PSP - Lumines: Puzzle Fusion - Tetris Now Has a Brother Taking Over the PSP!

The PSP game, Lumines: Puzzle Fusion was created in 2005 for the PSP entertainment system. It's very noticeable, colorful box attracts your attention over to it to pick it off of the shelf when looking for a video game for your new system. Lumines: Puzzle Fusion definitely caught my eye. On the back, it seems like a typical puzzle game. Nothing too special, but why is everyone buying it? Isn't it just a rip-off of Tetris? Apparently not...

Lumines is an incredibly enhanced version of Tetris! It has the same puzzle tactic of moving the blocks in certain forms before the hit the ground, but many differences come up.

One being that you only have 2 colors, both changing during the different themes throughout the game. There are over 20 themes and different songs along with forms of the blocks. They can change from stars to squares to balls, along with their colors being orange and white, blue and green, or white and red! Not to mention instead of being certain forms, they are always in a square like form at first made up of 4 blocks.

As they fall to the ground, you have to match up 4 of the same color blocks to form a square of one color to make them disappear as a bar that moves across the screen deletes the ones from left to right slowly or fast, depending on the speed of the theme. As the speed of the theme is higher, the blocks fall faster and the speed of the bar can increase to help you out, or decrease to put pressure on you to make more matches.

It isn't just 4 in a square though, after you have the first square, you can add on to it by having 2 more of the same color land on top, the side (next to it, not lying down), or many more than just 2 more. Plus there are bonuses if you delete all the boxes or if you get only one color of boxes!

When first owning this game, I played it for half an hour before putting it down to rest and eat, but the more and more I played it, I got addicted to it! It was just like Tetris' affect on many people around the world at its first development stage. But with a versus CPU or human modes available, along with unlockable symbols, songs and themes, it can be fairly easy to understand why it gets addicting.

A quick note before you decide to go out and rent it or buy it, be advised to its addicting power! This may sound silly, but trust me, if you have a job or girlfriend you truly care about, manage your time! But besides all that negative stuff, this game is pretty hot! So it is definitely something to check out if you have an extra $30 lying around somewhere and a PSP system. Enjoy the addicting power of the future Tetris!