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I'm not getting my head around Meteos.

Now, I get that you move blocks up and down to get lines, which turn into rockets and lift the blocks on top of them. But do you have to trigger the launch, or can you make one then wait a bit? How do you 'incincerate' blocks? Who or what are you 'attacking'?

PS what does the top screen do? Why does it look sometimes like you're launching blocks out of your planet and into another one?

Stark wrote:I'm not getting my head around Meteos.

Now, I get that you move blocks up and down to get lines, which turn into rockets and lift the blocks on top of them. But do you have to trigger the launch, or can you make one then wait a bit?

They launch as soon as you match them. That often leads to accidental launches if three coincidentally fall in alignment, much to my annoyance. It's a little element of randomness that screws with my perfectly coordinated (cough) playing.

How do you 'incincerate' blocks?

Incinerating blocks is just a fancier-sounding term for turning them into the grey rocket motors by matching three.

Who or what are you 'attacking'?

Other planets controlled by a friend (offline) or CPU, who are playing Meteos too with you. The blocks you shoot off the top of your screen land on their side as incinerated blocks. The same happens to you. Typically they act really as an inconvenience, the real KO comes from the blocks coming down too fast to keep up with after a while. But a good solid launch of 60 blocks or so at the right time can speed the enemy along to destruction.

PS what does the top screen do? Why does it look sometimes like you're launching blocks out of your planet and into another one?

There's three things the top screen can do, which you can change by the camera mode button above the spinner. They made it way too small, IMO, but it just something to jab at during the start of the game to set the top screen right- nothing you actually have to do while playing.

1) Planet. Just eye candy, it shows you launching the Meteos into the void if you're playing without any enemies (Deluge mode, my favorite. Like tetris in that you play against ever-increasing block flow until you lose) or shows them landing on the enemy planet, knocking it about with explosions occuring.
2) Camera on yourself- this is retarded. Why would you ever want to see your own game twice?
3) Camera on the enemy- now this is the actual useful one. You can see when they're about to launch a huge combo at you and prepare by hovering some blocks up to meet it and return it in their face, or to know when they're about to lose and when to pile the attacks on or if they have nothing on their screen and a huge 70-block combo in their face will just give them extra ammunition and no inconvenience.
4) Auto- I didn't really count this. Auto is #1 for most of the time, randomly switching to #3 for a random enemy (if there's more then 1, obviously if you're playing 1v1 then it's rather obvious which enemy it'll pick) to watch for a bit.

It looks like you're launching meteos at the planet on the top screen because you are.

See my explanation above.

How come in screenshots there are sometimes big lumps of rocket motor blocks that aren't flying anywhere? In 2p, are all the blocks that drop down your screen fired from your opponent?

Thanks for answering, btw: it looks kinda nifty, but the fact that I can't try it out shits me to tears.

Stark wrote:How come in screenshots there are sometimes big lumps of rocket motor blocks that aren't flying anywhere? In 2p, are all the blocks that drop down your screen fired from your opponent?

Thanks for answering, btw: it looks kinda nifty, but the fact that I can't try it out shits me to tears.

After a rocket motor burns out, it sort of is grey and useless. They do have fuel limits, after all, and won't keep firing forever if they don't make it off the planet quickly enough. That's why high-grav planets suck- you sometimes end up with huge banks of useless gray blocks if you can't get the thing off the damn planet and it just lands and the gray revert to normal meteos again. [One of them, Mekks, is damn near unplayable because of that- you literally cannot beat the gravity at times. Others, like Yooj, are completely the opposite in that I can't not have my blocks fly away when I want to make a good combo that requires them not to go up the full way. It's infuriating in a totally fair feeling sort of way. ]

However, useless gray blocks may also have a second purpose. It's my personal theory that the Second Stage Rocket or Launching The Whole Stack Up Again depends upon the gravity of the planet and whether or not the new incinerated blocks are adjacent to the old ones. It at least seems to work as a rule of thumb. If you didn't get what I just said, just ignore it- the whole thing is sort of a tangent- firing rockets within a stack that's already in midair feels natural enough that you don't really have to know why one stack flies away from the main body and another causes the whole thing to jump up with it.

In 2p, only the gray blocks that land on your screen in clumps are enemy ones. The ones that fall as colorful ones flow at a constantly increasing rate, they land on both people's sides equally and don't require any player action to cause. Naturally they're total bastards though because they never give you the color you need to complete a match right when you need it, and whenever you make an inefficient match out of desperation the right colored block to make a better one lands next.

I mean, think about it- who are you playing? The Computer. Who decides what color blocks you get? The Very Same Computer you're playing against.

If you get a device to run homebrew like the M3 adapter you can download demos people rip off the internet. Of course, they cost a pretty penny (the homebrew adapters, not the demos)