Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

There are retro-styled games that are great because of their simplicity and dedication to gameplay over all else. Then there are retro-styled games that are awesome because they include a relevant multiplayer component, scoreboards, and enough levels to keep the most diehard fans busy for a long time to come. N+, an improved version of the free PC puzzle-platformer N, was recently released on the Xbox Live marketplace and it certainly delivers on all of these counts. The premise is fairly simple. You’re a ninja who loves gold, and luckily for you there are hundreds of levels chock full of the stuff. Unfortunately, hordes of robots and turrets are guarding this gold (and the room exit), so you’ll have to be quick on your feet to grab the treasure and escape with all of your limbs intact.

Each episode of N+ consists of five stages, all sharing the same countdown timer. Grab a piece of gold to add 2 seconds to the clock, but be warned:most gold is heavily defended. The objective of each stage is to escape to the next; you’ll have to find a switch to open an exit door in each level before you can progress. Each episode’s levels are progressively more difficult than the last, and N+ eases frustration by allowing you an infinite amount of tries to complete each stage.

What makes N+ so much fun is its simplicity. The ninja is agile, but fragile; a long fall, hitting an enemy, or touching a mine will cause you to burst into chunky ninja bits. Luckily, you have physics on your side! You can leverage your momentum to great advantage to move quickly around each stage, and you have a few tricks (wall-jumping and a wall-cling) to help you get from place to place without dying. Learning how to best take advantage of the terrain and your speed takes practice, but you’ll soon find yourself making ridiculous leaps and tumbles with the best of them.

In addition to a great single-player experience, you can team up with up to three others locally or over Xbox Live to play in cooperative, survival, and racing modes. In cooperative mode, everyone must make it to the exit door before your group can progress to the next stage. In survival, players are thrown into a variety of deadly stages to see who can last the longest. In race mode, reach the exit door before your opponents do to win! Your rank in each mode is tracked over Xbox Live, so you can compare yourselves to other N+ players across the globe to get a feel for how you’re doing.

Although I haven’t had the time to try it out, N+ also ships with a level editor so you can design your own challenges. However, content-sharing over the Xbox Live service is not currently enabled. An IGN interview with N+’s developers notes that Microsoft currently lacks the tools to police inappropriate user-generated content, so until such tools are developed, you won’t see level sharing enabled. Once the tools are in place, one of N+’s developers says that enabling the feature is as easy as “flipping a switch.”

As N+’s creators have stated “Your continues may be infinite, but your patience may not be.” N+ is the old-school gamer’s game; it’s easy to learn, but difficult to master. A certain amount of dedication is required to get the most out of a title like this. A solid (but somewhat laggy) multiplayer experience is icing on the cake, and the game’s 200+ levels will keep you occupied for a long time. N+ is a solid combination of the puzzle and platform genres; you could do much worse with 90% of the Arcade titles on the Xbox Live marketplace. And remember, you can always try the demo to see if you like the game before you buy, or give the PC version a go.

For its merits, N+ gets an 8/10!

I don’t always have access to my WordPress dashboard whenever I have an idea for a blog post, so I tend to rely on my tablet (which is always two feet away from me) and Microsoft’s awesome OneNote 2007 application to tag any cool thoughts or ideas that come into my head. As far as digital notebook applications go, OneNote is hard to beat. It support various levels of navigation; you can have any number of notebooks, each with its own set of folders/tabs; each of those can have any number of pages and subpages. It handles just about every content type under the sun, as you can embed audio recordings and files into your notes, and most documents support being inserted as a ‘printout’ so you can write directly on your PowerPoint slides or what have you. You can also use the built-in clipping tool to grab screencaptures of specific applications or parts of a web site, something I do often.

You might have also noticed that I occasionally post entries in ink. While my setup using Windows Live Writer and the ink plug-in isn’t quite as robust as Sumocat’s build 51 implementation (which supports making inked words into links),I think it makes for a nice change of pace from the massive amounts of text (and the occasional image). I think ink adds a more personal touch to posts, even if my handwriting is terrible!

Some other cool tools I’ve found include InkSeine, a Microsoft Research prototype geared towards searching(and organizing the results) with ink alone, the Physics Simulator (included in the Microsoft Tablet PC Experience Pack), and Crayon Physics, a puzzle/physics game that’s more-or-less perfectly suited to the input methods on a tablet.

Rather than tell you about the many hours I’ve spent researching multivariate displays recently, here are a few cool things I picked up on some of my daily web scouring expeditions.

After switching from Trillian to Pidgin about a year ago, I saw a new instant messaging program over on Lifehacker called Digsby. Why the switch? Digsby integrates both Facebook (meh) and Twitter (yay) into its UI! Plus, the Google Talk integration actually works (compared to Pidgin). It just came out of closed beta, so give it a try.

I decided that I couldn’t wait for Apple to release their official 3rd party application support for the iPhone and iPod touch, so I found a fantastic unlocking program that’ll jailbreak either of those devices in under a minute. It’s called ZiPhone, and it supports all sorts of unlocking variants for iPhones (just one for the iPod touch!). You can just jailbreak an iPhone/iPod touch if you just want 3rd party application support, or jailbreak, unlock, and activate an iPhone unit for use on other providers’ networks. It’s quick, extremely easy to use, and best of all: it just works.

If sharing music via Internet and LAN is more your thing, head over to Deusty Designs and check out Mojo. Available for Mac and Windows (beta), Mojo lets you view the libraries of other iTunes users on your friends list and download any songs that catch your ear. The Windows version only works over LAN right now, and it autodetects other Mojo users on the network (although with limited success in my case; Matt and I couldn’t get our copies to see each other). The Mac version is substantially more robust and functions over the Internet.

On the web browser front, we saw the release of Firefox 3 (Beta 4) from Mozilla in the past week or so. It’s the first time I’ve really sat down and tinkered with the new interface, and I have to say I’m impressed. The biggest change that I noticed is the new address bar UI: check out the size of the back button! I know I rely on it all the time for navigation, and since the forward button doesn’t see nearly as much use (from what I’ve observed), I’m liking the disproportionate sizes. The other cool feature is the web address matching in the address bar. Notice how it scans through your history and attempts to autocomplete addresses it thinks you’re trying to reach? Nifty! If you’re looking to try the beta without mucking up your Firefox 2 install, try the Portable Apps version.

Fox and NBC have a new video site called Hulu with episodes and clips from a fairly large selection of current and former shows (House M.D., all of Firefly, the list goes on). There are also a couple decent movies (The Big Lebowski). There’s no uploading here; it’s strictly a “sit back, relax, and watch” sort of affair. Some nifty extras like Lower Lights (dims the rest of your screen, leaving the video bright) and embedding support make this one of the best ‘official’ online video offerings.

Enjoy!