Lumines II
One of the PSP's best titles finally gets a sequel. But can a Top 40 musical injection make the game better, or does it hurt it?
Published: December 17, 2006
The original Lumines is, along with WipEout Pure, one of the few launch titles that best demonstrates the fact that the PSP can deliver in a single game the kind of experience that justifies the PSP's admittedly expensive sticker price. The sequel quite literally just gives you more of that experience, but even with the addition of almost twice as many levels and a handful of new modes, it's really just the same game that so many people lost dozens of hours to.
That's not saying that the game is any worse than the original, mind; if you didn't get a chance to play it, you're going to go bonkers reveling in all the gameplay that's presented in just one little UMD, but for those that have already lost a good portion of their lives to the first game, it's a little hard to get that same feeling all over again -- particularly because a good portion of the first game has been recycled.
Comparisons to Tetris have been rightly made already, and Lumines certainly belongs in that club where you'll notice yourself playing imaginary games in your head (Every Extend Extra, also helmed by Lumines creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi, skipped through the same grey matter but never really stuck). Also like Tetris, it is an incredibly simple concept: blocks with differently colored quarters fall from the top of the screen to the bottom, and linking up any four adjacent quarters of a particular color clears them - but not until a line that sweeps from left to right in time with the background music actually moves all the way across the screen.
It's this approach to making the music the focal point of the game that sets Lumines apart - and is likely the primary source of division among the folks that will pick up Lumines II. Yes, all the songs you grew to love in the first game are here, joined by almost as many new hits crafted by some of the same artists, but there's also been an injection of Top 40 flavor in the way of artists like the Black Eyed Peas, Beck, Gwen Stefani and Hoobastank. Depending on your level of eye rolling and groaning, this will either annoy you enough to turn you off, or provide at least a passing curiosity.
Aside from adding a little more length to the skins (read: musical levels) since the artists are accompanied by the music video for that song, adding in Missy Elliot doesn't really change the game. It might annoy more for some, but the core gameplay hasn't changed one iota. Literally, while you're playing through these new songs, sprinkled between them are moments of insta-nostalgia as you drop blocks through the older tunes.
In fact, that may just be the biggest fault I found with Lumines II (yes, bigger than adding big-name artists). Puzzle Mode is now joined by Mission Mode, which delivers the same basic objective-based challenges, but works almost as an expanded tutorial, subtly teaching you how to pull off more advanced moves while under the guise of another distraction from the main Challenge mode (which now comes in three difficulty flavors with increasingly smaller play areas, something I though was rather pointless). Yes, there are actual tutorials, and some basic tips to help newcomers get up to speed, but the Multiplayer, Time Attack and VS. CPU Modes are all the same as the first game.
If the new skin additions really kill you, there is always the option to use Skin Edit Mode to essentially chart your own path through the more than 80 different songs in the game. You can pick exactly what songs you'd like to hear and in what order and then loop the sucker on into infinity if you so choose. What's cool is that you can include songs that were created in the game's other new feature, the Sequencer.
That's not saying that the game is any worse than the original, mind; if you didn't get a chance to play it, you're going to go bonkers reveling in all the gameplay that's presented in just one little UMD, but for those that have already lost a good portion of their lives to the first game, it's a little hard to get that same feeling all over again -- particularly because a good portion of the first game has been recycled.
Comparisons to Tetris have been rightly made already, and Lumines certainly belongs in that club where you'll notice yourself playing imaginary games in your head (Every Extend Extra, also helmed by Lumines creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi, skipped through the same grey matter but never really stuck). Also like Tetris, it is an incredibly simple concept: blocks with differently colored quarters fall from the top of the screen to the bottom, and linking up any four adjacent quarters of a particular color clears them - but not until a line that sweeps from left to right in time with the background music actually moves all the way across the screen.
It's this approach to making the music the focal point of the game that sets Lumines apart - and is likely the primary source of division among the folks that will pick up Lumines II. Yes, all the songs you grew to love in the first game are here, joined by almost as many new hits crafted by some of the same artists, but there's also been an injection of Top 40 flavor in the way of artists like the Black Eyed Peas, Beck, Gwen Stefani and Hoobastank. Depending on your level of eye rolling and groaning, this will either annoy you enough to turn you off, or provide at least a passing curiosity.
Aside from adding a little more length to the skins (read: musical levels) since the artists are accompanied by the music video for that song, adding in Missy Elliot doesn't really change the game. It might annoy more for some, but the core gameplay hasn't changed one iota. Literally, while you're playing through these new songs, sprinkled between them are moments of insta-nostalgia as you drop blocks through the older tunes.
In fact, that may just be the biggest fault I found with Lumines II (yes, bigger than adding big-name artists). Puzzle Mode is now joined by Mission Mode, which delivers the same basic objective-based challenges, but works almost as an expanded tutorial, subtly teaching you how to pull off more advanced moves while under the guise of another distraction from the main Challenge mode (which now comes in three difficulty flavors with increasingly smaller play areas, something I though was rather pointless). Yes, there are actual tutorials, and some basic tips to help newcomers get up to speed, but the Multiplayer, Time Attack and VS. CPU Modes are all the same as the first game.
If the new skin additions really kill you, there is always the option to use Skin Edit Mode to essentially chart your own path through the more than 80 different songs in the game. You can pick exactly what songs you'd like to hear and in what order and then loop the sucker on into infinity if you so choose. What's cool is that you can include songs that were created in the game's other new feature, the Sequencer.
