Re-release this: Meteos
Re-releasing Meteos, a Nintendo DS game that relied on the stylus to work as well as it did, would be tough. But there's one possible way.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Meteos was published by Nintendo outside of Japan, but it’s not really a Nintendo game. It wasn’t one they contracted out to a studio, but instead, one they picked up on for publishing abroad for a couple of pretty obvious reasons: for one, it was a spring 2005 puzzle game that took advantage of tech specific to their new platform, the Nintendo Dual Screen — the DS — within basically the first half-year of its existence, and two, the game’s designer was Masahiro Sakurai. You know, the creator of Kirby and Super Smash Bros., who happened to work on both of those things with the then-president of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, when they were both at HAL Laboratory.
So, while Bandai — before its merger with Namco, which would come a year later — published Meteos in Japan — Nintendo was a natural publisher elsewhere. Which also meant that the game was displayed at Nintendo’s convention booths, and given marketing attention and an additional push, which surely helped its visibility. It also deserved said visibility and attention, however, because Meteos is a killer puzzle game that sprang from the mind of not just one talented and notable designer in Sakurai, but also Tetsuya Mizuguchi, whom you might know for games like Space Channel 5, Rez, and, most related to Meteos, puzzle games like Lumines and Tetris Effect.
Mizuguchi’s Q Entertainment, which he co-founded in 2003, had already released Lumines for the Playstation Portable, and now it was time for the DS to get a puzzle game, one suited for both its stylus and dual-screen setup. He tabbed Sakurai to design a puzzle game in the time before the DS, but once that system existed, the idea to go multiplatform out of the gate vanished, and they focused instead of making a game that fit this hardware in particular. “When I first saw the Nintendo DS hardware design, it really gave me a lot of inspiration. The two screens and touch panel really change the game — I wouldn't do a game like Lumines on the DS," Mizuguchi told 1Up back in 2005.
Sakurai believed, as he explained to IGN in a 2005 interview, that “this genre really hasn't evolved since Tetris Attack and other games,” by which Sakurai likely meant that the focus was so often on matches and clearing of blocks and rows, which is the case in the likes of Tetris, Columns, Puyo Puyo, and so many others from the late-80s and 90s — it’s not that none of the puzzle games were different, so much as that there hadn’t been a complete overhaul of familiar systems in years. Tetris Attack — which is just the first Puzzle League game, known as Panel de Pon in Japan — had blocks come up from underneath rather than below, and let you swap them all around rather than forcing them to stay where they arrived, while horrible things came from above to keep you from being able to make progress, or to build on whatever structure you were carefully constructing in a way you didn’t want. It certainly wasn’t Tetris, no, but it was innovative, as Sakurai mentioned. That had released a decade prior, so by his estimation, the genre was due.
There’s something to what Sakurai said, in that from Tetris Attack onward, much — not all, but much — of what went down in the puzzle space was a refinement of an existing concept rather than truly innovative. Magical Drop also released in 1995, and that, like Tetris Attack, changed how the playing area worked, in this case by putting all the pieces at the top, and having you cause them to fall and be placed wherever you chose to put them. Cleopatra Fortune modified how blocks are cleared as well as seriously changing what their shapes and functions were, but it, too, released in ‘95. Even then, these are all reactions to Tetris and the other dominant forces of the genre, subversions of player expectations that tweaked an existing formula, and even games like 2000’s Bejeweled took clear inspiration from existing series like Puzzle League and Columns, while spin-offs like Tetrisphere were still very much, spiritually, Tetris.
So, Sakurai set about making something that, yes, played off of expectations to a degree, but managed to be completely different in an innovative way in the process, rather than just a slight tweak or deviation to existing puzzle titles. And Meteos certainly is that, given its matching works unlike the matching in other puzzle games, and that all of its modes tie together in a manner that makes the game a coherent, complete package rather than “merely” a few alternate ways of playing the game.
You’d be hard pressed to say that Sakurai and Mizuguchi took the traditional route when looking for inspiration for Meteos. As Mizuguchi told 1Up in that same interview:
The concept of Meteos came out of inspiration drawn from a variety of entertainment mediums -- namely the Fox TV series 24, The Matrix, and classic arcade game Missile Command. "When I first explained the Meteos concept to Sakurai, I pointed to the camera work in 24," says Mizuguchi. "Often times they split the screen into three or four shots, each screen showing a different angle on the story. Drawing from that idea we came up with the concept of a puzzle game. We also got inspiration from the opening of The Matrix with the green computer code that drips down on the screen," Mizuguchi continues. "Except in the world of Meteos, everything is dripping up."
