If it were legal, I would marry Tetsuya Mizuguchi.
"Mizuguchi-san, will you marry me?"
In all my years of living, I have accrued more than a few regrets. Nearly all of them, I have to say, involve women I could never find the courage to talk to. Until time-travel is made possible, I lack the power to change that. However, I can proudly proclaim that I have learned from my sins of omission. I have found that you can change the past, the future's past, by working on the present.
The only way to correct your mistakes is by not repeating them. Case-in-point, I have never forgiven myself for giving REZ a less-than-perfect score. Few games deserve a solid 10 as much as REZ. There's a reason why a new copy of this game will probably cost you around $200 dollars. However, when I scored it, I did so according to how I felt the public would receive it. This was a mistake. I can do nothing about my 8.9 [Ed: At another site of course...], but I have been given the opportunity to atone.
Lumines is as perfect a game as I have ever seen. Many consider Tetris to be the distilled essence of video game design, and I tend to agree. It's our Periodic Table, and it's nearly impossible to find a puzzle game that doesn't crib it to some extend. However, when Tetris sleeps, it dreams in Lumines. Lumines is Tetris transcended - the puzzle freed from the cycle of death and rebirth. It makes no apologies for doing Tetris better than Tetris, and there's no shame in admitting as much. It's had a long reign, and will be remembered fondly, but from this point on, falling blocks are now the property of Tetsuya Mizuguchi.
A more simple design you couldn't find - squares, comprised of four blocks, fall from the sky. These blocks come in two colors, creating 6 types of squares. Squares can be rotated clockwise and counter-clockwise, creating a total of 16 possible color patterns. Stack these patterns so that four blocks of the same color connect on the ground, and those blocks fuse into a solid square. Solid squares disappear when the timeline, which keeps with the tempo of the stage's song, passes over them. Delete as many solid squares as you can before the screen fills up and your game ends. Couldn't be easier, huh?
Of course, the trick is using the timeline and the special blocks that delete all connected members of the same color family to complete the biggest chains possible. This becomes the most enjoyable aspect of the game; that is, once you realize this is the most unbelievable difficult puzzle game you will ever find. The first few hours (days… weeks…) you'll wonder why you are such a freakin' idiot who can't make simple freakin' squares out of two color blocks! You've mastered Tetris, IQ, Super Puzzle Fighter, Devil Dice, and every other game in the genre. Once you start thinking in Lumines, however, the world opens up to you. Patterns begin to emerge. Principles present themselves. You start to plan ten, twelve moves ahead. When you hit your stride, it's brilliance in action. Mizuguchi's genius is that such pure design could conceal such complex gameplay. That and that the presentation is second to none.
Each one of the game's 100 Challenge and 10 Verse levels has a completely different look and feel. More importantly, each level has a different song and set of sound effects. Like REZ, everything the player does in the game creates a sound. These sounds blend with the audio track to create a real-time soundtrack that basically synchronizes your heartbeat to the action on screen. When combined with the pulsating lights, the effect is an entrancing sensory overload that completely drowns out the world around you. You'll lose hours of your life without noticing, riots will happen beside you and you couldn't be distracted.
Once you get into it, you'll see the game on the back of your eyelids every time you blink. It will consume your life. It will be the death of your productivity. And you just won't care. I've honestly walked into busy intersections because I couldn't put the game down long enough to walk home from the train station. Luckily it's one of the easiest games on the PSP battery, getting upwards of 6 hours out of it, so you can usually get away with playing it from the time you leave your house, until the time you get home.
If you run into other shaking, red-eyed Lumines addicts on the street you can join them in a hit by playing via Wi-Fi. The game keeps track of your multiplayer record, which is very satisfying. If you prefer to dose alone, there's a Time Attack mode, Single Skin mode (in which you play with the unchanging background of your choice), a VS CPU mode (that's played to unlock new profile characters), and a Puzzle mode, in which you must complete specific patterns in a given time frame. Of course, climbing your way through the unending Challenge mode is enough to last anyone a lifetime, and even after you've reached level 100 several times, the new challenge becomes topping your own high score. I've been at it since the day the PSP launched, and I don't foresee a future in which Lumines isn't still my time killer of choice for that very reason.
Let's face it, long after you've drained every drop of life out of Liberty City Stories, Lumines will still be the reason to keep your PSP on your person at all times. It's reinvented the puzzle genre by stripping it down to its fundamentals. Will there be sequels to Lumines? Probably. It's sold incredibly well for a puzzle game on a $300 handheld that's as fragile as a baby head, but frankly, it's unnecessary. There's nothing to revise, there's nothing to expand, there's no gameplay elements that need adding. Attempting to make a bigger, better Lumines would prove ruinous. There's nowhere left to go. The "falling block" genre has been closed. It's complete. There's just no need for another. Ever. We have Lumines.
Bottom Line:
If Tetris is the soul of gaming, then what is Tetris' transdimensional, perfect form? It's Lumines and I've have never seen a 10 look so insufficient.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
|
|
10.0 |
Posted: 2005-11-28 21:17:05 PST