On one side you have Tim Rogers. On the other you have what I suspect is his counterpart, an opposite number of sorts, who goes by the handle "duckroll." He is an operator on the little-known #insertcredit IRC channel, and patriarch of a message board on some site I wouldn't have otherwise heard of if he hadn't told me that it was there.

I'd first come across duckroll on another IRC channel, on another IRC server, somewhere deep in the internet. (A channel whose decisions on whom to give authority were skewed at best, but I'd rather not tell that story here.) I'd met him there...About half a year before I'd met Rogers, I believe, where we discussed anime and Xenogears and the state of things in general. We still do, on occasion.

Like Rogers, he's the most unabashed, outspoken fellow on any subject he gives half a damn about. He's an individual whom I'm honored to know and one who can actually put up with my confusion (and those are few and far between). The difference between them lies in opinion: where Rogers praises Killer7 highly, duckroll dismisses it out of hand, citing Grasshopper's previous work (Michigan) as the means to dismiss anything Gouichi Suda directs; Reciprocally, where duckroll indirectly venerates Akitoshi Kawazu as the first true innovator at the Square half of Square Enix, Rogers slams his works as half-assed.

To their credit, they both admire the Metal Gear series, though their reasons for admiration are like night and day. duckroll thinks Kojima's so "addicted" to Metal Gear Solid that he'll never really quit; Rogers thinks that Kojima honestly takes every step to distance himself from his series. (Though, hell, Rogers has talked with the guy, so he has some sort of advantage.)
(Oh, yeah. Another point: duckroll is introverted; Rogers is extroverted. I could really, go on all day.)

Both defend their opinions well. and their rationales tend to be at least somewhat valid and concrete. I can't help but find both of them entertaining and full of great interest. I also find that, in similar ways, I can't agree completely with either of them, yet feel that it's as it should be that I'm not able to. I'm sure there are people who agree with me about this...Somewhere.

I consider myself to be a fellow who defines himself by the individuals he's able to "network" in one odd way or another, taking advantage of the way all things are connected. One of my funny little dreams is to see a complete conversation/argument between duckroll and Rogers from beginning to end, relying on words alone. The first attempt at such a thing (which I had no hand in) caused duckroll to ban Rogers from #insertcredit, which was puzzling but not entirely unexpected. I eagerly await the opportunity to get both of them at each other again, under...More controlled circumstances. Should such an act be successful, the result would almost certainly cause a horrible change in the base laws of our universe that could not be taken back. (Which I'd very much enjoy, thanks.)

The chances of such a thing happening probably aren't in the cards, though, with or without my involvement. Besides, as Andrew Toups can attest, my charisma is lacking. Still, it'd be something...You know, that I'd like to see, something that could possibly create some degree of understanding.

And I'm an obstinant bastard when I want to be. So I'll keep trying.

PLEASE ANTICIPATE IT!

—That was awkward. Let's move on now.

Why I felt obligated to go on about all of that is to outline the reason this article exists in the first place, seeing as I, a man who only feels comfortable writing anything at length when it's over IRC or an IM service, wouldn't typically be caught dead writing anything at length on a site. This review exists due to the intervention of both parties listed: duckroll, lover of Lumines, at the beginning; Rogers, hater-by-association of Lumines, at the end.

Rogers' intervention at the end should be more-or-less obvious. At some point, you would have guessed that he'd have asked me to write this review, It's sort of self-explanatory. There's not really a story behind it; he just asked. Besides, this is his site, and enough has been spoken of and by him to give you an idea of the man that he is.

duckroll's intervention at the beginning is far less obvious than you'd expect, on the other hand. How he started me off, weirdly enough, was through badmouthing the PlayStation Portable.

It was about, say, two months away from the Japanese PSP launch and he was steadfastly arguing the case on #insertcredit that Sony didn't know what the hell they were doing. They had no business going into a market that Nintendo stood over in absolute dominance, you know. It made no logical business sense. He went over the particulars point-by-point, convincing a great many that it WAS to fail. (Being able to speak like an absolute authority in any situation is one of duckroll's talents; one I damn well respect, if anything else.)

At some point, he convinced himself to pick up a PSP import bundle with Lumines and Ridge Racers.

At some point shortly after launch, he recieved said bundle.

Between then and some point shortly thereafter, he appeared in his usual haunts to make a joyous shout for the arrival of the PSP, as if a man born again. Now, he had somehow come to understand, the PSP WAS to completely destroy the Nintendo DS. He began to outline why.

His attitude would ultimately cause him to make the following claim in January, 2005:

"The PSP will sell more than 10 million units worldwide by Dec[ember] 2005. If that doesn't happen, you can ban me [from the Gaming Age forums] for all of Jan[uary] 2006[.]"

I highly respect that kind of enthusiasm. (And SO SHOULD YOU!)

