Brad Shoemaker Associate Editor

Now Playing: Tetris (with all the boxes I used to move to a new apartment), Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, N

N-credible

I'll be up front with you: This column is going to gush about a little-known and totally awesome free Flash game called N. So if you've played N, and you therefore know how great N is, you can stop reading now (and get back to playing N).

N's story: You're a ninja and you can jump real high. That's about all you need to know.

For all the rest of you, N casts the player as a mighty little ninja who stands not 30 pixels tall. You make this ninja run and jump across well over a hundred levels in a quest to pick up gold nuggets, avoid roving robots and other death traps, and find the exit to each level. Like I said, it's a free download, one that clocks in at less than a single megabyte, so I bet you're not expecting much on the graphics front. In fact, this must all sound pretty pedestrian to you. So what makes N great?

The secret to this ninja's outright badness is physics. Not the boring old big-fat-textbook high school physics. I'm talking about the kind of physics that let you go leaping over tall barriers with aplomb and wall-jump nonstop until you hit the ceiling of the level. I first learned of N from a news post by Tycho over at Penny Arcade, who described the game pretty aptly as "Lode Runner plus physics." The game isn't much to look at (though it does have an appealingly minimalist aesthetic), but it's a lot of fun. Clearly, single letters make for the best free games.

Here's the rub, though: N is, to my mind, a lot more fun than plenty of games you have to pay for. Why hasn't anybody thought of something like this in a console game? Too busy making fancy graphics or milking a big-name license? There are innumerable games that waste their physics modeling on crates or floppy enemy character models--why is there no platformer that can marry the production values of a Mario Sunshine with this kind of over-the-top, innovative, fun gameplay? Developers, you are dropping the ball; these guys beat you at your own game with Flash.

Here's another picture of N just because.

N doesn't even stop giving with its initial offering--there's also a level editor included so you can construct your own boards, effectively extending the game's replayability to infinity if you have the patience and creativity. It's loaded with style, too. Check out the way the ninja dances when he hits the exit or the wonderfully bouncy, bloody way he splats on the ground when he falls from a perilous height. Everything about N smacks of care and craft on the part of the developer(s)--the simplicity, the humor, the distilled essence of its design.

If you can't tell, I'm pretty well enamored with this game, and the fact that it's so small and it's free. I think a little bit of the platforming genre's future is buried in this simple game--I just hope the people who make the design decisions are paying attention. Anyway, download it if you haven't. If you'll excuse me, I need to go run up some walls.