Columns
The OG match 3 game. Also the worst.Genre: puzzle - blocks
Publisher: Sega
Year: 1990
System: Genesis
Gameplay Score: 1
Gameplay Notes:
It's a simplified Tetris but it's so cut down that it's more a game of luck than skill. The only thing you can do is change the vertical order of the falling set of three colors. There's rarely a good place to put the piece so you wind up piling it on without any way to control your destiny. It's just a waiting game to run out of space and time. Oh and all three buttons rotate the same way so if you rotate once too many you have to go all the way around the horn.
Level Design Score: 1
Level Design Notes:
Two modes - endless and "flash" which is ostensibly the puzzle mode. In arcade you try to prevent the stack from building up too far and in flash your objective is to get to the bottom and eliminate a key piece down there. Both modes are mind numbing.
Theme Score: 3
Theme Notes:
The presentation has ancient greek or roman artwork and animations. It's not the fun stuff from NES Tetris but it's better than nothing.
Art Style Score: 2
Art Style Notes:
Not much to look at. Still, the colors are distinct and the few animations give the game a touch of personality.
Audio Score: 2
Audio Notes:
There are three music tracks. None are particularly interesting. Ok "crystal breaking" sounds
Overall Score: 26
Review ID: 840
On games that are rated significantly lower than what I would rate them, I will heretofore label them as Mike's Second Opinion. Notably, I have not found any disagreement when you rate a game a score above 70. I think our disagreements are about games you rated low that I rated high, or "hidden gems". Anyway...
ReplyDeleteMike's Second Opinion:
Definitely not as fun as Mean Bean Machine, but I do enjoy this game to a pretty high degree where I would rate it around a 60 based on gut feeling. 25 does seem a bit low. I think I put more emphasis on art direction than you do for my personal like of a game judging from your criteria though gameplay does trump art direction in my book. I liked the artistic choices of this game, from the unique font, to the sprites of the jewels, and I also found the music to be hypnotizing ("Clotho" specifically). I also enjoyed how it leaned into its theme of what appears to be ancient Greece on the title screen. I liked how visually striking the animations were when three jewels were made in a row. A small detail but fun one is the sounds made during a combo get progressively higher pitched.
Overall I think this game's main weakness (especially compared to Puyo Puyo and Tetris) is its lack of a true adversarial element. In Tetris and Puyo Puyo, for instance, skillful play on your screen negatively affects your opponent by introducing trash, and skillful play intensifies the attacks. This game, on the other hand, has a two player mode, but you're both just playing the same game simultaneously, and would have an equivalent experience playing the same game on two separate consoles on separate screens. I think an adversarial element was addressed in Columns 3 (where's Columns 2?), which I haven't played, but Columns 3 from screenshots abandoned the ancient Greece artistic theme and it was jarring enough to make me avoid the game altogether. I hear it is 4 players with the multi-tap though.
There is a cheap exploit (or oversight) to this game where you can pause the game and view all of the jewels on the board, so it's easy to get absurdly high levels because of this. I once got to level 91 and demanded my sister take a photo of it with one of those one-time use Kodak cameras from the pharmacy. I was really proud of myself for some reason, lol.
"It's just a waiting game to run out of space and time. Oh and all three buttons rotate the same way so if you rotate once too many you have to go all the way around the horn."
DeleteForgot about this. Very legitimate criticism.
I agree that there is a group of objectively good games (the 70+ crowd) and then everything else that might be beloved by some and despised by others. Thank you for sharing "Mike's Second Opinion" for those games you and I don't see eye-to-eye about.
ReplyDeleteI generally enjoy block puzzle games but Columns has always felt so constrained when compared to its contemporaries.