Why didn’t they give February 30 days and use the extra two to take a couple of the 31-day months down to 30? That would be much more consistent.

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:

I’ve been pretty lax in posting here lately… but you can’t say you weren’t warned. It does say short-lived obsessions, after all. Still, this blog is something that I would like to continue doing, so I’ll be making a stronger effort to chronicle some of those million mini-obsessions that pass every day through the spot behind my eyes.

In that spirit, here’s one wacky but addictive flash game: Nanaca Crash. The goal is to get the maximum distance possible when you drive your bicycle into a guy and send him flying. The flying guy bounces off the ground, and gets different results depending on the various characters that you land on. Clicking at the right time (when the character you land on shows up in the “special” box) will get you specials, which are really cool.
Most of the instructions are in Japanese, and I don’t speak Japanese, but that doesn’t matter once you’ve played it a few times. Warning: this is (strangely) addictive.