Do you remember playing Tetris so much that you’d see the pieces falling when you closed your eyes? Sleep was no escape — I just kept fitting them together in my dreams. That’s when I knew it was time to take a Tetris break for a few days.

I haven’t had the same experience with any other game since then. Until last night. I bought a new Sony PSP the other day (yes, I am occasionally susceptible to hype) and have been playing Lumines ever since.

Lumines (darned if I know how to pronounce it) is a puzzle game in the falling-block tradition of Tetris, but its mechanics are different enough to provide a completely different experience. Every block is a 4×4 square made up of some arrangement of two different colors. Your goal is to arrange the falling blocks into 4×4 squares of the same color, which will then disappear. There are more subtleties that enhance the gameplay, but that’s basically about all there is to it. Pretty simple, but somehow it works, and it works very well. Especially when you add up the exceptional production quality of this game. The music is so tightly integrated with the gameplay it feels like I’m composing it while listening to it at the same time. And it looks stunning on the PSP’s sharp LCD screen.

It works well enough that now I have to take a little Lumines break so that I don’t see these stinking blocks falling every time I close my eyes. I left my PSP at home this morning so I wouldn’t be tempted to play it on the train on my way to work. That’s the only reason you’re getting this entry. Argh, my eyes! Somebody make it stop!

Here’s a screenshot from the Ubisoft website: