N2O: Nitrous Oxide

""Another world, another time... In the age of wonder...""

''...Another world, another time. The grass was green and blooming, until the crystal cracked!''

...Or something among those lines.

I was first introduced to the world of N2O: Nitrous Oxide in 2000 when all my friends Mac, Riley and Josh came over and we would all have fun by drinking, doing drugs, and taking advantage of girls. They came over one day with this CD wallet filled with CD and PS games. Twisted Metal 2, Resident Evil 3, Street Fighter II Collection... But then I noticed a little orange disc with 'N2O' at the top. I ask him, ''Hey, what's this? Never heard of this game before.'' Riley goes, ''Oh dude, we're playing that tonight when we're ripped!'' And so, after smoking a bowl (I'm a bad person, I know), he pops in this mysterious game.

And I was blown away.

I hear a music group I've never heard of before on the title screen, playing 'Trip Like I Do', the song's 'lyrics' (which are in my one-liner) mesmerized me. This was the first time I was introduced to techno music, the colourful menu screen that warped and morphed was quite, so stoners say it, the ****ing trip. But then the game itself blew me away, I never saw a spaceship shooting game (like this game) since I rented HyperZone for the SNES when I was 6. The insects and mushrooms were just plain weird yet I was enjoying myself. We pulled an all-nighter playing this underrated gaming masterpiece.
A week later I just HAD to buy this game, so I found it brand new at Wal-Mart for a cheap $20 (that's apprx. $14 for you Americans), along with a free memory card that didn't work.

But 2 years later, with friends sent off to work in farms and my act mostly cleaned up. I decided to play it again...

GRAPHICS : 9/10

Colour, need I say more? This game has so much colour it makes my eyes hurt sometimes. The tunnels each have their own unique style and show that with their colours. One level looks like a watery sewer, using lots of blue, grey, and green. Another kind of resembles a space station, using plenty of black, grey, and blue. Sure, that sounds dull but the colour of the bad guys makes up for it, green caterpillars, yellow beetles and red ladybugs. One small but neat thing is the different types of lens flares. The menu screen was done well graphically as well. But the big con is, a lot of it is very pixelated. However, this game visually shows that the developers at Gremlin wanted to push PSone's graphic power to the limit. Beautiful.
On a Side Note: If you own PS2, I highly recommend the Texture Smoothing option on, you'll be amazed.

SOUND & MUSIC : 6/10

The Crystal Method was the perfect choice for a game such as this, the sounds of that electronica music that goes with the flow of gameplay is great. Trip Like I Do, Keep Hope Alive, Busy Child and Now Is The Time would have to be the best choices. And you can simply pick what you want to hear by pressing Select during gameplay. Sound on the other hand, is kind of dull, but thankfully there's not much sound to go around in the first place. When you shoot your laser, it's just a little 'boop' and the explosion sounds as if something out of a SNES game. But you can always turn it off. The ambient sound is okay, but not needed, the only time you can really notice it is to turn the music off. But it's a great experience if you have a Dolby Surround sound system, as this game supports it. It's good but needs improvement.

CONTROL : 9/10

It's quite responsive, but a little iffy at first, VERY iffy if you play the game with the LOCKED camera function activated, as you won't know what you're doing. Learning curve would maybe be an hour, as you only assume noone's played a space shooter like this before, if not played a space shooter at all. Although this game supports Dual Shock, close to no difference is made between analog and digital. If you do not like the standard control configuration (which is the best one) you can always choose between 4 other control configurations or program your own and save to memory card. Good control is an absolute must for a game like this and it definetly shows.

GAMEPLAY : 9/10

Here we go, the good stuff...

In the distant future, the Galaxy is at war. On planet Neptune, the forces of evil have planned to invade Earth by accelerating sub-atomic particles around a tubular shaped circuit called the Torus, developing a race of lethal insects from Hell inside. Nitrious Oxide is the byproduct fueled by the Torus' gas emitions, which supplies energy for your Tunnel Runner (the name of your ship), but unfortunately, the insects as well. Your mission is to kill these insects, assassinate the Boss Enemy and destroy the Torus.

Sounds quite B-movie-ish, but you gotta have a B-movie plot for this type of game.

