G4TV

This is a game with a great many names. Originally, Nintendo called it Panel de Pon, back in the early ‘90s when it first hit Japan. Here in America, it became Tetris Attack, even though it didn’t have much to do with Tetris. (At the time, Nintendo had a piece of the property, and Tetris was a handy marketing tie-in for any puzzle game involving stacks of blocks.)
 
Nowadays, of course, the Tetris name has a price tag, so it’s Puzzle League instead. (You might remember Pokemon Puzzle League a few years ago – that was more or less the same game.) Under whatever title, though, it’s the same puzzle game, and this is a particularly fine version of an old favorite. Nintendo’s Intelligent Systems team has done some great work refreshing the classic puzzler’s presentation, and it’s packed with extra modes and variations on the basic theme.

Wi-Fi Connection play tops off the package, so you’ll never run out of competition online. With so many people available to play now, the “Puzzle League” moniker finally makes sense.

Rising and Falling

In case all the history up there was actually new to you, here’s a simple rundown on how Puzzle League works. It’s a stack of colored blocks, gradually moving up the screen. When you want to manipulate the stack, you can cause two adjacent blocks to swap places. (It’s a bit like Bejeweled that way, but you can only move blocks left to right, or vice versa – swapping them up and down isn’t an option.) Lining up three or more blocks, horizontally or vertically, makes them disappear, and the rest of the stack settles to fill the empty space.

Naturally, the real goal is to set up the stack so that one combination triggers several more. That throws big garbage blocks over at your opponent, pushing his stack closer to the top of the screen. When it crosses that line, the game is over.

There’s a neat mix of risk and reward thrown in, because you can actually speed up the rate at which your stack rises. That reveals more blocks to – hopefully – combo with, but obviously it also gives your opponent an opening to push you very close to the top with some well-timed garbage.

To-Do List

It’s a simple game, obviously, but it’s as addictive as they come, and Planet Puzzle League offers a lot of different ways to play it. You can compete against the computer by the standard rules, or strictly for score. Endless mode cuts out the opponent and just lets you play until you can’t play anymore. Puzzle mode might suit the taste of players with more smarts than reflexes – it gives you just a couple of moves to try and clear a whole screen of blocks. For competitive players with short attention spans, “Daily Play” has three two-minute score challenges you can play just once a day, and that’s just a sampling of the different options on offer.
 
The really competitive types, of course, will run straight for the wireless modes, which support four players in ad-hoc games or head-to-head battles online. It would have been nice to get more players in on the game via Wi-Fi Connection, but two is enough to make for an exciting competition, and it runs with no visible lag, as smooth as you please. Like the single-player half of the game, online play also has a couple of quirky extra modes, including an option to only play with people who share your birthday. (Why would you want to do that? Well, why not?)

Second Verse, Same as the First

Planet’s visual style would be similarly quirky if it hadn’t been for Lumines. Since Lumines does exist, and Meteos as well, this looks a lot like one of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s games – the same blend of arch, futuristic design elements, and even the same kind of soothing electronic music. That said, this isn’t what you’d call a cheap imitation. It’s a very good-looking game that happens to have a lot in common with another, earlier good-looking game. The different block shapes shift up the pace without being confusing, and the animated backgrounds are pleasant to look at without distracting you from the business of making blocks disappear.

Besides that, there’s not an awful lot to criticize here, and the last paragraph isn’t much of a criticism anyway. Planet Puzzle League offers all that you’d want in a puzzler for the DS, and probably a couple of things you wouldn’t have ever thought to ask for. Tetris Attack veterans likely already have it -- newer puzzle fans should give it a look for another addictive twist on moving stacks of blocks around.

Article by: D. F. Smith