Well, then...What had caused this man, whom I'd come to understand to have a near-unshakable opinion on many things, to change his mind? In describing the package that night, he spoke much about the launch software in the bundle. He spoke, some, of Ridge Racers. Not as much, however, as Lumines. Gods, not NEARLY as much as Lumines. He gushed praises over the thing, the tuning, the gameplay. He gushed about it so much that it convinced me to throw in an additional preorder and commit myself to a game for a portable game console that was otherwise going to be used, by me, as an average-grade video and MP3 player that just happened to play videogames.

One of the reasons the Game Boy lasted as long as it did at launch lied in the puzzle game that was its pack-in. If Nintendo had, for one reason or another, decided not to package Tetris with the system, nor acquiesce to ELORG's licensing demands, nor whatever else, my thought is that the Game Boy would not have been taken quite as seriously in the form that it had been released in. (Well, at least until Super Mario Land got out a few months later. I believe it could very well have carried the system. Speculation, though, really.)

Sony could have believed that the reason all challengers to the throne of the portable console—all those before Sony who had faced Nintendo—had failed, could have due to certain possible factors. One of those factors may have been a Puzzle Game. It's concievable that they asked Tetsuya Mizuguchi's new company to fill just the niche that Tetris filled. At the very least, it would keep their options open and their lineup consistent.

It's my belief that if Sony Computer Entertainment America had done the unthinkable and bundled Lumines with their US "Value Pack" instead of that Spider-Man 2 UMD (A SEQUEL TO A MOVIE I HAVEN'T EVEN SEEN YET DAMNIT SONY), the PSP would have been seen as a game console, not as a portable media player with a game-playing function. As it stands, that distinction hasn't been drawn to the satisfaction of many. Perhaps it's the way that Sony wants it, being a manufacturer of consumer electronics first and foremost; not my place to say. Whether the PSP succeeds in the end will be left to the verdict of history (though as of this writing, history isn't being very enthusiastic).

Whatever image Lumines was intended to give its mother platform, Sony might not have bargained for what Q Entertainment has actually given them (via Bandai, anyhow). Lumines is a game that was made with the entire history of its genre in mind, bringing out the qualities that make them work while minimizing those which make them fail.

The game works like this: you begin with an empty playing field ten spaces high by sixteen spaces wide. Your pieces are squares of four blocks each. Each of these four blocks can be one of two different colors. You rotate and drop squares to the bottom of the screen (as the playing field is wider than it is tall, you have the ability to "dash" your piece by double-tapping Left or Right on the pad, which can become very useful and soon, very neccesary) until you create another square of all one color. Following that, you can build onto the square with more blocks of the same color to increase the bonus you obtain when the "square" is "scanned" by the "timeline" that is constantly scanning the playfield left to right. Once a "square" is scanned, it is deleted. When the timeline reaches the end of the playfield, it will loop back to the left side to scan again.

In addition, there are rare "special" blocks that appear. When a square is formed with one, all blocks of the same color adjacent to that square will be scanned and deleted. They can provide an edge in clearing more of the field for more squares to be made in a tight situation, but the blocks aren't practical for much more than that. They're a tool, not a weapon as such.

—Err, let's back up a bit, to the concept of the "timeline." Its addition is an important distinction, one of many that separate Lumines from the games it draws upon. Your completed squares will not clear until the timeline scans them. It's even possible to make a square while the timeline is scanning it, only to find half of the square scanned; as a matter of fact, you can expect this to happen in the tightest of situations, which can be frustrating at first. At some point, though, you begin to realize that it plays a role in making you aware of the motion of the timeline, as its speed across the screen varies based on the rhythm of the background music being played. By extension, then, the timeline makes you aware of the music you're listening to.

Mizuguchi's dynamic music is another important distinction, though not as prominent or neccesary in this work. Using methods almost identical to those used in Rez, it's the most obvious thing you'd expect from a game "PRODUCED BY TETSUYA MIZUGUCHI," director of Rez and Space Channel 5. For instance, Lumines's music will advance only as squares are deleted; if you take too long in setting up a block of squares to delete, you will hear the last bar looping, as if the music itself has become impatient with your dawdling. (Anyone who's missed a Network Opening in Rez knows this behavior all too well.)

The major difference here is that, quite unlike Rez, Lumines is not as reliant on the aural side of things. Circumstances are altered such that Lumines doesn't NEED its music, neccesarily; you can shut the sound off and the game is more than capable of standing on its own without looking derivative, at the price of constantly adjusting to the timeline speed. (This decision may have been one crafted from neccesity in the portable market, scenarios in mind of the player on a noisy street without headphones.) One could claim that Rez was, by and large, an experiment, the results of which exist in Lumines today as a bonding veneer. Mizuguchi needn't cover that territory again; that it's used to strengthen another is just as good, now. Something else for Q's toolbelt.

