Game:

Counter-Strike: Source (2004)

Duration: 5:44

1,692 views

2

Well, if you know me, you know I'm a fan of action puzzle games and matching colors and patterns and all sorts of good junk to create order and destroy game pieces with flashing lights and sounds and all sorts of audiovisual flavor. Therefore it should come as no surprise that I'm also a fan of Lumines as well as a number of the other works of Q Entertainment.

I'm actually a much bigger fan of its younger cousin co-developed by Q Entertainment and Masahiro Sakurai of Kirby and Super Smash Bros. fame, but it seems to have gotten the short end of the stick in terms of releases...although I rather hope that it'll see some new life with exciting new hardware and digital infrastructures these days as well as on the horizon.

But anyway, this is Lumines! I'll be tackling the "Challenge" mode, wherein you're faced with a predetermined set of "skins," which is basically the name for the sets of visuals and sounds that accompany play.

Unlike later iterations of the series (at least from what I'm aware), the original Lumines is almost entirely gameplay-generated when it comes to its sound and music, which is the biggest part of the appeal to me (and incidentally a big part of why I love Meteos) ...and thus, it's also part of why I'm constantly leery of updated rereleases that as far as I know just use licensed music and match the gameplay to the rhythm instead of having the rhythm and gameplay dictate the audio backdrop.

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Lumines is a fairly simple game to play, you're presented with two-by-two squares of game tiles consisting of two different colored pieces. The objective is to create solid square regions of tiles of at least two-by-two, but you can keep building on a formation of clearing tiles until the clear line passes over them.

The other major mechanic that will intervene to keep the entropy of the system from driving the field too predictably along is the existence of some pieces that will have one of their component tiles marked with a dot in the center. If you clear a set including one of these, all tiles of the same color touching the clearing cluster (and those touching those that touch it and so on and so forth) will also be cleared.

Now, pay close attention to the clear line, because it will sometimes cause tiles in mid-clear to be cut off, depending on which side of the line they happen to be on.

Fair warning: I'm not particularly "good" at Lumines per se, and I can't remember the last time I played the game... so even beyond that, I'm not exactly at the top of my game.

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Challenge Mode
Skin 01: Shinin'

So I'm going to be perfectly honest here... and this is true of most action puzzle games I seem to like so much. I don't pay attention to the score. I don't pay attention to the accumulating stats. Heck, I rarely even pay attention to the incoming pieces queue, and if I do spare it a glance, it's only for the very next one. I'm more than a little careless and chaotic when it comes to games like these, simply riding out the piece placements and reveling in the action of my puzzles. Oh, and boy does Lumines give you enough to not focus on, choosing to ignore all things nominal and numeral and focusing on the aural and the visual.

Fear not if this seemed a tad too short for comfort...particularly since I seriously doubt it gave you anything but a passing impression if you've never seen the game before. This is but the first skin in a progression, and the very end of the video is representative of the transition from one skin to the next.

(For the curious, the raspy distorted menu guide voice said "Urbanization," the name of our next skin.)

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This is also technically a low-stress test of whether or not I can capture PSP footage and have it look... even halfway decent when uploaded to YouTube. Because of some really bizarre quirks and choices when they decided to figure how the output to other displays would work out, they basically give you a tiny "window" of game footage and some pretty considerably hefty black borders on all sides.

I'm hoping that I can tinker around with it and YouTube's special tags that will crop and resize it with as little fuss and muss as possible...mostly because I don't trust any actual alterations to such already low-resolution footage not to degrade the visuals even further than they already started at.

Worst case scenario: it'll look just as it does now, and the visual "quality" will perhaps discourage me from trying to record PSP footage for now. I do have PSP component cables, and it looks pixel-perfect to the PSP display (at the very least, the S-Video version you're seeing here is WAY better than composite), but obviously my dinky "toy" of a capture device isn't able to catch that.

Maybe sometime, when I'm made of money again, I'll spring for luxuries on this little video capture hobby of mine, but for a game like Lumines (where the audio is the most important factor and the visuals are simple, abstract, and sweeping), it should more than suffice.

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