When handheld gaming hit the scene in 1990, I was completely floored (thanks Santa). Here I have this little mini Nintendo that I can take anywhere with little interchangeable cartridges that I can swap out whenever I want, but for the longest time, I didn’t. Why? Well if there’s one thing we can thank the Russians for, it’s Tetris. While I might have been more inclined to play a platformer or a beat-em-up in my youth, Tetris came out of nowhere with it’s inviting pick-up-and-play and completely addictive gameplay, and to this day it might hold the record for most hours I spent with a single game. Handheld gaming was here to stay - in a big way - and for the next 15 years Nintendo would virtually monopolize the market and rake it in, despite competition from Sega’s Game Gear and Nomad systems, Atari’s Lynx and the Turbo[Grafx16] Express (all of which had beautiful color displays and back lighting – Nintendo’s Game Boy incarnations did not).
Fast-forward to the present and we are staring at the beginnings of a new handheld gaming revolution with Sony’s magical all-in-one pocket device, the PSP. And what better way to launch a new handheld system than with a puzzle game by the name of Lumines. I’ll have to admit though, I was a little uneasy when I handed over the 40 bones needed to purchase this game. I mean, here we have this revolutionary handheld capable of displaying console-quality 3d graphics in glorious colors never before seen on a portable, and I’m forking over my hard-earned dollars for a 2d sprite-based puzzle game? Fear not. While this game may not push the PSP’s graphical capabilities like Ridge Racer, it makes up for it in spades with its incredible audio excellence that is unrivaled in any handheld game, ever. Period. And it’s a damn fun game too.
Drop It Like It’s Hot
So what is Lumines? Well if you’ve ever played a falling block puzzle game like Tetris or Puzzle Fighter, you’re already half-way through the learning process. The object of Lumines is to take a never-ending stream of 2x2 two-toned colored squares and arrange them so that the like colors form larger squares and rectangles (much like Puzzle Fighter really). Only in this game, the blocks will not automatically break and clear when you form the larger blocks, but instead a line moves across the screen from left to right, clearing your blocks as it passes. The more blocks you are able to form before it does, the more points you get. Blocks will break in half if you drop one on an uneven surface too – there are no blank spaces to be found on a Lumines screen. And learning to anticipate how they fall can yield big combos. It’s a simple idea that at first seems perhaps too easy, but it’s not long before you realize that it’s not. As the screen fills up, the action gets intense. VERY intense.
Game modes vary from your standard "see how far you can get before you screw up" mode to "single skin mode" (same as the aforementioned, except you stay with the same song and color scheme the entire game) to a nifty split-screen vs. mode that adds a new twist. Instead of sending randomly colored blocks your opponent’s way when you bust a fat combo, the division line separating your opponent’s puzzle space from yours is constantly wavering back and forth. The better you do, the smaller the amount of room your opponent has to maneuver his blocks until one of you can’t go on. It’s pretty slick, and the wireless multiplayer works flawlessly. Lastly there is a single player puzzle mode that challenges you to form shapes out of the blocks – this mode is entirely too hard for me, currently, but it’s a challenge that I look forward to some day. However a challenge that I’m not too thrilled with is the game’s awful and completely random habit of asking me if I want to reload old save game data, and if I’m not careful it’s "bye bye" to that new high score. It’s happened more than a couple times too, and it’s annoying as hell.
I suppose the game’s basic mechanics aren’t that complicated (put blocks with other blocks of the same color, clear, repeat). But the real challenge in the game lies in your attempts to not be distracted but the unnatural amounts of eye-candy thrown at you. There are so many little sparkily particle effects, so many jaw-dropping animated backgrounds, and so many vibrant colors in your face that it’s very, very easy to forget that you’re playing a game at all and not just get lost in its beauty. It’s very obvious that the developers knew this as they throw more and more colorful animations and sparkles at you, so much that it nearly makes your head spin, 3d graphics or no.
Not to be outdone by the eye-candy, Lumines takes handheld audio to an entirely new level. Where a game like ,i>Ridge Racer might be the game you show to your friends in order to show off the graphical capabilities of the PSP, Lumines is the aural equivalent in every way, shape and form. Firstly you will notice that the quality of the music is pristine. Remember that feeling you got when you turned on your first PlayStation game and heard CD quality audio coming out of your console? You will get that 10-fold playing Lumines on the PSP (especially through headphones). The entire game is actually centered around music. That little line that clears the blocks is made to look like the timeline you’d see on a drum sequencer, with little dancing EQ lines behind it. To accompany the music (and this is very cool), every single sound effect in the game is an instrument, and is timed to the music perfectly. Every time you move a block side to side, rotate it, drop it, clear blocks, etc. you will hear another instrument or drum break that is always perfectly timed. So essentially, the better you play the better the music is, and that’s just so damn cool to me. Sure games like Rez have done that before, but it’s just so fresh having the little PSP pump out such rockin’, catchy tunes. And the icing on the cake? Each and every level (called "skins") come with their own unique songs, sound effects and visuals, as there are a seemingly endless supply of new ones to unlock which adds to the already enormous replay value.
At the end of the day I am entirely satisfied with my purchase of Lumines. I can’t say for certain whether or not I’d rate it higher than my original Game Boy and Tetris combo experience, but it’s damn close. If you own a PSP and are itching for a fast and fun game with great music, Lumines is right up your alley, and should prove to be a favorite amongst your PSP library for a long time.
