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Lumines Preview
Written by Modojo Staff on Sunday, January 30, 2005
Could this be the best handheld puzzle game ever? No. It could very well be the best puzzle game of all time.
Here's a currently crappy situation. The PSP is set to make a huge impact on American soil this spring, and its best game in Japan isn't part of the lineup! Now I've played lots of PSP games, from Coded Arms to Twisted Metal, Wipeout to Ape Escape, and none of them hold a candle to Bandai's Lumines. Tetsuya Mizuguchi's (Rez, Space Channel 5) latest title is a masterpiece that not only shines on the PSP, but threatens to evict Tetris as being the ultimate king of puzzlers.
Great puzzle games are built around the simplest of concepts, and such is the case with Lumines. In its simplest form, the goal is to eliminate blocks by grouping colors together, but it's so much more than that. To just sit there and mindlessly cobble blocks together means you're missing the point, or at the very least don't have the volume jacked up. You see, Lumines is about groovin' to the music as much as it is about testing your geometry skills.
So here's how it works. Stretched across the PSP's drool-inducing screen is a grid, and blocks (which are composed of four mini blocks) fall from the top of it. Each board/grid has blocks with two colors, so you should, for example, group all orange together or all silver, and while you're doing this the game's pumping out this really fantastic music. Most of the soundtrack is this super hot techno that really gets the blood pumping, in particular the opening song by Mondo Grosso that is simply one of the greatest opening themes ever heard in a videogame.
Anyway, the block elimination and the music fuses together because every time you move blocks around and make them disappear they produce sounds that actually enhances the music, and the more blocks you obliterate the better the music becomes, so it's not just about grouping four wimpy squares together but doing so in style as well as in large numbers. Some blocks have tiny green dots inside them that, when linked to other colors, can eliminate half the board, which in turn produces a trippy musical treat. Lastly, to make things even trippier, the backgrounds are always moving. Videos play, lights pulse, and other bizarre things happen, which more often than not distract you, but it's all good. Over time you'll get used to what the game throws at you.
posted October 31, 2005