Missile Command is the easy one to figure out there, since that game had you fighting off endless waves of missiles aimed at the cities you were trying to protect — your goal was to take them out before they could do the same to you, and Meteos plays with this concept a bit despite being a puzzle game. As for 24 and The Matrix, though, those are more surprising sources, but just goes to show you that inspiration for games doesn’t have to come from games — just the way a primetime network television show shot some of its scenes helped with visualizing how Meteos would work! And it’s also one of the reasons Meteos ended up being able to achieve the goal Sakurai envisioned, which was to create something less tethered to and less of a reaction to existing puzzle games. Visually, it’s wildly different, with the emphasis on action on two screens happening concurrently, with multiple things to look at within each of those screens. And gameplay-wise, well, Missile Command didn’t exactly scream out for puzzle, no, but what is a shoot ‘em up, anyway, besides an action-forward kind of puzzle game with fast-twitch reactions and perfect placements and needles that must be threaded, anyway? Toaplan knows what I’m talking about.
The two are a perfect fit if you can make them work, which Sakurai and Q Entertainment did with Meteos. Here’s how it works: blocks fall from the sky into your playing area, and “sky” is said very purposefully there, rather than “from the top of the playing area,” as the sky serves a narrative purpose. You are showing up on various planets defending against the attacks of the planet Meteo, fusing together the meteo blocks that they’ve been firing off in order to fire them right back at the various bases they’ve established across the galaxy. In the end, you reach planet Meteo, and you fight its leader, freeing the galaxy.
You fuse groups of at least three blocks together, horizontally or vertically, using the stylus. You can use the D-pad, but don’t. It’s too slow. Even when you’re playing on an easier-than-normal setting, it’s simply too slow to keep up as the game’s pace picks up and the action becomes far more frenetic and your play reactive. When you’ve fused these blocks together, they fire upward — rockets emerge, propelling the blocks, and any sitting on top of them, into space. Or, you hope they end up in space. Far more often, the unique gravity of whatever planet you’re on will keep these fused blocks from exiting the atmosphere, and you’ll have to create another fused match to propel it even further ahead. Getting a second match creates a combo that allows for more powerful propulsion, so you’re going to do a whole lot of initial launches and then follow-up launches to be sure that it’s actually gone. Doing this repeatedly will defeat the planets you’re facing off against that are held by Meteo’s forces, and you can see the progress of that on the top screen of the system, as all the meteo-based rockets you’ve fused together pound the surface of those planets. Additionally, you can see inset boxes for each planet you’re facing off against on the touch screen, as well as the condition of the planet you’re defending. There’s a whole lot to look at here.
It is chaos. Sometimes it’ll go slow enough to not seem that way, when the gravity is low enough that fusing is a pinch, but for the majority of the planets you’re going to be fighting for your life. And if you don’t feel that way, well, try turning the difficulty up: Meteos uses a system that, while nowhere near as robust as what Sakurai would eventually introduce with Kid Icarus: Uprising and its decimal-based difficulty slider, is still fine-tunable all the same since it uses a five-star system that ranges from Simple to Brutally Hard. Even standard, the second star, will test you and your reflexes when things get busy on screen. What adds to the difficulty, as well, is that you can speed up the rate at which meteos fall from the sky into your playing area, whenever you want, by spinning an orb found on the bottom screen using the stylus. It’s a temporary increase, but when you’ve filled a bunch of the screen up and can continue your unrelenting attack, you’ll be plenty satisfied with temporary.
There are 16 power-ups that can both help your progress or harm it, depending on the context of their use — you start with a simple bomb that can clear some meteos, and unlock additional power-ups through fusion — more on that in a moment — that can do things like drill straight down through a column, or a war axe that takes some random, descending swings that destroy 1x3 groupings of meteos in your playing area. These power-ups appear among your meteos, and you tap them with the stylus to begin the countdown to their use. If you’re desperately trying to stay alive before one of these can clear a bunch of meteos off of your screen, you better hope that you had more than five seconds left to live when you tapped.
