N+ for the DS: It blows.

Being a pretty hardcore fan of the original N flash game and its new iteration on consoles and handhelds, I was pretty stoked to check this one out. After several excruciating and botched delays, it turns out that Metanet and Atari managed to produce... a bad game.

Wait, what? How did they manage to screw up this time?

Well, after even a quick glance at this title, the answer comes easily. Even the great visual style has been scrapped for something... crappier. Kudos to whatever guy in a suit said in a meeting, "Hey, you know the visual style that makes this game so appealing to gamers? Fuck it. It's gonna have to go."

This (sort of) brings me to my first complaint, which is overarching through the whole game. It's that this game looks and feels like a Game Boy Advance game. Some of the enemy sprites have even been replaced with pseudo-3D ones.

Yeah, that's right. Pseudo-3D. Are the guys at Atari even aware that the DS' hardware is perfectly capable of rendering 3D objects? The Xbox Live Arcade version (which is actually better than the flash game, and DEFINITELY better than this piece of crap) had an illusion of depth in the levels, where, if you moved the right stick to move the camera around a bit, the foreground would appear to move faster than the background, much like parallax scrolling. On the DS, the levels move like a static image. What's that all about?

Back to my point: It's almost as if the developers are blissfully unaware of the power of the DS. The (scarfless, I might note) ninja himself looks pretty crappy, and the animation just looks unpolished: for instance, the "gold collecting" animation takes about a second to complete, when it definitely shouldn't. The "dying" animations are too fast compared to the other versions of the game, and some of them just pale in comparison: when you fall from a large height and die, for instance, you just FOLD UP into a small horizontal line. And don't even get me started on the explosions. Seriously, when you hit a mine, you expect to hear an "explosion" sound, right? Nope, according to the developers. Apparently it ought to sound like a fart.

Indeed, the sound is horrible. The background tracks, again, sound like they come out of a GBA game. I mean, if I were blind, I might think I was playing my old copy of Razor: Freestyle Scooter (and yes, it's for the GBA). What was so wrong about the theme used in the flash game, and the remix in the XBLA version? We may never know.

This game is so bad, when you even turn it on, there's even three obvious design problems with the opening screens. Don't believe me? Let me point it out:

Problem 1: Overuse (or actually just use) of the most generic font ever where it says "Licensed by Nintendo" and "Online Interactions Not Rated By The ESRB." This is the font that I've always seen in cut-rate GBA games (what a surprise), but honestly, serious developers have stopped using it since 2002.

Problem 2: The Atari logo, which is the most pitiful 5 frames of animation I have ever seen in an opening logo. The whole thing looks like it's been dipped in JPEG and ugly sauce.

Problem 3: The Silverbirch Studios animated logo, which looks like it's going for the classic "light reflecting off a blade" effect but has some weird framerate issue and ends up looking really choppy.

Now, there are some redeemable features here. The physics engine is still as good as it ever was, and the controls are what you'd expect. They obviously didn't skimp on the online features, either: there's a full head to head battle mode as well as a level creator community, full of custom levels. The only problem is that the core game is so BAD that I don't feel compelled to try any of them out. The game can also be played on either screen: the bottom screen, which displays a "zoomed in" version of the level that moves as you move; or the top screen, which displays all of the level, a la N, but is undetailed. It looks more like a perpetually-open map screen than anything else. I prefer this screen, though; it allows me to forget for a while about the hideous graphics on the bottom screen.

All in all, this game has a good engine and good online features, but it could have used a lot more polish. The fatal flaw, really, is the scrapping of the style used in the flash game N and N+ for Xbox Live Arcade. This could have been a good game that could keep us well entertained through the summer. Instead, it's a monstrosity that you should keep far, far away from. And that's all I can say.