One of PlayStation’s most beloved puzzle games will be making the jump to mobile next week. Lumines: Puzzle & Music will be releasing on iOS and Android on September 1 for $3, officially leaving the PlayStation handheld ecosystem.
Lumines is a weird mix of Tetris and Daft Punk. You drop cubes made up of four squares containing two colors. You match up those colors to create squares or other patterns which are cleared via a “timeline” sweep. It’s essentially a line that moves left to right and clears color-matched cubes. With each successive song, the line moves faster. It becomes an interesting balance of managing squares and navigating around the timeline sweep.
Last year, Japanese developer Mobcast bought up the rights to Lumines from Q Entertainment. Because the handheld gaming space is leaning far more toward mobile, it makes sense that developers are after established brands and are wanting to appeal to a wider audience.
The first Lumines was a launch title on the PlayStation Portable back in 2004. Years into the PSP’s life cycle, it was still regarded as one of the best games to hit the system. Excluding some spinoffs for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Network, a true follow-up came out in 2012 subtitled Electronic Symphony for the PlayStation Vita. That too, years after its launch, is widely considered one of PS Vita’s strongest showings.
Details are slim on exactly how Puzzle & Music will play on mobile. But video and screenshots do show a portrait view versus the more traditional landscape. It’s uncertain how this will affect gameplay, but your pieces will definitely build up rather than sideways.
Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the designer on the original Lumines, is back for Puzzle & Music as well, bringing some relief to longtime fans of the series. The game will feature new music as well as some classics.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.