You unlock these items by fusing meteos, which you do outside of a match. On the main screen of the game is a “Fusion” label, where, per its own words, you “Use Meteos to create new matter!” You can fuse new planets — each planet has distinct blocks and environments, as well as its own gravity to contend with — new items, and rare metals (powerful, unique meteos), using meteos that you’ve banked by clearing them in any of the game’s play modes. The Cross Bomb, for instance, requires 200 fire meteos, 300 zap meteos, and five dark meteos, but once you’ve fused it, it’ll show up for use at random like any other item. To play the high-level Meteos difficulties, you’re going to probably have to build up your arsenal on lower difficulties, which will let you build some of the tools you need to clear the tougher challenges. If you find that any item is more trouble than it’s worth, you can also just shut them off from the options menu. If this all sounds like stuff you’d normally find in a Sakurai game, well, just know that the actual menu screens also look like they could only have come from one specific person’s mind, too. Even if you’ve never seen Meteos’ menus, you know what they look like if you played any of Sakurai’s titles from the GameCube onward.
In addition to various multiplayer modes — a wireless Vs. mode as well as DS Download Play, for when just one person had a copy of Meteos on them — there’s also an abundance of single-play content. “Star Trip” is the story mode of the game, and within there are three separate ways to play: You can take a straight route, one planet after another, or a branching one that looks a lot like going through a Darius or Star Fox game. Then there’s the Multi route, where you can win the match and advance, but clearing a specific mission tied to the planets you’re on opens up additional paths that are closed off otherwise. Things like clearing a mission in X amount of time, or launching Y number of meteos before you win, and they’re sometimes pretty tough to pull off unless you’ve got a whole lot of control over every action you’re taking and aren’t just reacting to what’s on screen one fusion at a time.
There’s also a Simple mode, which lets you face off against multiple computer opponents, up to three, in a one-game Meteos match where you set the rules and conditions. There’s Time War, which is a bit of a caravan mode, with two timed options — two minutes and five minutes — as well as two modes based on how fast you can launch 100 or 1,000 meteos. Deluge is the final mode (outside of a tutorial), which is endless meteos — keep fusing until you fail, and see if you can beat your own high scores.
Considering that you not only improve as you play but also add additional mechanisms and nuance to the game by introducing new planets and items via fusion, and that there are five difficulty levels to choose from, Meteos has so much going for it on top of it being just a different kind of falling block match-three puzzler. It’s a special game, and also one that really only worked the one time when all conditions were right.
Mizuguchi told 1Up that, “As a game designer, he really is a genius… Even before development started he had the entire game completed in his head. Let's put it this way — if Sakurai wasn't on the team, we wouldn't be able to do Meteos.” Sakurai wasn’t around for the follow-up game, Meteos: Disney Magic, which was fine and all, but upset the careful balance of Meteos. In this Disney-flavored spin-off, you could now make diagonal matches, as well, which changed the entire feel of the game, making it far too easy. The restriction of only being able to move and match pieces horizontally and vertically is what helped build up the feelings of tension that made Meteos work in the first place: Meteos: Disney Magic is still a Meteos game, of course, but it changed a fundamental part of the experience, and lost something in the process.
Moves to platforms without a stylus didn’t go as well as the original setup, either. Meteos was ported to mobile phones in the days before touchscreens, and an Xbox Live Arcade release, Meteos Wars, came out in 2008 — you do not hear that as fondly recalled as the original for a reason. It’s just a different game with controller inputs instead of a stylus! And most modern touchscreens, the kinds used on phones and tablets and the Switch, were not built with a stylus in mind, but your finger, which is going to be less precise. If Meteos is going to be re-released in the present, there are two different ways to go about it: bring the stylus back, which Nintendo could do with the Switch successor if they are ready to get over the idea that (practically) every game should work the same docked as it does undocked, or, put it on computers with the expectation that a mouse could replicate a stylus, at least better than a controller input could. A trackpad would likely suffer, but a mouse? Your classic PC gamer would probably tell you that it’s even better than a stylus if precision and speed are what you’re looking for.
The point? You should play Meteos. Dig up an existing DS copy if you have the means. It might not be a great fit for emulation even on something touchscreen-enabled like a Steam Deck, given the aforementioned issue with the differences between a stylus-centered touchscreen and one that expects you to use a finger. So, until a better solution arrives, original hardware (or 3DS equivalent) it is. Which is a shame as far as the fate of one of the best puzzlers of this century goes — it inarguably deserves better than its current fate of being forgotten and stuck on hardware from two decades ago, itself now abandoned like the Game Boy before it.
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