Something else to note is that Lumines, in a most admirable manner, doesn't make much of an effort to admonish you when you've failed. When you "lose," the screen dims, shows your results or the high scores, and then informs you that so-and-so buttons exit or retry. (Sometimes, in Puzzle or Versus Mode, a computer voice mumbles "Failed" or "Cleared" or "Win" or "Lost," as if it didn't care either way.) The game doesn't make much of an effort to stand in your way as you play, either; the "Next" bar on one side of the screen shows you no less than three pieces in advance—something for the most part unheard of (even past trendsetter Puyo Puyo shows two). When the game is paused, the screen doesn't go black to hide your position as in most puzzle games, only dims. You could certainly use this "flaw" to make your next move, causing others to complain about your "cheating;" the question is, would that really be "cheating" as such? What advantage would you hold with pausing, considering, unpausing and landing every block that way, particularly at higher levels of play, when pieces drop too quickly for pausing to make any difference?

These changes, however subtle, are Q's way of manipulating the genre that it intends to enter, messing with the laws that require that such and such "be so." Q must have gathered around a table and questioned every notion of what a puzzle game is, what each notion means, and what they could get away with not using.

Where the game seems to want to go is fascinating in itself...

Challenge Mode, which comprises the bulk of the main game, is the best example of still another distinction...Which is likely where you'll start anyway, seeing as most levels, or "skins," are found in this manner. (As you clear each "skin" in Challenge Mode, you unlock its use for unlimited free "single skin" play and in two-player Versus Mode.) To correctly understand this element, you will have to play this mode, fight bravely with the new experience, and fail. And fail you will, constantly, until you understand the nature OF these failures.

Here is your key to enlightenment: The nature of most failures here is tied directly to the consequences of your past actions, and your lack of understanding of those actions as you make them. Challenge Mode requires the discipline of a talmudic scholar to understand the nature of the task you're grappling with, in order to survive further and see the rest.

To ensure you last the longest, then, your prime, sole and holy commandment, the one you will hold most dear, will be thus:

KEEP.
THE BOARD.
CLEAR.

In knowing such, enlightenment is obtained.

A concept like this is actually nothing new to players of Tetris, say, another game where the playing field starts (by default) empty, leaving you to make your own mistakes as humans are wont to do. The difference is that Tetris gives you little incentive to actually keep the board clear. In Challenge Mode, clearing all blocks of a single color is worth a bonus of 1000 points; clearing the board completely is worth a ten times that. This form of scoring, at least early on, is worth potentially more than what you can make playing the game "straight" in building squares.

This development, then, leads to a particular strategy. At lower levels, the challenge to the experienced player is no longer to "survive," but to ensure that he/she/it makes the most informed decisions as possible to keep as few blocks onscreen as possible. In so doing, Challenge Mode achieves a sort of pace where strategies are meant to be played slowly and which accelerate the further on the player advances—Not unlike Shogi, in fact, which could have been an influence.

Delete a sufficient number of blocks, and you gain a "level," a concept similar to that used in Tetris; in practice, however, gaining a level in this context happens often enough that you don't tend to notice quite as much, at first. At higher levels, when the speed at which pieces drop begins to spike sharply, you'll almost certainly begin to notice. No matter what, though, you may never notice that the speed often ramps back. It's something many players wouldn't bother to think about, but Challenge Mode's difficulty progression tenses up and releases gradually, like a blood pressure cuff, taking a moment or two to gauge your tolerance to higher speed before letting up a bit each time, allowing you to recover in time for the next "spike."

Early levels also place your active piece "above" the playfield, waiting a moment before actually dropping them. As your level goes up, that delay is gradually taken away until, by the time you make your first loop (around Level 100-110 or so) you barely notice that you no longer have that advantage anymore.

Subtle difficulty adjustment like this can't be designed in by chance. The way Q handles this aspect—an extremely important one—is almost Treasure-like in its application. It's a far cry from the hard linear progression of Tetris or its ilk; this game was designed in an era where taking skill into account has become the utmost concern, and it shows.

Gain enough levels, and you switch skins, unlocking the next skin you reach when you reach it. The skins that are unlocked during Challenge Mode—and in the rest of the game, for that matter—vary in reaction to your responses, audibly and visually. In Challenge Mode alone, the music used is fairly well representative of the vast field of dance music DJing, ranging from the standard licensed house fare ("Shinin'," "Shake Ya Body," "I Hear the Music in my Soul") to alternative rock ("Aback") to hard rock ("Spirits") to hip-hop ("Dark Side Beside the River," "Get up and Go") to slow funk ("Slipping") to fast funk ("Just...," "Meguro") to orchestral funk ("Big Elapso") to outright disco-like trance ("My Generation") to "traditional" trance ("Talk 2 You"), to Carribean steel drum music ("Holiday In Summer") to quick piano-accompanied drum-and-bass that sounds like something out of a warped Peanuts special ("Strangers") to abstract new age ("Da-Di-Do," "Working in the Hole," "Take a Dog Out a Walk").