When handheld gaming hit the scene in 1990, I was completely floored (thanks Santa). Here I have this little mini Nintendo that I can take anywhere with little interchangeable cartridges that I can swap out whenever I want, but for the longest time, I didn’t. Why? Well if there’s one thing we can thank the Russians for, it’s Tetris. While I might have been more inclined to play a platformer or a beat-em-up in my youth, Tetris came out of nowhere with it’s inviting pick-up-and-play and completely addictive gameplay, and to this day it might hold the record for most hours I spent with a single game. Handheld gaming was here to stay - in a big way - and for the next 15 years Nintendo would virtually monopolize the market and rake it in, despite competition from Sega’s Game Gear and Nomad systems, Atari’s Lynx and the Turbo[Grafx16] Express (all of which had beautiful color displays and back lighting – Nintendo’s Game Boy incarnations did not).
Fast-forward to the present and we are staring at the beginnings of a new handheld gaming revolution with Sony’s magical all-in-one pocket device, the PSP. And what better way to launch a new handheld system than with a puzzle game by the name of Lumines. I’ll have to admit though, I was a little uneasy when I handed over the 40 bones needed to purchase this game. I mean, here we have this revolutionary handheld capable of displaying console-quality 3d graphics in glorious colors never before seen on a portable, and I’m forking over my hard-earned dollars for a 2d sprite-based puzzle game? Fear not. While this game may not push the PSP’s graphical capabilities like Ridge Racer, it makes up for it in spades with its incredible audio excellence that is unrivaled in any handheld game, ever. Period. And it’s a damn fun game too.
Drop It Like It’s Hot
So what is Lumines? Well if you’ve ever played a falling block puzzle game like Tetris or Puzzle Fighter, you’re already half-way through the learning process. The object of Lumines is to take a never-ending stream of 2x2 two-toned colored squares and arrange them so that the like colors form larger squares and rectangles (much like Puzzle Fighter really). Only in this game, the blocks will not automatically break and clear when you form the larger blocks, but instead a line moves across the screen from left to right, clearing your blocks as it passes. The more blocks you are able to form before it does, the more points you get. Blocks will break in half if you drop one on an uneven surface too – there are no blank spaces to be found on a Lumines screen. And learning to anticipate how they fall can yield big combos. It’s a simple idea that at first seems perhaps too easy, but it’s not long before you realize that it’s not. As the screen fills up, the action gets intense. VERY intense.
Game modes vary from your standard "see how far you can get before you screw up" mode to "single skin mode" (same as the aforementioned, except you stay with the same song and color scheme the entire game) to a nifty split-screen vs. mode that adds a new twist. Instead of sending randomly colored blocks your opponent’s way when you bust a fat combo, the division line separating your opponent’s puzzle space from yours is constantly wavering back and forth. The better you do, the smaller the amount of room your opponent has to maneuver his blocks until one of you can’t go on. It’s pretty slick, and the wireless multiplayer works flawlessly. Lastly there is a single player puzzle mode that challenges you to form shapes out of the blocks – this mode is entirely too hard for me, currently, but it’s a challenge that I look forward to some day. However a challenge that I’m not too thrilled with is the game’s awful and completely random habit of asking me if I want to reload old save game data, and if I’m not careful it’s "bye bye" to that new high score. It’s happened more than a couple times too, and it’s annoying as hell.
I suppose the game’s basic mechanics aren’t that complicated (put blocks with other blocks of the same color, clear, repeat). But the real challenge in the game lies in your attempts to not be distracted but the unnatural amounts of eye-candy thrown at you. There are so many little sparkily particle effects, so many jaw-dropping animated backgrounds, and so many vibrant colors in your face that it’s very, very easy to forget that you’re playing a game at all and not just get lost in its beauty. It’s very obvious that the developers knew this as they throw more and more colorful animations and sparkles at you, so much that it nearly makes your head spin, 3d graphics or no.
Not to be outdone by the eye-candy, Lumines takes handheld audio to an entirely new level. Where a game like ,i>Ridge Racer might be the game you show to your friends in order to show off the graphical capabilities of the PSP, Lumines is the aural equivalent in every way, shape and form. Firstly you will notice that the quality of the music is pristine. Remember that feeling you got when you turned on your first PlayStation game and heard CD quality audio coming out of your console? You will get that 10-fold playing Lumines on the PSP (especially through headphones). The entire game is actually centered around music. That little line that clears the blocks is made to look like the timeline you’d see on a drum sequencer, with little dancing EQ lines behind it. To accompany the music (and this is very cool), every single sound effect in the game is an instrument, and is timed to the music perfectly. Every time you move a block side to side, rotate it, drop it, clear blocks, etc. you will hear another instrument or drum break that is always perfectly timed. So essentially, the better you play the better the music is, and that’s just so damn cool to me. Sure games like Rez have done that before, but it’s just so fresh having the little PSP pump out such rockin’, catchy tunes. And the icing on the cake? Each and every level (called "skins") come with their own unique songs, sound effects and visuals, as there are a seemingly endless supply of new ones to unlock which adds to the already enormous replay value.
At the end of the day I am entirely satisfied with my purchase of Lumines. I can’t say for certain whether or not I’d rate it higher than my original Game Boy and Tetris combo experience, but it’s damn close. If you own a PSP and are itching for a fast and fun game with great music, Lumines is right up your alley, and should prove to be a favorite amongst your PSP library for a long time.
