Meteos: Disney Magic Hands-on

October 21st, 2006, 01:03 Posted By: wraggster

Meteos was one of the first puzzle games to hit the Nintendo DS, and its unique touch screen controlled action-based tile-swapping gameplay, as well as its quirky visual style makes it one of those games held in high regard with early-adopting Nintendo DS owners. It's an excellent game, and Buena Vista knows it -- the company now has the rights to the property and is working with the game's original development team -- Q Entertainment -- to offer up a second run of the design. Buena Vista stopped by the office this week to show us a work in progress version of Meteos: Disney Magic, and if you think it's just a Mickey Mouse-skinned version of the original game, read on.

First of all, for those not familiar with Meteos, here's a breakdown of the gameplay: blocks of various colors rain down from the top of the screen, and the only way to get rid of them is to arrange three or more of the same color either vertically or horizontally using the stylus to drag them around. Unlike other puzzle games like Tetris or Puyo Pop, in Meteos these tiles don't disappear when matched. Instead, they turn into "rockets" which are used to boost the tiles on top of them off the screen. The more tiles you match while they're rocketing off the screen, the more powerful the boost...which comes in handy when the gravity in some levels get a little "heavy."

The biggest change to the design of Meteos in Meteos: Disney Magic is its new orientation: you now play the game on the system by holding the DS like a book a la Brain Age. This change gives players a lot more vertical real estate without hindering the rest of the design. Number two: in Easy and Medium difficulty, you can now swap tiles left and right, so long as there's tiles on one side of them. In the original design, you could only slide tiles in the same column, up and down. Because of this, many players utilized a "scribble" technique to randomly boost tiles away by quickly slashing at the screen. With the left/right idea, it makes scribbling less helpful -- players that plan have much better potential for winning now since they'll be pulling off combos that just couldn't be possible by scribbling up and down.

But yes, just as the name suggests, the Meteos design is now "skinned" with Disney themes. We've played levels from The Lion King, Winnie the Poo, Toy Story, and Nightmare Before Christmas, each with their own set of tiles that match the property. And like the original Meteos, each "book" has its own gravity...Nightmare Before Christmas had the heaviest we've experienced in our hands-on, while The Little Mermaid, being underwater, had the floatiest. There will be the same multiplayer focus that's in the original design, so expect single and multi-cart support in Meteos: Disney Magic. But no Wi-Fi Connection support. Bummer.

The game's still Meteos, though, even with the cute Disney franchises branding the puzzle games. The new "book" orientation and the horizontal and vertical sliding mechanics add a significant amount to the already excellent puzzle design. The game's scheduled to hit shelves in February.

Via IGN

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