Lumines

When I pre-ordered my PSP, I wasn't sure what game to get for it. I wasn't about to pay $250 for the PSP, then another $40-50 for each game, which is why I'm glad I had a lot of trade-in credit stocked up for just such an occasion. I decided to go ahead and throw a couple bucks down on Ridge Racer, mainly because it was a known quantity. Luckily I came to my senses, and the games I came home with were Lumines (pronounced like luminesce, I think) and Wipeout PURE.

Lumines is made by the creator of the outstanding game Rez. The game is similar in theme to Tetris, but every block is made up of either one or two colors, and is always a square shape. The goal is to is to create squares of a single color. When you create a square, it doesn't get "deleted" immediately, they are removed from the field when a "timeline" bar comes scrolling across the screen left to right. This gives you a chance to plan multiple squares and create combos.

Where the game manages to nail it is the way the music works. The soundtrack is mainly electronica, but the cool thing is that the moves you make with the cursor, dropping a block, rotating the blocks ... each has a sound effect that punctuates the music. You're effectively creating your own remix of the music while you play, adding vocal samples and percussion. There is also a video that plays in the background, and while it can be distracting at time, mostly just adds to the feeling that you're not so much playing a puzzle game as playing a musical instrument. It's not quite as interactive musicwise as Frequency, but it's far more addictive.

Oddly, the game is actually doing more to get me excited for another upcoming title by the same designer, Meteos for the Nintendo DS. Meteos is harder to describe (so I'm not going to try), but the game has been rated 39/40 by Famitsu ... an amazing score. To compare, Lumines only got 30/40, and it's still a fantastic game.

I made the mistake of giving my PSP to my wife to play for a couple of minutes last night, to see what the Wife Acceptance Factor was like on the device. She wasn't at all interested at first, so I gave her Lumines and just let her go. Once she figured out what the game was all about, she got into what I'm calling the "Lumines Groove Zone", and she started beating my scores from earlier that day. Later, (never taking her eyes off the game) she said, "Thanks for buying me this new toy, Bobert!" She's not at all interested in the device itself (though her first comment was that the screen was enormous), but she loves the game. She also really likes the Nintendo DS, so when Meteos comes out, I think I'm going to lose my DS forever.