PLAYSTATION GAME RECOMMENDATIONS |

[#] N2O: Nitrous Oxide (Fox Interactive, PlayStation, 1998)

Get busy, child.

From the "how did this take me 27 years to try out" file, N2O: Nitrous Oxide is a long-forgotten arcade shooter from back when every arcade game was getting the 3D all-neon Wipeout rave treatment. This one, it's Polybius getting the boob job, if Polybius were real. Creepy-crawlies and mushrooms populate various psychedelic tunnels, and you spin around these tunnels blowing everything up. The more you blow up, the faster it goes. This is the kind of game you play at eight years old on a demo disc and it transfixes, terrifies, and perhaps nauseates you. For me, it's become my first cigarette of the day.

N2O seems overcooked at first (because it is), piling on text boxes about combos, bonuses, alt-fires, brakes and jump controls, bugs to run over, and a strange coin-leveling-up-when-shot system (and I have had a few cheap deaths due to these blocking my aim of incoming enemies). Ignore all that. It's the coins that add the push and pull to the game, exchanged for either smart bombs or points on level complete. Do you stockpile the extra firepower if needed, or do you go for max scores and the extra lives every 50,000 points? Either way, leveled up coins give you more, so focus on shooting them, not the enemies. Plentiful bonus levels also provide opportunities for extra coinage.

On the audiovisual front, N2O is stellar. It runs at a solid 60FPS nearly all the time, tunnels undulate and flash and wobble like liquid, and unobtrusive sound effects lightly pepper the effectively game-exclusive, usable as an audio CD DJ mix by 90s big beat duo The Crystal Method (American Gran Turismo 2 fans, listen out for a certain "Now is the Time"). I mean, it looks great. All this glitz does mean there's occasional readability issues with what's going on, and man oh man, does this game need a rapid fire function bad. Whatever faults it has, though, it's whippits in video game form, Galaxy Gas on your PlayStation--just that it gives you ADHD instead of brain damage. I say it's worth it.

Recommended for... the well-armed and iron-stomached entomophobe.