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Meteos

I'm not going to lie and claim that my job is exciting. My real world job, I mean; my job here at N-Philes is filled with more excitement than one man can hope to contain on his own and still retain his sanity. In reality I fix computers when I'm not living it up at Clemson University, and most of the time I'll sit at my tech bench and just read things on the Internet instead of doing actual work. The ultra fast connection allows me to blaze through message boards at a speed approaching that of light, and so I'll read pages upon pages of video game forums before lunch. It was during one such period of me getting paid for not doing anything that I stumbled across some guys discussing Tetsuya Mizuguchi's new game Meteos. I pondered the fact that a game was actually being released for the DS before reading that Meteos was, in fact, a puzzle game – and a good one at that. I spent the next couple hours reading about the various intricacies of the game (the ins, the outs, the what-have-yous) and finally decided that I'd swing by Circuit City on the way home and buy it. I drove through the pouring rain to find that Meteos was no longer in stock at Circuit City. My eyes narrowed, steam shot out of my nostrils, and I sped to Best Buy, more determined than ever to own a piece of the sweetest puzzle action the DS has seen yet. Clutching my prize in my ever-so-manly hands, I drove home and fired up my DS for the first time in months. And it's barely been off since.

Puzzle games are traditionally held together by their extremely well-planned and coherent plots, and Meteos is no different. The impossibly-named planet Meteo is threatening the universe by pouring out matter (called Meteos) like grease from Jermaine Jackson's hair. Other planets in the galaxy started dying left and right until, by pure chance, three Meteos aligned and blasted off into space. The remaining (apparently sentient) planets took note of this and formed their last hope: The Metamo Ark, a warship capable of shifting Meteos in columns. Your stylus controls the Ark, giving you the ability to sort Meteos up and down in a column, with the goal of matching up three Meteos of the same color vertically or horizontally, causing them to turn into a row of rockets and blast up off the screen along with any Meteos blocks above them. Easy, right?

Not when you realize that matching three Meteos doesn't necessarily clear an entire column from the screen. Just like in real life, three Meteos rockets trying to lift up fifteen others will barely clear the halfway point of the screen. You can try to match three more in the airborne block of Meteos as it slowly descends to break some free, or you can match three underneath it to blast them up and thus aid in the plummeting hunk of death's takeoff. Rockets that hit an already-lifted section from underneath have twice the boost power as they would normally. Also, occasionally a drill or a bomb will fall and clear some blocks for you. Sometimes a smoke bomb will fall and make it difficult to see. Sometimes a weight will fall and sit there until you can lift it into space but you can't lift it into space because it is so heavy and you keep lighting rockets under it but it just won't move and you get angrier and angrier and keep matching up Meteos but THE THING WON'T MOVE WHY WON'T YOU JUST GET OFF THE SCREEN OH GOD.

The computer plays along/against with you, and when it does well and blasts Meteos off the top of its screen they fall onto your screen. You've got a brief period of time to launch them back at the computer before they turn into normal blocks and you want to throw your DS across the room. If you keep up a relentless attack, however, you'll quickly find yourself in possession of lots of gathered Meteos which you can use to buy fun things. This is where Fusion comes into play. You can spend the Meteos you've blasted off the screen on items that fall during play, planets to call your own in Star Trip mode, or songs to listen to in the Sound Test. Some bonuses requires Rare Metals. There are two Rare Metals: Soul and Time, two types of Meteos which you will barely ever see.

These features are all well and good, but is the game fun? The answer is a resounding "yes!" Gameplay get maddeningly fast-paced when the computer dumps four or five lines of Meteos on you at once, and the blocks' pace picks up considerably the longer you play. You'll be pulling your hair out after dying with three seconds left of the 5 Minute Meteos Race or getting 700 Meteos into the 1000 Meteos Challenge. The Star Trip mode offers a delightful jaunt through the galaxy, where you'll be destroying planets and launching Meteos as you progress to one of eight different endings. Some are funny, some are satisfying, and some are just mocking. There's also Deluge mode, more of a traditional "see how long you can last" style of puzzle playing. Meteos isn't designed for this, however, and games rarely last past three or four minutes for beginners.

Speaking of beginners, don't get frustrated when you pick this up and have absolutely no idea what's going on. It takes a good hour or so to get acclimated to the speed of the Meteos and start assembling block setups three or four steps ahead in your mind. Once you do, however, you'll be launching Meteos into the stratosphere like there's no tomorrow. Until that time comes, you'll be tempted the exploit the game's only weakness: scratching the screen wildly often yields combos previously unseen. You can often free yourself from a tight spot by simply scribbling all over the screen, and it's a difficult temptation to overcome when you've got four columns about to bring the game to an end with Planet Meteo about to send more.

Moving onward and upward, the music in the game is excellent. Each level only has three or four sound clips that last a couple seconds each, but they change depending on the action portrayed on-screen and are melodic enough that you won't notice the repetition. Sound effects are ample but do not stand out in any way. And while we're at it, graphically the game is superb. The actual Meteos don't really look exceptional, but the FMV displayed in the opening cinematic is breathtaking, and the game's visual style overall is flawless as well. Combine the visuals with the moody and catchy music, and you've got one of the more stylish games to make its way to the DS.

This game gets an N-Philes score of A+.

I love Meteos. I didn't think a puzzle game would ever burn itself into my retinas to the degree Tetris did, but I was wrong. I find myself waking up and dreaming of rockets blasting off or lining up three different colored tiles on floors while I walk. It's a disease, but it's one that I'm glad I paid for the privilege to catch. The multiplayer gives Tetris a run for its money, and until Nintendo releases Crack DS I'm pretty sure that I won't find anything that keeps me coming back like Meteos does. If you'll excuse me, though, I need to go get my fix.

Posted in: Reviews