I have, in the last two days, succesfully burnt (or at least, rendered dark brown and crispy) two meals. This is something of an embarassing result for someone who likes to pride himself as being pretty good in the kitchen (my paella has been known to make grown men weep). The reason? Goddamned Lumines (pronounced, because it’s Japanese, Luminous).
It’s kind of impossible to describe Lumines without making it sound like Yet Another Falling Block Game, because that’s exactly what it is. But then, so is Tetris, and so is Puyo Puyo, and so is Meteos (which is still better than Lumines but hasn’t caused me to burn food for reasons I’ll get to shortly) and they’re all like digital crack, except less prone to leaving suspicious white dust around your nose. The trouble with Lumines is that a single game can, literally, last for several hours. After the first couple of levels you enter this sort of zen-like trance state where slotting the blocks together is an almost unconscious process, and the outside world becomes an unnecessary distraction, hence the whole pizza-burning thing.
(Meteos, on the other hand, is almost exactly the opposite – if you can make a single round of Meteos last more than two or three minutes then you’re either some kind of godlike gaming legend, or you’re not playing the game properly. You should buy Meteos, though; it’s the best game this year. Really. It’s better than Lumines.)
Anyway, Lumines is great, but it really needs some kind of mode that’s as satisfying as challenge mode but doesn’t cause you to forget you’ve got a saucepan full of chillis boiling in vinegar and sugar on the stove and thus render your kitchen full of an acrid sugary tear-gas-like smoke when you return to the kitchen an hour later.
In other news, this made me very, very angry for not including Puyo Puyo, Final Fantasy Tactics (Advance or original), Disgaea, Chuckie Egg, Meteos or any 2D vertically scrolling shooters at all, and also for having some sort of retarded obsession with old Nintendo games that – trust me – aren’t as good as you remember. Really.