The soundtrack's themes are firmly rooted in the house style of electronic dance music, as firmly as Rez was rooted in trance. I find it to be excellent, and mind that I usually loathe house music; When one has listened to the worst dance track ever made in constant rotation on Los Angeles radio at some period in history, one would think one would be desensitized to house music for life. That Shinichi Osawa (better known as DJ Mondo Grosso—a man who, strangely enough, collaborated at one time with that Armand van Helden person) could manage such a feat as to make me enjoy any form of house music whatsoever is feat enough.

The final Challenge Mode skin, "Lights," has some of its own intrinsic value. Before Ubisoft announced Lumines's US release, mainstream game review sites had spoken of "Lights" as some sort of "hardcore" obstacle, some claiming that 200,000 points was required to obtain it (which isn't exactly true, given that LEVEL is what dictates skin switching; score could be more, or less, depending on play time). "Lights" being an "obstacle" isn't quite the case. To its credit, though, Q does do a fairly good job of keeping the _complete_ identity of skin number twenty-six close to its chest.

The two Lumines commercials aired in Japan (Watchable on Bandai's official Lumines site) play maddeningly short music clips of the "fast" part of "Lights" over stop-motionish CG animation of naked female mannequins playing PSPs, either commercial ending with them looking directly at the viewer and dropping their jaws simultaneously (in an emotion that I suppose might represent "surprise;" creeps me the hell OUT is what it does). It bears noting, however, that neither commercial actually shows the skin "Lights" being played.
The attract mode of Lumines itself includes a demo of the first thirty seconds or so of "Lights" proper. The demo ends, though, shortly after Eri Nobuchika sings the third bar, and immediately before the skin and music begin to...Change.

These examples considered, hiding the nature of "Lights" is indeed a justified concern, since the very act of achieving it also entails that the player has gained a sufficient degree of skill to appreciate the pace of the skin. it also happens to represent the culminating essence of the game—which, actually, you'd expect, given its name.

("Lights." You know. English for "Lumines." Yeesh.)

The last skin is the reason the first three licensed tracks are used early on, to act as sort of a motivator to lead further into Challenge Mode and through the more experimental skins that make up the last half of the loop. (Not to denigrate the licensed tracks; "Shake Ya Body" is particularly good at holding interest. Nor the experimental tracks, which are, by and large, very good.) They're also placed to make "Lights," the song, look even better when you reach it by "starving" the player of licensed material...Although the song IS the best licensed track in the game, so such behavior is unneccesary even so.

To Q's credit, the music and the skin match up perfectly. Playing it feels like as if you've "reached the top of the mountain," as if "Lights" were a worthy enough reward for reaching the end, and enlightenment was yours to contemplate. This skin is meant in every way to be the Culmination of most players' study and perserverance.

The best way I can put it is for the benefit of those who've played the Treasure classic Alien Soldier: "Lights" is the equivalent of fighting Z-Leo.

(Yes, I see that I've just invoked the name "Treasure" more than once with regard to this game.)

(No, I can't clearly say why.)

Even though looping Challenge Mode once it isn't T3H H4RDK0R a challenge as review sites make it out to be, it isn't quite as easy as one would believe, either. It took duckroll three months of on-and-off play to get to "Fly Into the Sky," the second-to-last Challenge Mode skin, and quite possibly the most frustrating at the level you reach it in the first place. In rough estimation, it took me the same amount of time to clear my first loop. (Though if duckroll hadn't been busy with other concerns, he would have long since beaten me to it by now—so I don't consider it any sort of "victory" to "gloat over" as such.)

The key phrase here is on-and-off play. Being a puzzle game on a portable console, Lumines is specifically geared in such a way that you can take it in small doses—even with pausing the game, putting the PSP to sleep, and resuming the same game two days later. Challenge Mode, as the most time-intensive of the modes, can be looped in less than half an hour if you know what you're doing.

Bearing that in mind, for those who still have no intention of standing still with one game for three months, Challenge Mode isn't all of Lumines. It seems Q didn't seem content with just one aim.

The story of Tetris, you could claim, is something like a tragedy. Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian software engineer, sat down and wrote it together with his family, based on what I presume was a simulation experiment at the think-tank he worked for. (Well, I admit I don't know for sure.) For years, the Soviet government owned the rights to his work, causing invariable havoc between Nintendo and Atari and so forth in the trailing days of the Cold War. Pajitnov was a man who emerged from that period in history claiming that one triumph, later having reclaimed his and his brothers' own work from the ruins of history, to at last arrive in America.

