World of silence: Lumines' brilliance remains revolutionary
Today, if you start playing a game on your smartphone that places a heavy emphasis on music and sound, chances are you'll receive an advisory warning. It'll ask you to please insert your headphones for the "best experience". It doesn't matter if you're home alone on the sofa or your head is scrunched between numerous standing thighs on public transport, headphones are important. And we can all blame this warning on Lumines and the way it helped change our relationship with games.
Apart from dance and instrument-based entries, successful music games are bloody hard to make, regardless of their soundtrack listings. In Lumines, you guide four-bricked squares down a large grid, each brick made from one of two colours. Your goal is to shuffle the colour orientation and make new, identically-coloured squares that vanish in this grid before it becomes too full. However, each button press creates a sound and the music will continuously change along with the brick and background colours, inducing a unique form of synaesthesia.
As with any puzzle game description, it sounds (pun intended) pretty tedious compared to seeing this delight with your own eyes. My first time playing was in the backseat of a Nissan Micra on the PSP's launch day, sitting in the Toys R Us car park (RIP) as my brother went to purchase a different Sony product. It might not seem ideal, but I knew then just how groundbreaking all of this was.
Post a Comment