Who plays the player? Well you obviously ffs.
By Koworld

2x2 squares. Two colours – all mixed. Drop ‘em down and make 2x2 blocks of one colour disappear. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Ooh by Christ do I hate fucking videogames. They eat your life through such sweet processes. Lumines is another thief of time but of the very worst kind – a deceptive little puzzler. Five minutes, five minutes, five minutes. Become half proficient at Lumines and you are talking 45 minutes to two hours per single game.

One go.

Two hours.

This level is crackers - those squares in the background, pulse and twist and
spit at you, all to the accompaniment of this scratching, creak, creak, creak
noise. It's enough to send you mental. Especially as you will have been playing
for an hour when you hit this level.

100,000 points – the new players’ Holy Grail is a score you’ll be hitting within a week and from then on you are lost to us. You can play Lumines for five minutes, indeed one mode counts down a time line of just 30 seconds but you will always want more. The very worst go is the ‘quick one’ before finally sleeping. You’ve sorted out the cat, the missus, and your bladder. All those are in that deep initial sleep, teletext on the bedroom portable has lost its novelty, p124 ‘Cancer Duck Recognises Prime Minister’ is long read. You feel wonderfully sleepy. Just a quick go on your favourite Lumines level p’raps? Just ten minutes, tops.

6:30 AM alarm goes off – you’ve got to be in Colchester to service a photocopier by half eight. You’ve had two hours sleep. Its paper jams in Essex for one lucky customer.

Yep. Mental. Wonderfully so.
(Thanks to Colin Dutton for the pics).

Lumines is a cast-iron five-star classic. It’s a twisted take on the make-falling-blocks-disappear-before-they-reach-the-top puzzler. And it’s better than Tetris. First of the obvious genre twists is the playfield – it makes full use of the PSP’s widescreen aspect ratio and this extra width provides many more tactical choices than we’re used to in these games. Next twist is that blocks won’t fall into the playfield until a left-to-right sweeper has crossed your path – similarly, completed groups down in the pile won’t disappear until the sweeper line has passed them either. Cunningly, the speed of the sweep and the rate of block fall are varied throughout the different levels.

These simple variables make for an extraordinary variety in themselves but the absolute mind-evil genius of Lumines is that colours, backgrounds, images and most crucially music and beats are all both effecting and effected by how you play. Crazier still the developers manipulate your play style by chucking certain rhythms, beats and sound FX at you – both driving and reacting to your approach to each run of blocks. Lumines manipulates the most basic elements of sight and sound. And it does so in the most fundamental and extraordinary ways: you play Lumines in every sense of the word and it plays you right back.

Lumines makes you think like this.

There is a moment, ten levels in when you hit a ‘skin’ called ‘Dark side by the river’ – colours are gloomy, the music alien and sad with what sounds like a Quatermass sample running through it, and the sweep line changes pace suddenly, the blocks appear to hang in the air – it takes the entire level for your senses to work out that it’s the game, not time, that has slowed down. This supreme trick feels as if you have been double zoned – you are already in that extraordinary gaming place where your movements are more by muscle-memory and instinct than governed by thought, and then the game pulls you down even further into an entirely deeper zone in which time appears to have been rewind-bent.

It is an extraordinary feeling and entirely typical of this masterful game. Sod Tony the Tiger’s Championship Lawn Tennis 2007 – get a PSP just for Lumines. It’s worth every single last penny

March 2005

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