malvasia bianca

Meteos is a DS puzzle game. It’s in the “objects falling from the sky” genre; a new take, enabled by the touch screen. The goal is to line up three blocks of the same color (either horizontally or vertically); you can do this by moving blocks up and down in a column using the stylus. When you do this, the blocks in question and ones above them launch up; typically they start falling back down, though, so you have to create more lines of blocks out of the chunk of blocks that are falling down. (DS features used: the touch screen is essential to the game, but the second screen isn’t used in any important way.)

Pleasant enough; I probably would have played it more if I hadn’t had a zillion other games to play at the same time. Or if I weren’t constantly reading blogs or writing blog posts. Or if I could pry the DS out of Liesl’s hands. (Not that I blame her: there’s a reason her game of choice is sometimes called Animal Crack. She likes Meteos too, by the way.) I’ll happily bring the game along the next time I’m travelling.

One nice thing: you can use the blocks that you send off into space to buy stuff: new places to play (with slightly different physics models), new items that occasionally appear instead of blocks, and music to listen to. More and more games include stuff like this; honestly, I don’t understand why every game doesn’t have some sort of store aspect to it. It’s easy to do; it gives another way for people to feel like they’re making progress; and if people don’t like it, they can just ignore it…