable now, this is for the moment the best way to play N. Well, maybe the 360 is better but this one’s portable, so there [oops, just realised it came out on PSP too—which has the full levels on screen… maybe try that one, but who has a PSP anyway?]. The slightly toned down difficulty made it more enjoyable, there were only a few occasions of the massive frustration that the original engendered. I’d recommend it since it’s on the cheap, although the only place I found it was through Amazon (I think it had a low print run). Anyways: recommended.