Lumine is a great Tokyo mega-mall full of awesome gourmet restaurants where I eat lunch every day.
BUT THIS THREAD ISN'T ABOUT THAT SHIT, it's about Tet Mizuguchi's new trippy music game! Mizuguchi was showing it off at the Sony booth -- he had two demo units showing it off, with big ass headphones attached to each one.
It's kind of a Tetris clone. You have a block of four squares drop from the top. Each square is one of two colours. Your goal is to group the colours together into a block of four. Blocks slide down to the bottom if there's a lip so you don't get pieces hanging. It's very easy, you can pick it up in a second, three seconds if you're slow. Once you form the block, you wait for this line that scans from the left to the right of the screen to "Activate" and erase it. I think if you group the same color blocks near the big blocks of four you create BEFORE the scan line hits it, you get some kind of bonus.
I'm not sure how to describe the music. Kind of trancey, acoustic, LOTS of vocals being overlaid, which was really neat. I was playing the game and kind of rocking out to it and it took me a few minutes to realise that the placement of the blocks in the game were directly affecting the music in realtime, kinda like a sequencer. I can really see myself grooving out to this game on the train to work, it's very relaxing.
The problem is that the game is a little too easy. I started to get kind of bored and wanted to die so the guy behind me could try, and I started dropping blocks randomly, but somehow it kept busting out combos and I went to the next level. Hmm.
In short, it's good, the backgrounds are trippy and have lots of color cylcing and it's fun to look at, but the core of it really seems like a Flash game that you could put together in an evening. I'd probably drop twenty bucks on it or so, but I'm a sucker for that Bejeweled type crap, y'know?
Mizuguchi's games are all prety easy, and I never found that to be a problem. I guess if Lumines just keeps speeding up, like Tetris, that would provide challenge. Tetris in itself is trivially easy untill you get to higher speed levels.
