Game:

Tetris (1984)

Duration: 1:10

1,170 views

5

Phew, what a week and some change it's been... I've felt vaguely exhausted, but without any real excuse (as usual) for why I might feel that way. Oh well, you always know where to find me...just not when. It's my little contribution to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. I can only imagine what observer effect this must have upon my affected observers. (Whoever or whatever those might be.)

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Vs. CPU
Skin 05: Mekong

Continuing my trend of the tendency to spread doom and gloom all over this particular video subseries, this is the opponent that more often than not will send me packing.

In case I never actually stated it outright, this isn't your usual competitive puzzle progression wherein you take your lumps and choose to "continue" in spite of your shame of having been defeated... usually repeatedly, at least once you reach the threshold where your meager modicum of what's generously referred to as "skill" deserts you completely. In Lumines, a loss will eject you from the mode and make you begin all the way back from Japanese Form. So, the fact that there are "only" 10 stages in the whole mode is of little comfort when it comes to making headway into new challenges.

I'm not sure what an AutoShape vampire (at least that's what he looks like to me) has to do with a river in China. Or perhaps this guy's actually a jiang shi (oh come now, this isn't the first time I've made reference to one), or a "hopping" chi vampire of Chinese folklore. Anyway, the connection here is that, like Western vampires, the "stiff corpse" can't cross the running waters of the Mekong, so he challenges us to a Lumines battle. Clearly.

Fun fact, the Chinese language refers to Western vampires as "blood jiang shi"...so they find bloodsuckers just as weird as the bulk of the English-speaking world might consider one that feeds on the unseen life force without a sanguinary conduit for extracting vital lifegiving material.