First you choose your Tunnel Runner, some have more Turning power over Braking power and vice versa, or you can just pick the well-balanced Tunnel Runner, Mantis. Push Square to customize your ship's colours (cool feature, so be creative). There are 30 levels in the game, or should I say 2 sets of 15 levels. Each level drops E-currency, which you can use to either buy extra lives, or a destructive weapon called the Firewall, you get this oppurtunity every time you beat a level, as well as saving a game. Shoot E-currency to increase its value. Special Weapons are found by finding them in the level (they fly in front of the Tunnel Runner for a second first), you can choose 'Selectable' in the Options mode to select different Special Weapons by shooting them before collecting them. The first 15 levels are quite simple, but each level introduces a new insect enemy, making each level harder. The more insects you kill, the more Nitrous Oxide it emits, making your Tunnel Runner go faster. You have to kill all insects before fighting the boss enemy, which is a bigger version of the insect that level introduces. Of course, you can be able to choose your difficulty level before you start a game. Each level has something called a Driller Time Limit, a counter ticks, and when it ends, deadly Drillers will grow out of the Torus, making travel kind of difficult, and these can only be destroyed through Special Weapon use. After the first 15 levels, the levels repeat themselves a second time, but with one complicated catch, each level have Termites that unleash an enormous wave of energy, destroying your Tunnel Runner. Yes, you only have one hit per life, so if you have any hopes of beating the game with a good score, you gotta be good. You get big fat score bonuses by performing certain actions in the game such as destroying a row of mines a Scorpion lays or shooting a Wasp a millisecond before it kills you with its stinger. You can also shoot the mushrooms (yes, this game does have some drug influence in it, hence the T rating) five times to make them change colour, then ram it with your craft (this is how you also earn a Shield). Every time you get a bonus for mushroom shooting or insect killing in a certain type of way, you get a Bonus Award. Bonus Awards allow you to access a Bonus Level (there are 15 of those as well) once you collect five of them (they're the stars on the top of the screen). In the Bonus Level, you can have a chance of getting poop-loads of E-currency by shooting green eggs and collecting the coin inside, however, you must avoid the red spikes, or the level ends. The longer you go, the faster you get, making it harder to not hit the red spikes (or the green eggs if you didn't shoot 'em). After you either die or beat the game (and watch the short but sweet end FMV), you score is put up and input your initials.
This game is absolutely amazing in two-player mode, you get that great sense of competition since this game is mostly about score. As the ad says, ''Don't trip alone,'' because countless one-player hours will get you tired of it.
One more great game feature is the password system, so for once, if you're memory card-less, you have nothing to worry about. And you can put in great cheat codes through the Password system too.

REPLAY VALUE : 6/10

Is it old after a while? Yes. But will you come back for more? Definitely. What you'll find yourself coming back for is the need to beat your score, or to maybe beat the game again on Hard. Or play this electronic acid trip with a friend. If you have friends who will play this a lot with you, you'll be playing this cheap sucker for months. But you still do get tired of it, as there's not much to find when it comes to secrets or rewards. This game's worst area.

OVERALL : 39/50 = 78/100 = 8/10

Nitrous Oxide is something that games nowadays need. Originality. I mean, where else can you find a game where you shoot mushrooms, fly through warped tunnels at 330 km/h and kill mutated insects? This game would have to be Fox Interactive's greatest but underrated masterpieces. It provides a lot of what's been missing since the SNES days and is an excellent break from ultra-realistic movies of Tidus and Yuna making out in a pond in Final Fantasy X or shallow gameplay of story-driven titles like Silent Hill 2. If you want a change, this is your game, because it's the best you might ever get.

Should I buy or should I rent?

Buy. I once found this game used at Electronics Boutique for $7.99, that's barely even $5 American. Nowadays, you can get this masterpiece cheaper than even those little Spec Ops games by Take Two you can get for the price of dinner for 2 at McDonald's. Some might get tired in a week, but others might actually play it for a lot more, it took me 6 months to finally put this game away. And now that I popped it in again for this review, I can feel the addiction coming back already. Besides, you also get a cheap Crystal Method album as a bonus.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 04/02/02, Updated 04/02/02