Today, he can be found at the Game Developer's Conference, lumbering from session to session on behalf of Microsoft, constantly looking for his next big inspiration as he's now being paid rather well to do...And never really finding it, we can assume, since we haven't seen anything distinctive of his since then. Tetris, his old glory, is all most people know about Pajitnov; the games he's working on now, small online affairs, are so minor and bland as to be invisible in the grand scheme of things. Creatively, not much has really been said of him nor asked of him since then. (Why would Microsoft do such a thing as innovate, after all?)

I noticed him two seats away from me in every other conference session I attended, during my one visit to the GDC in 2000. (I could swear he was tailing me at one point.) As the father of the entire time-based puzzle genre, he looked...Desolate, lonesome, searching, as if he were trying to climb out of the creative hole he had dug for himself, finding footholds along the way, only to be constantly driven back down by falling clumps of bland academia, seeking to bury him in the same status quo the Soviet Union was mired in. In the end, he escaped one squabbling beauracracy only to be mired in another: the modern American videogame industry.

Tetris, in itself, is a story of tragedy, as the game was originally designed with no end, like the arcade games of old. Placed in a context like that, the player is resigned to the idea that, sooner or later, they won't be able to keep the pit from filling to the top—though people who use it to kill time hardly ever mind, nor notice, for the same reason they never seem to mind constant loss in Minesweeper.

In the early period of Tetris's release, Spectrum Holobyte attempted to remedy this tragedy by changing backgrounds every few levels, in some way a prototypical version of what Lumines would do in greater scope, much later. Nintendo would step up and remedy this tragedy entirely, giving Tetris a more definite ending, in about the same way the original Super Mario Bros. has an ending: beating the highest level on the highest speed in "Type B" mode grants you a "Congratulations!" screen. This fixed things, nominally. The tragedy became less tragic, and more accessible, once actual goals were in place.

Other puzzle games, rising to meet the task of the new genre, carried varying sets of goals. Some carried no goal at all. Still other developers added new modes to allow different ways to play with the existing game engine, adding new, vaguely-related goals.

Few of these modes can be considered to be sincere attempts, however. Even Compile's Nazo Puyo series (a "puzzle mode" form of Puyo Puyo, broken out into full games) wasn't very sincere about it being its own animal, since the series was directly applicable to its parent series's rulesets. By contrast, Lumines has modes which stand on their own, divorcing themselves from virtually any knowledge of their siblings. The basic behaviors still apply; only the rules for making progress vary.

The most striking example of this is Lumines's own Puzzle Mode. In it, you build objects, made up of one color of blocks. If you are successful, the object will become scannable, will be scanned, and will cause the next puzzle to be unlocked. With only two exceptions ("Clear All," "Delete Over 20 Blocks"), Puzzle Mode does not rely on any of the other modes' rules. a player can start the game with Puzzle Mode, complete all of the levels (unlocking two skins as he/she/it does so), and end up very near clueless when it actually comes time to play the rest of the game.

This sort of lateral thinking is not entirely new for a Mizuguchi production (Rez's "Trance Mission" mode worked on similar principles). When applied to the puzzle genre, it becomes a revelation. That Q would have the balls to divorce themselves of their own primary rules is something as yet unheard of in a puzzle game.

Puzzle Mode's drawback is that it lacks in variety. This may have been due to time constraints, I guess. After the first half is cleared, you do the same puzzles from the first half again, the only difference being that same goal must be made twice in a row instead. While it does create a valid difficulty progression ("Zero to Three x2" comes to mind as a puzzle that's validly difficult), it seems more like a move to fill things in than anything else, just so the game could get out the door. It could've been something much bigger. As it stands, it does its job very well, repetition nonwithstanding, as a mode geared for short and intermittent play.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have Time Attack Mode, which doesn't even attempt to bring anything that's new to the table. As the name implies, your goal in this mode is...To delete n number of blocks before a variable amount of time runs out. There's nothing new or imaginative here. It's there to fill in a versatility gap, and allow four more player avatars to be unlocked. That's...About it, really; not more more need be said.

There is no such lack of words with Versus Mode.

I had attended a particular vocational school for many years. (Some could claim that I attended it for much longer than I had to.) This school had an internet kiosk in the lobby, based on a Power Macintosh G4. Someone, at some point, had outfitted it with an X-Arcade joystick, then loaded it with MacMAME and a nearly-complete romset. I suppose it was "repurposed" in this manner since, given that the lab machines had internet access already, there wasn't much of a reason for students to use it in the way it was intended.

I goaded the other students into playing Twinkle Star Sprites; few people would actually agree to play it, much less give it a second look. (Probably due to its "cute" factor. This was a shame.) So they moved on, and I moved on as well, to Magical Drop III.

