meteos: another game i wish i liked more
Meteos is a “puzzle” game for the DS. I really don’t like the use of the word “puzzle” to describe the genre of games like Puzzle Quest and Tetris and Meteos, because they’re not so much puzzles, to me, as just games. That’s not the point, though.
In Meteos, blocks fall from the sky and form rows and columns. You can move blocks up and down, but not side to side, by dragging them around with the stylus. If you form a sequence of three or more of one color in either direction, the sequence of blocks will join together and launch up into the air. Blocks above the launching blocks are carried up, but they have mass, and while they are moving up, other blocks continue to fall from the sky. You might need to launch a second set of blocks up to keep the first set moving, as gravity works against it.
The concept is very simple, and it’s pretty fun. It’s just too much to pay attention to, though, compared to Tetris or Bejeweled. It might be a lot more fun to play against a friend, but it’s too hard to keep an eye on how your enemy is doing, which makes it hard to talk smack. Also, any time I think about multiplayer games on the DS, I feel like I’d rather play a game where I share one big screen, rather than hunching over a little one.
As much as I want to like Meteos, I lose at it too quickly to enjoy it much. I wish it was easier to play a much longer, simpler version of it. The in-game stats tell me that I’ve played it fewer than twenty times, for less than three total hours since first turning it on in the summer of 2006. Oh well.