Lumines

Lumines 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. more...

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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, to be released.

Lumines is pronounced (homophonic of \"luminous\", the word is also the Latin word for \"lights\")). It may also be a phonetic translation of the katakana spelling of its name in Japanese (ルミネス, ruminesu^?).

Gameplay

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.

Read more at Wikipedia.org