"Eat it!" The words escaped my lips like hydrocarbon fleeing the tailpipe of a backfiring car as I finally roared past my friend's high score in one of N++'s viscera-knotting episodes. I'm not saying that proudly. I don't think of myself as a competitive player, except maybe that's wishful thinking when I'm phantom-dueling my compadres with maddeningly high scores in a platformer this insidious and exacting.
It's what N++ does to your head, prompting soft-spoken guys like me to eventually wring my hands around the gamepad as if to vicariously strangle the game design into submission, all the while hurling obscenities at the screen like Charlie Sheen in any given interview. How, I ask each time I clear an episode's five linked levels and juxtapose my score with leaderboards, did so-and-so get that score?
You can find out. This new PlayStation 4 game lets you watch replays of other players' level runs, rolling or rewinding their near-perfect feats at leisure. This is also known as a form of self-torture.
Metanet Software