Like Twinkle Star Sprites, it sparked a love affair that continues to this day. I got good at it. Perhaps too good, as I'd gotten to the point of consistently two-crediting Story Mode, with an aim at one-crediting it at some point in the near future. Incensed with being so (self-percievably) skillful with the game and having any opponent worthy enough to challenge me, I began goading people into playing me in that game instead.

Few people were interested there, as well, really. As it turned out, I ran into behavior eerily similar to behavior that Vincent Diamante once observed: you have a nearly-complete MAME romset collection, one that represents a fairly large cross-section of videogame history. Then, in practice, you see most of that history ignored in favor of a handful of games.
In my school's case, the most-played game in that romset, the bane of my existence, was Puyo Puyo Tsu.

There was a period, lasting months, where that brand of Puyo Puyo was all the other students had any interest in playing. I stole the MAME kiosk whenever I was able. I did things like, when in the middle of a pitched Magical Drop III high-level CPU battle with final boss "The Wheel," build a six-match combo on the fly, causing her screen to come crashing down. All of the interest I recieved was in people mumbling "you off the machine yet?"

Outcomes like these made me remind myself:

When applied to the majority of the Human Race, the axiom "Familiarity Breeds Contempt" is a DAMNED LIE.

Like Lumines's Challenge Mode, Puyo Puyo can be slow-paced. The difference being that, unlike Lumines, it's never aware that it's capable of being slow—so it was never designed to be patient. The flow of Puyo Puyo itself is modeled in such a way that, given competent players on either side, a round can never seem to be beaten in more than three minutes. In order to gain this "competency," you must adapt yourself to Puyo Puyo's combo system, which requires an aggravatingly slow buildup time in order to make any noticable progress against your opponent—since, while you're building onto your opponents queue of incoming transparent Puyos, your opponent's trying to cancel his/her/its out before they drop, then creating a queue of his/her/own on yours, and so on. Tack on a grab bag of speed and delay issues, and things snowball to a point where the definition of "good play" is led to mean "Constant, grating-on-nerves near-stalemate."

Michael, a fellow former student and friend of mine, being a Sega-obsessed individual, once brought to school his Dreamcast swaptrick converter and import Puyo Puyo 4...With character-specific special techniques that SLOW THE GAME DOWN EVEN FURTHER in waiting for you to blow all of your technique uses to invariably save yourself from the screen getting too full. This can, and will, draw a match out past the point of tolerance with most people. Michael claimed, at the time, that it made things more interesting; I say, with all due respect to him, that it makes an already-long best-of-three match even longer and more painful to sit through, when you're already waiting to set up that one STUPID combo that might be shot to hell if you can't work fast enough, but the game won't ALLOW you to work fast enough and and transparent Puyos happen to fall, ruining your entire train of thought and AAAAAAAARGH

(—Or maybe I just suck at it. But, even if that's true, I wouldn't have had this pure, seething frustration for it otherwise.)

The most recent entry in the Puyo Puyo series was actually a very different experience for me, oddly enough. It seemed like something I could actually sink my teeth into. This was Puyo Puyo Fever—coincidentally, the first "Puyo" game not developed by the (ailing, dead, gutted, hubris-ridden) Compile, but by Sonic Team. Fever decisively fixes the problem of slow matches by introducing the titular "Fever Mode," triggered by a meter on the side of your screen. When the meter fills, you recieve "combo-ready" pieces for a limited period of time.

(I'D HAVE PLAYED MORE OF IT AT E3 2004, TOO, IF IT WASN'T FOR THAT MEDDLING PHANTASY STAR UNIVERSE TRAILER)

Michael, being a seasoned pro at "the real thing," doesn't like it. He feels that it turns Puyo Puyo into a "who can trigger Fever first?" contest; I don't know about that, since Fever Mode attacks can be countered if you're fast enough, and consistent enough, as a player. What it does is force a flow to the game that Puyo Puyo never had. When you beat an opponent of equal skill, it's far more fulfilling, and much less a war of attrition.

You could probably guess that what I like about the Magical Drop series is its feeling of immediacy there, as well. When a combo starts, you don't have to sit there with your fingers up your ass waiting for the combo to complete before "dropping" more pieces. Hell, you're able to add to the combo while it's happening if you're fast enough. (And you soon get to be. You have to be, as a matter of fact.)

Lumines's handling of board clearing is halfway between those two extremes. Your squares won't erase until the timeline passes over them; before that happens, you can drop as many more blocks as neccesary to set yourself up for the next pass. This sort of context doesn't directly apply, however, seeing as in Lumines there's no such thing as a combo, only the number of squares made in each timeline pass. You can set squares up in the future, sort of, but you won't gain any sort of real credit for doing so. as a matter of fact, by experience, you'll only screw "The Future" up unless you really know what the hell you're doing.

