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By STEPHEN DAUSE

Date published: 3/24/2005

YOUTH CORRESPONDENT

If it is at all possible that a Flash game is worth downloading, "N" is it.

"N" is what's called a puzzle platformer, which is a fancy way of saying a 2-D thing where your little guy jumps around the screen and tries to run from the bigger guys who try to kill him.

Where to find this gem of a flash game? Harveycartel.org/metanet, sports fans.

The basic premise is that you act as a 2-D ninja who is apparently trying to achieve transcendence through jumping around puzzle rooms. It's strikingly similar to a lot of the old games you've played in arcades, except now it's in Macromedia Flash form.

The graphics, while neither simplistic nor stunning, fulfill their purpose. MetaNet Software, the creator of this simple yet addicting game, has a morbid philosophy that can be summed up as "Death, which happens often, is animated."

Nothing says rejection better than when, after one's ninja has been gunned down, precision-lasered or electrocuted, its corpse then flies into an exploding mine, causing its limbs to be strewn throughout the 800-by-600-resolution screen.

And if you don't laugh when that happens to your ninja, then you shouldn't be playing this game. Half the fun is watching yourself die, anyway.

"N" is really a combination of a flashback to early Nintendo games with new-millennium sense of humor--an odd twist, perhaps, but it works.

STEPHEN DAUSE is a junior at Colonial Forge High School.

Date published: 3/24/2005