Lumines

Lumines (pronounced like "luminous") is a falling blocks puzzle game released in 2004 (Japan) and 2005 (Latin locales) for PSP.

Gameplay

Playfield is 16 blocks wide by 10 blocks tall.

O tetrominoes composed of dark and light blocks enter above the top center of the playfield and drop into place. They do not begin to fall immediately; there is a delay of a second or two, which the player can cancel by pressing Down. (This is not ARE because the player can still rotate and shift the piece.) Player manipulates them as in Tetris. There is no lock delay or hard drop. Soft dropping increases the score by 1 point per row.

When a piece lands on the stack, it breaks into individual blocks; once these fall, any 2x2 block square of all dark blocks or all light blocks gets marked with a large square over it. Unlike large bombs in Bombliss and power gems in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, these squares can and often do overlap.

At the same time that the player is stacking pieces, a vertical line called the "timeline" or "sweeper" periodically passes from left to right over the field. It moves one column for each eighth note of the background music; speeds range from 3 columns per second (for 90 BPM down-tempo music) to 6 columns per second (for 180 BPM music). It changes any marked blocks to darker swept blocks, counting the number of marked blocks that are completely removed. Once the timeline completely passes a group of marked blocks (that is, reaches a column with no marked blocks or the right side of the screen), all swept blocks disappear, and the number of squares in that group is added to a counter at the top of the timeline.

The timeline reaches the right side of the playfield once every two measures of 4/4 time. At this point, it restarts on the left side, and the player earns 40 points for each square that was completely removed in that pass, times four if at least four squares were removed.

Roughly every 30th piece contains a special block. As this block is formed into part of a square, all blocks of the same color connected to it through a side are marked (like with bombs in Puzzle Fighter), but they do not increase the score.

The goal of challenge mode is to get 999,999 points.

Clones

Verticube, Flare, Luminesweeper