Lumines

September 3,2005 - Ever since Tetris was made in the 1980s, just about any puzzle game other than Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move to come out of development has been little more than a follower of Alexei Pazhitnov's baby, no matter how good the actual games, including Puyo Pop and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, were. This has gone on for so long that few gamers, if any, continued to look for a legitimate successor to the father of the puzzle genre.

Enter Tetsuya Mizuguchi, creator of such titles as Sega Rally Championship, Rez, and Space Channel 5.

Lumines first started to get some buzz around the time of the Tokyo Game Show, when several representatives from North American gaming sites came home with mention of a killer app puzzle game that Bandai was sitting on for the PSP – one that none of us knew about beforehand, simply entitled “Lumines." Many even went as far as to call it the one to watch, putting it over the likes of Ridge Racer, Metal Gear Acid, and Wipeout Pure. Now that PSP has launched, we get to see Lumines for ourselves, and figure out once and for all if Mizuguchi's Q? Entertainment had indeed been working on an instant classic.

The premise is simple. A series of 2x2 bicolored blocks will fall from the top of an unusually-wide field, and it's the player's job to rotate and place them as needed, building as many 2x2 single-colored blocks as possible, even if they overlap. For example, a 3x3 block of one color will count as four 2x2s. While all this is going on, a vertical laser called the “timeline" will sweep across the screen, removing any 2x2s it comes into contact with. That's how you rack up points. Furthermore, you get bonus points for singling out one color (1000 points) or for clearing the field entirely (10000 points), which will actually be your prime source of scoring when you reach more advanced levels of play. That's the core objective of Lumines, everything else varies from mode to mode.

In Challenge Mode, where you will be spending the majority of your playing time, you will just play Lumines as mentioned above, occasionally earning new audio/visual sets (called “skins") as you progress. The interesting thing about these skins is that they affect gameplay just as much as your level does. Some skins throw you a faster timeline, others might drop blocks faster while slowing the timeline down, while some might go all out to one extreme or the other. Your level also affects drop-speed, but the skin tends to be the dominant deciding factor. Challenge mode will let players go all the way up to a score of 999999, at which point, the skin “Water, Flower, and Lights" is unlocked – arguably the most pleasant in the game.

Earned skins are unlocked in Single-Skin Mode. This plays out the same way Challenge Mode does, except with no unlockables. This mode is tailor-made for more casual players who have taken a liking to one particular skin or another, or to gamers who want to check out earned skins that do not come up in Challenge Mode. There are quite a few non-Challenge skins; too; about 1/3 of the game's skins are unlocked in other modes or are time-released, so you will be using this mode from time to time to check out new skins regardless of how you play Lumines.

Puzzle Mode is the one weak point Lumines holds. Instead of trying to put together 2x2 blocks (even though the timeline will still get rid of those whether you want it to or not), you are instead trying to make other specific shapes, ranging from simple patterns like an arrow to very delicate constructs like the numbers “0123" with no “wiggle room" whatsoever in which you can safely make mistakes. There are a couple of skins available for your trouble, but it isn't really worth the effort.

Rounding out the single-player, Time Attack Mode is the “bite size" version of Lumines, in that the focus is to clear as many blocks as you possibly can in a pre-determined timeframe of 1, 3, 5, or 10 minutes. There are unlockables to be had here, and once you reach a certain skill level, you'll be able to go into Time Attack and take these unlockables at will.

Switching over to multiplayer, Vs mode is rather unique in Lumines. Both players work on the same field, but a line seperates the area in which the first and second players can place their blocks. Landing combos and working as fast as you can will move the line left or right, giving the better player more and more real-estate as the game presses on, until there's finally a winner. There is also a 1P vs CPU flavor of this mode, through which you can unlock – you guessed it – more skins.

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