The highly addictive puzzle game has arrived on the Xbox 360 Live Arcade. For those of you who don’t own a PSP; Lumines is a very addictive puzzle game where your goal is to make coloured squares, when a "scanner line" passes through the completed square of 4 or more same coloured blocks…*poof* they go. Sounds simple enough, but it becomes a time waster as hours go by playing it over and over.
There has been a bit of flak from the gaming community with the Xbox 360 version, such as the Versus CPU mode only includes one CPU to challenge for the "full price of 1200 Microsoft points" and the Puzzle mode only has 5 out of the 40 puzzles that were in the PSP version. These lacking puzzles will be added back with additional purchases of mission packs in the near future.
Fortunately there have been some additions to the Xbox 360 version, such as local two player mode where you can battle out and see who can knock the other player off the screen. There is of course Xbox Live support if you don’t happen to have a second controller handy and enjoy gaming online. Leaderboards and achievements to unlock skins have also been added but there are quite a few missing skins if you compare it to the PSP version.
My favorite mode is Challenge mode, which is where you’ll spend most of your time. Think of it as an endless stream of blocks till you can’t fill up the pit anymore and it is game over. You can end up playing Challenge mode for over an hour or more each session if you put your mind to it.
The Time Attack mode will keep you busy trying to beat the timer such as trying to unlock the final skin, you’ll have to do 60 blocks in 70 seconds!
The stripped down Puzzle mode forces you to create a specified shape within a time limit.
The music seems to be missing a few tunes, and soon started repeating the same songs after a short gaming session, I really can’t wait for the early 2007 music video pack to come out because the game needs it.
The Xbox live mode seems to suffer from the occasional lag, there would be moments where I’d be playing and suddenly the block would drop into the wrong place. Otherwise the Xbox live mode is pretty fun to show who’s boss when it comes to Lumines Live!
All in all, Lumines Live! is still a very addictive puzzle game. Even if you have to make separate purchases to make the game as full as the PSP version, it still costs less than a new copy of Lumines for the PSP. I just wish they would had told us what our 1200 Microsoft points gave us instead of finding out after the "non refundable purchase".
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