stutterin’ groovin’ blocks

continuing my wiiware kick, i recently sat down with groovin’ blocks, which was released about 5 years ago (yikes!) and was also later released as a boxed retail version with additions including more levels and balance board controls. (for people who may be interested, apparently the game was also released on PSN, and was supposedly released on the iphone although it doesn’t seem to be available there now.)

anyway, the game is your pretty standard tetris-type game (although to be more specific columns is the closer relative), with the twist that placing blocks in time with the music (usually on the down beats) increases your score multiplier. depending on your love of house/techno this may be a great hook, but while i generally enjoyed the music i didn’t find much of it to be really rousing or memorable. i also found that the central mechanic got quite tedious and that being tied to the beat was too constraining to be much fun. on top of that it felt like it was easier to get chains randomly than through careful planning, and although the game is designed so that you have to fully master the mechanics to beat the harder stages and difficulty levels (apparently there are four), after a few hours of playing through all the stages at the lowest difficulty i didn’t feel at all motivated to invest more time in the game. on the plus side, the lumines-esque visuals are pretty polished, esp. for a wiiware title (although the yellow/orangish and red blocks were harder to distinguish between than they should have been), and i don’t doubt that the game has found a decent set of fans. wiiware itself has continued to be more mediocre than memorable, but there are still a decent number of highly praised games for me to check out, probably before too long.

stutter through these groovin’ blocks links:
– here’s the fairly bare-bones page on the game on the company’s official site
– tips on getting high scores, at gamefaqs
– review at nintendolife.com
– list of trophies for the PSN version
– entry at metacritic
– entry at wikipedia

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