Stark wrote:Well, what was that silly apparently-really-good GBA puzzle game? Snoop or something? That SUCKED. Meteos just looks like a columns game... explain how it's good, and how it uses DS stuff, etc. I really want a reason to buy a DS beyond cool games - since they'll all be shit compared to things I could play on my PC - but like nifty DS-specific stuff. The Metroid demo was cool, for isntance, with it's neat FPS control.
All right.
Meteos.
The blocks fall from the top of the screen, obviously, but unlike Tetris they do so one at a time. They have different designs and colors for ease of identification.
You can only move the blocks (you do so with the stylus. D-Pad is possible but about 100 times less intutiive and way slower) up and down a column- horizontal movement is forbidden. When you match three or more blocks of the same color horizontally or vertically, they turn grey and get a sort of rocket engine type thing going on, propelling themselves and all blocks under them upward, off the top of the screen (hopefully).
Gravity, the combined weight of the stack's blocks, and also the downward force of new blocks falling hitting your flying stack, all of which are subtly different in strength on every level, obviously interfere with this. If the stack doesn't make it off, it floats back down. You can match new parts of the stack in midair to send it higher or split pieces off for a second stage rocket sort of thing (depending upon where exactly the new match occurs determines which, it's hard to explain which one is which when but you learn fast). You can fire new rockets up at landing ones to give both of them a little boost. You can also set it up so that when it falls it makes a match again with other non-launched columns, which will naturally add one or more new columns and re-propel it back upwards. Every time you make another match in a stack, the force of the rockets gets strong, which prevents Gravity from keeping you down
forever
However, if your stack lands again and spends too much time on the ground (the exact time varies per planet), then it reverts back to normal meteos.
There's also the spinner. L, R, or touching a part of the screen with an icon on it increases the force of gravity by a ton, causing stacks to slam into the ground, and also causes blocks to fall very fast. It's useful if you don't want to wait for gravity to do its thing on a stack because of a time constraint or if you just have insufficient blocks and need more without waiting. It sounds minor but it's very useful and a good part of strategy- if your rocket has enough force to overcome the increased gravity, the extra blocks that land on it while the spinner is on mean more points.
If the blocks reach the top after piling up and overflow, you lose.
There's like 30+ different unlockable planets (bought using Meteos- you gain the meteos you launch off the screen as a sort of currency) each with their own gravity and launch physics (Vubble's verticals have 0 force but their horizontals are powerful) but they all feel intuitive and sort of fit the flavor- Oleana is a water planet, the physics feel like you're underwater. Most airy or cloudy-looking planets have low gravity, etc.
During a vs match with the computer or should you ever find anyone offline with Meteos it's basically like 1 player, but any blocks you fire drop on the enemy's screen as grey blocks- weighing down their rockets if they're trying to fire some, and you can often overwhelm someone with a storm of blocks so that they don't have enough time to fire them all back. Of course, that idea is risky because if they do it all lands right back in your lap.
This is all happening very fast, mind. The game is a reflex-based game. You don't think about what you're doing, it just sort of flows from your hands onto the screen without much actual deliberation over what to match and when to link up blocks as efficiently as possible. I find high levels of speed that occur at about 3 minutes or beyond on my favorite levels to really be a Zen thing- I don't even cognizize what's going on, it's as if my hands and eyes play the game on autopilot because the brain's thoughts move too slow to keep up with the frantic action- at 3+ minutes, every second is Keep Going Or Lose.