This concept of "The Future" only comes into effective play (well, sort of) in Versus Mode, which relies on immediacy more than anything else—It's typically about as fast, and just as definite, as Magical Drop. It successfully continues the Challenge Mode theme of paying for your mistakes while providing another, very different, take on what the game itself is. Where Challenge Mode lends itself to slow, steady endurance and Puzzle Mode lends itself to creative problem-solving, Versus Mode lends itself to meeting quotas as quickly as you possibly can. It won't make any difference here if the board is clear; as a matter of fact, I could argue you'd be at a disadvantage if you don't have anything to build on.

The format is laid out with you and the opponent sharing the same board. The board starts with a line down the center, dividing the playing field in half. Your completed squares and your opponent's completed squares are scanned in turn. When the timeline goes off-screen, if you have more completed squares than your opponent, the line moves away from you by one "line" of blocks, expanding the playfield at the cost of your opponent's. Continue to make more squares than your opponent and you can reduce his/her/its playfield to a minimum of a quarter of the screen; barely enough to move around, let alone counterattack. (It's actually not impossible, but bears difficulty. Versus Mode is not forgiving of early failures.)

Of course, it also works the other way.

In Versus CPU Mode, it works the other way very fucking often.

Versus CPU's AI was definitely crafted with the historical marker of Puyo Puyo in mind, and on that merit alone it may well be the most difficult mode in the game. As of late July 2005, more than a month after unlocking "Lights," I still haven't been able to beat the final opponent; hell, I have enough trouble consistently beating the NEXT-to-last opponent, a giantic Chinese wind spirit whose vectorized "sprite" is big enough to block out his "ATTACK" icon as it flies at you over and over again until you're over in the corner with blocks up to the top of the field.

No, Versus CPU Mode is not easy. Q understands this and tries to reward you accordingly by not only unlocking the CPU opponent's skin with each opponent beaten (unlike Challenge Mode, you must clear the skin first before it's unlocked), but a scaled-down version of the CPU's avatar as well. Should you actually manage to beat every CPU opponent, you obtain an additional skin called "Tin Toy," which I may never see the way that things are going.

At least it's not as damn near impossible as...Err, that's coming up, let me save it.

In Tim Rogers' 2004 Insert Credit Fukubukuro, it's explained that Chuck Franklin had certain reactions to Lumines at Tokyo Game Show 2004. He'd gotten the impression that it was slow, boring; that impression carried on to Rogers, by association. As a Lumines player, I knew immediately why Franklin believed that it was.

Move forward to E3 2005: first day of the show, after the day's events were out—me standing in front of the press room with the rest of the Insert Credit contingent as if I were out of place—which, as I was there as "industry" and not as "press," I actually was—and I take out my PSP, boot it up, walk up to Franklin and ask a single question about his TGS Lumines experience. One which I already very well know the answer to.

"Did you play Versus CPU Mode?"

He didn't. Exactly what I'd thought. There you go. "All right, you want fast-paced? Look, I'll show you fast-paced."
I start Versus CPU Mode and get to opponent number five, "The bird singing in the night," where CPU reaction speed begins to pick up sharply.

"Okay, look, this is—"

I look up. Franklin is now distracted. He's off talking to people.

I groan, shove the PSP back into my bag, slump against the wall next to Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh, who's reading through the Kojima Productions flyer. (He and Rogers will, in short order, remark about the revisionist history Kojima has crafted; this is another story that may one day be told by someone better than I.)

Point being, if Franklin had actually watched the screen, he might have understood that Lumines wasn't limited to the Challenge Mode demo he'd played on the TGS show floor one year previous. If I was a more interesting person, or at least a more charismatic one, this would have been so. But I'm not. Well, damn, if I was more interesting or more charismatic, I could've gotten Tim Rogers to NOT miss the point of Okami. (Little did I know that, through some bizarre causational meddling, he would jinx me into not completing the second half of that same demo on the last day. "We have an early flight, we have to shut down the booth" INDEED, Capcom! YOU WERE IN ON IT! WITH HIM! I'LL GET YOU FOR THIS, 108—)

...Where was I going again? Oh yes.

Michael could, possibly, like Lumines's Versus mode; he's never played it, so I couldn't say for sure, of course. Really, it's rather upsetting that I haven't played this game with another ACTUAL HUMAN BEING yet.

So. what happened to my matching service, Q? Bandai? Ubisoft? Sony? Anyone? I keep flipping my WLAN switch whenever I'm out and expect to find players, but no one's around. I mean, the PSP moved enough damned units, and, being in a large urban area like LA, I have the belief that there have to be at least two people playing each other somewhere, each owning a PSP and a copy of Lumines, since Lumines sure moved a great deal of units itself in a relative sense BUT I MEAN COME ON NOW! Am I going to have to blindly reach out in Ad-Hoc Mode forever? A lobby server would've been ideal, so I wouldn't have to wardrive for other players and find no one. It's depressing.

