Your smartphone’s about to get a dose of some funky puzzles.
Lumines: Puzzle & Music hits iOS and Android on September 1. This marks the first time the award-winning puzzle franchise (which has sold more than 2.5 million copies since its 2004 debut) will appear on modern smartphones. With the mobile gaming market hovering at $36 billion a year (or so says market research firm Newzoo), most studios opt for the free-to-play gambit, charging players for content and other goodies. But Mobcast will instead launch the latest game from series creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi for $3.
Your smartphone will present the Lumines game board in portrait mode, and you use the touchscreen to move blocks as they come down to clear the screen. Like in the console games that appeared on PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, you want to time your board wipes with the colors and music, unlocking skins and tunes as you go.
In a recent interview with GamesBeat, Mizuguchi detailed how the team at Mobcast approached making Lumines fit mobile devices.
“Fortunately, touch controls have come a long way, and we were able to learn a lot from the experiences of other developers and the many games before us since the dawn of touchscreen smartphones,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s a challenge that we wanted to take on in bringing Lumines to iOS and Android, and we’re confident that we’ve created something that works really well with touch controls while retaining the original feel of the game that people love.”