Meteos - Second Play Rating

Over the past week, I haven’t played as much Meteos as I would have liked, but that hasn’t stopped me from squeezing as much enjoyment out of the game as I possibly can in my limited spare time. Since writing my previous Play Rating all I’ve played are multiplayer games of Meteos. It is one wild ride. There are two modes - “Download Play” and “Vs.” The “Vs.” mode requires two copies of the game, so I haven’t been able to play that, but I see a second copy of Meteos in my near future, so I’m sure I’ll get around to playing it sooner rather than later. For this play session, I’m sticking to the single card download mode.

I feel like a game pusher, Meteos is the most recent in the long line of games (mostly puzzle games) that I’ve managed to get my wife hooked on. Over the past 5 years, she’s become somewhat of a puzzle game prodigy. She is consistently far better than me at any puzzle game we ever play together, and Meteos is no exception. In the single card mode, the players have the option of playing a timed game, racing to the highest score, or a stock game where each player has between 1 and 5 lives. Both are extremely fun even though I ALWAYS lose. I think I won the first three stock games that we played (her first 3 Meteos games ever), and I haven’t won since. In the games, the blocks are always the same, and there does not seem to be any variation in the gameplay that I mentioned in my first Play Rating. The music is always the same as well, but fortunately the song does not grate on the nerves.

At first I was disappointed that I couldn’t use all the different kinds of blocks (I hope that is possible in the 2 game card version), after playing a few games though, I quickly forgot about that minor complaint as I got sucked into the chaotic gameplay of the two player mode. It’s when I started playing the two player mode frequently that the insanely fratic nature of Metoes began to really shine. This game requires lightning fast thinking and reacting. As I launch blocks off of my screen, some of them fall on my wife’s screen, and vise versa. The larger the group of blocks, the faster they fall on the other person’s screen. There are times when huge avalanches of Meteos blocks will come rushing down filling the screen almost immediately. There is no time to blink, the player has to react very quickly in order to get out of these jams. I often find when I get jammed up like that, the best thing to do is just start moving blocks around randomly and as quickly as possible. While it is not a very efficient tactic, it works some of the time, and it does well to buy some breathing room. I’ve found the key to not losing too badly is to get as many blocks off the ground and keep them off the ground, constantly juggling them and launching them off to my wife’s DS. It’s bad news though when I start to fall behind. The game is so fast, that after a couple of minor screw-ups my screen will be nearly full.

When a player gets on an especially good roll, juggling and launching large groups of meteos blocks in rapid succession, the top screen graphics will start to go crazy. I’m not exactly sure what it is doing, but lights are flashing, blocks are falling and things seem to be in a general state of chaos. All I can say is, cool. I’m not sure what it does to the player that is on the receiving end of the onslaught of blocks because I’ve only managed this feat once. All my wife would say was that it was “not good.”

Even though I can’t seem to win a game against my wife and her mad puzzle game skillz, I can’t help but come back for more Meteos goodness. Meteos has climbed to the top of the list of my all time favorite puzzle games. As it stands now I’d say Meteos falls in at number two between Tetris and Intelligent Qube; and like those games, I can’t imagine that I’m going to ever lose interest in this one. Whenever I the itch to arrange some blocks, Meteos going to be my go-to game.