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Lumines
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Lumines | |
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| Developer(s) | Q Entertainment |
| Publisher(s) |  Bandai  Ubisoft |
| Designer(s) | Tetsuya Mizuguchi |
| Release date(s) | December 12, 2004 |
| Genre(s) | Puzzle |
| Mode(s) | Single player, multiplayer |
| Rating(s) | ESRB: Everyone 10 and older (E10+) PEGI: 3+ |
| Platform(s) | PlayStation Portable, Mobile Phone |
| Media | UMD |
Lumines (ルミネス Ruminesu?) is a video game created by game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi. It was released in 2005 for the PlayStation Portable (see 2005 in video gaming). It is a puzzle game based on sound and light patterns.
As of October 11, 2005, it has been confirmed that Lumines has sold over half a million units since its original release in Japan in December 2004. Europe has contributed 180,000 units since its release in September 2005, and North America has sold around 1,300,000 since March. In Japan Lumines has sold around 700,000 units.
In September 2005, mobile gamemaker Gameloft announced that they would be bringing both Meteos and Lumines to cell phones. Lumines Mobile was released on May 31, 2006.
A sequel titled Lumines II was released on November 7, 2006 in North America, as well as a port of the original game to PlayStation 2 titled Lumines Plus.
Lumines is pronounced [lu•mən•əs] (homophonic of "luminous", the word is also the Latin word for "lights").
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A block-dropping game, its look and basic gameplay is similar to Columns and Tetris, although the music and visuals are far more important to this game. A 2 x 2 square (an O tetromino) made of four smaller block pieces is dropped into the playing field. The small blocks that comprise the larger blocks will be one of two different colors. You make the blocks disappear by rotating their component block orientation and using the D-Pad to form four matching colored blocks into a square. A vertical "timeline" periodically sweeps horizontally across the field and removes such squares. Unmatched blocks pile up, and the game ends when the pile gets too tall. When part of a falling block hits an obstruction, the unobstructed portion of the block will split off and continue to fall. Matching 2x2 squares can overlap; for example, a 2x3 block of the same color is considered as two 2x2 squares. More points are scored by creating the largest number of squares during one "timeline" sweep. Increasing score multipliers are earned by repeatingly clearing numerous squares on consecutive timeline sweeps. Bonuses are also given by reducing all remaining tiles to 1 single color, and for completely removing all tiles from the screen.
Infrequently, a 2x2 piece given to the player will have a special square of one of the two colors. This square, when cleared as part of a matched 2x2 square, will cause all individual 1x1 blocks of the same color that are immediately horizontally or vertically adjacent to the the matched 2x2 square or to another block of this same qualification to disappear; that is, this will remove the contained block of that color when the square is removed. These can be used for both generating large bonuses, since generally several blocks of the other color will be formed once these are removed, as well as to help the player recover if the field becomes too cluttered.
Lumines is played in different "skins". Like the software interface skins, these change the visual appearance of the board, but they also control the soundtrack. Each skin contains a different song and different sound effects, which are triggered by game events and then integrated into the soundtrack. As in Mizuguchi's earlier game Rez, the separation of soundtrack and sound effects is much less than in most video games. Skins are unlocked by progressing through the different game modes. Each skin also changes the rate at which the timeline moves across the screen, in time with the music. This can affect the game play; it may be more difficult to create large combos with the faster tempo music, while the playfield can be easily filled up waiting for the timeline to erase matched squares on the slower tempos. The visual changes can also be jarring; while it's generally easy to distinguish the two colors, nearly always a light and a dark one, the contrast of these colors with the background can be difficult to make out, and thus can make playing more difficult.
In addition, the order that the skins are presented to the player in both Challenge and Vs. CPU mode are fixed in a pre-set order that loops around indefinitely. (While this is also true for the basic mode in Lumines Live, this game also includes the ability to create one's own desired skin order). The order of the presentation of the skins can affect the difficulty of the game as well; for example, a fast-paced skin which can cause a lot of blocks to pile up, followed by a skin with a very slow timeline can make it difficult to recover from earlier mistakes. Skins change regularly after a fixed number of 2x2 squares are removed, tracked by a "level" indicator, so that one can prepare for the visual disruption caused by the change.
There are 4 basic modes in the game, Challenge, Time Attack, Puzzle, Vs., and Vs. CPU Mode. Challenge Mode cycles through skins in a fixed order of generally increasing difficulty, and is played until the blocks pile up to the top of the screen. The maximum score in Challenge Mode is 999,999 points. Time Attack games give the player a limited time to clear as many blocks as possible. Puzzle mode challenges the player to create pictures (such as a cat, dog, cross, etc.) by forming the picture with one color while surrounding it with the opposite color. Vs. CPU mode is a series of battles against A.I. opponents. A line splits the playing field in half, and deleting blocks or combinations of blocks shifts the line towards the opposing player, effectively giving the player doing the deleting more room on their side and the opposing player less. The battle ends when blocks pile up all the way to the top of the screen for one player. Two players with PSPs can use their wireless connection to play in the same way.
It is theoretically possible to beat at least the slow parts of the single-player Challenge mode of Lumines deterministically [1] [2]. By dividing the game board into separate sections, and using each section to clear blocks of only a single type, it is always possible to place a piece so that the game state stays in a loop.
So far, there has been four other games in the series (all release dates are for the US):
- Lumines Mobile - May 30, 2006 (Mobile Phones)
- Lumines II - November 7, 2006 (PSP)
- Lumines Plus - February 22, 2007 (PS2)
- Lumines Live! - October 18th, 2006 (Xbox 360; Xbox Live Arcade)
- Included on Game Informer's "Top 50 Games of 2005" list
- GameSpot's 2005 PSP Game Of The Year
- Electronic Gaming Monthly's 2005 Handheld Game Of The Year
Because of the popularity of Lumines, developers of shareware, freeware, and free software have made their own game programs either based closely on or inspired by the rules of Lumines.
- Flare - program for Java Web Start technology
- Luminesweeper - Free homebrew game for Game Boy Advance
- LumiDS - freeware homebrew game for Nintendo DS
- Sweep - applet written in the Java programming language
- Zoomines - for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh written in BlitzMAX
- Luamines - Homebrew game for the PlayStation Portable, via Lua Player