In future PSP titles, by and large, this "small voice crying out in the wilderness" crap needs to be remedied, and I mean in a terminal way. Even Nintendo, internet luddites that they were until recently, is beginning to address this need with that "Mario Net" thing they threaten to implement (however vaguely). Get on the damn stick, Sony. I'm counting on you.

There are scattered Lumines fan groups out there already, certainly. The closest I've gotten to finding one, however, probably isn't the kind of group which would begrudge me something as petty as a mere Versus match. These are the people who'd rather fight Challenge Mode to the death in order to achieve a score of 999,999 (after which the score counter fails to advance, until either you willingly suicide, or pause and quit the game). Why people play "götterdammerung" like this is to obtain the last unlockable skin—which, in fact, is one that not many players will ever bother to see. (Without cheating, anyhow.)

The skin's name is "Water, Flower, and Lights." I suppose the title makes it seem like it has something to do with "Lights," though I'm not entirely certain. I, myself, am in no hurry to obtain it and, given my current skill in Challenge Mode (457,971 as of this writing; got as far as "Just...," second loop) I'm likely to give up on the game before I'll ever approach that score.

My guess is that Q had that skin unlock in that particular way to reward the contingent of discerning gamers who are consumed by the fury Challenge Mode is capable of producing...But it's a portable game, for gods' sakes. Again, the reason it took three months for me to loop Challenge Mode was that...Well, I was playing it every now and then while waiting for things to happen in real life and such.

"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans." John Lennon said that, of all people. It pegs the essence of the puzzle game quite well: A substitute for having to deal with Life, at one point or another.

This may also be why time-based puzzle games—even multi-talented ones such as Lumines—are overlooked in the long term, and as it stands there isn't any good reason for them not to be. Puyo Puyo and Magical Drop and Mr. Driller and Super Puzzle Fighter II X and Lumines are overlooked, and should be overlooked, as they are meant as an exercise and not a meaningful experience. When it all comes down, when you are led to do other things, you will put away your console or controller and you will rejoin the real world, and a genre with as such little context as puzzle games generally have will cause you to walk away with very little. Why would they, after all? You have other fish to fry.

The mistake that many self-styled "ludologists" make is in picking apart the addictiveness of games like Tetris and their progeny without realizing that "addictive" and "meaningful" are not the same thing; instead, they group those concepts and a bunch of other aspects under the accursed catch-all "emergence" and refuse to sort things out further. Any "meaning" that a puzzle game provides is typically incidental, very few actual events of meaning consciously placed. Any conscious meaning that Lumines holds starts and ends in Challenge Mode, in "Shinin'" and in "Lights," those levels acting as standard bearers for the theme and spirit that Lumines shows to those who play it. The rest is window dressing, a diversion meant to occupy you when you're not doing other things.

For the most part, puzzle games are...Really just toys. Lumines is also a toy, and doesn't stray far from that conceit—but it does much, technically and thematically, to advance the state of puzzle games, and their awareness as toys.

One also has to take into account that this particular toy comes from a company headed by a man who seems to value experience over mechanics, who may have otherwise decried the very use of videogames as such things. This pretty much gives you a basic idea of why it was crafted as it was. Lumines may not bear lasting meaning, but it is aware of its own status as a hybrid of play mechanics and aesthetics. For instance, your progress, your high scores and your identification in Versus Mode are all represented by your entered name and a player avatar. The avatars are small, rave art-styled icons, tossed in there only to identify you in a somewhat unique manner and otherwise do nutty little animations when you get bonuses and such. (They're cute little runts. I myself use "Auto Mobile Industry," the second Versus Mode opponent, which is a stack of 45-inch records with googly eyes that "tosses" itself at the other side of the screen when a bonus is made.) Some are even unlockable within the game, as previously explained—but they didn't need to be there. Nor did the dynamic music that tempers the flow of the timeline. If this game was made twenty, even ten years ago, those elements would probably not be in there; hell, man, it's generated sufficient, meager interest such that even examples of such a scenario are playable. Those elements are there because of our modern awareness of the fact that we can add such touches to design of such a simple, toy-like game. It is a product of this modern era of game design, irrevocably, and that's what makes this game what it is.

Lumines was created to fill a need: to give Sony a pack-in puzzle game of the same grade as Tetris. What it actually achieves is something that exceeds that standard and surpasses many (if not all) of its predecessors. Tetris was the "Xevious" of the puzzle game world; Puyo Puyo was the "Raiden;" Q Entertainment has created something that history, provided it remembers long enough, may well judge to be the "Ikaruga." Its few shortcomings are formed by what it was made to be, and by the time allotted for its creation; thankfully, history will probably not judge those, and neither should you.

Highly recommended.

—E. Megas.

Started: 06/27/2005, 12:06 PM PDT
Completed: 07/29/2005, 09:43 PM PDT

Megas may return in the analysis article "Taizou X Susumu"