Lumines PSP unlikely to appear on PSN

By Tom Bramwell Published 21 October, 2009

Publishing and licensing complications.

Japanese developer Q Entertainment has said it wants to see PSP titles Lumines and Lumines II appear for download on the PlayStation Store, but a mixture of licensing and publishing issues are getting in the way.

"We would love to bring Lumines/Lumines II to the PSN store, but there are complications, music licensing, was published by Namco, etc," the developer tweeted this week (thanks GamePro/Kotaku). "That said, we're obviously looking into it."

"To clarify, we don't have any problems with Bandai Namco," the developer said a day later. "It's just not as simple a matter of slapping Lumines I/II up on PSN as it seems... The songs 'Shinin'' and 'Lights' were licensed for the UMD version of the game. To re-purpose the game for PSN, we'd need to re-license, etc.

"And since Bandai Namco is the publisher of Lumines I, it's basically up to them to put on PSN. We'd love to see it as a PSN game, though!"

It probably gets even more complicated in Europe, too, since Ubisoft published the first Lumines on PSP and Buena Vista Games (now Disney Interactive) published the second.

At least there are plenty of other ways to play Lumines. Apart from owning one of the original brick PSPs and the UMDs, which are around a fiver each at retail, there are the Xbox Live Arcade (Lumines Live) and PSN (Lumines Supernova) versions, and there are even PC and PS2 ports of the original.

Never heard of Lumines? It's a 2D falling-blocks puzzle game played out on a wide horizontal grid. Blocks tumble in two colours and the idea is to create squares or rectangles, which can overlap, that are at least two blocks deep on both axes.

The gimmick is that blocks only disappear when suitable shapes are strafed by a vertical line, which sweeps left and right across the play area. Q mixes things up from level to level by changing the pace of the block-tumbling and line-sweeping, and gives each level its own sound effects that appear to feed back into the soundtrack song.

It's really very excellent. And if you still don't get it, why not amuse yourself with a morning's worth of reviews? Here's Lumines (Japanese PSP import), Lumines (European PSP launch version), Lumines Live! (Xbox Live Arcade) and Lumines Supernova (PSN for PS3).

Oh yes, and we'll have a review of the iPhone version up soon.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (6) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • wizlon #1 2 years ago

    One of the best PSP games not up on PSN, typical. Simple solution: make a new one, Lumines Mini, and sell it for a fiver, money in the bank!

  • Toothball #2 2 years ago

    Yeah I was wanting Lumines on PSN. I didn't get round to playing it much before as I kept forgetting to bring it with me.

  • Arwin #3 2 years ago

    Yeah just port Lumines Supernova or something. And otherwise just drop out those two licenced song 'skins', shouldn't be that hard, and we really don't need Lumines 1 - the first doesn't really offer anything that the second doesn't offer in a much better form.

  • SeesThroughAll #4 2 years ago

    Just bundle together another Lumines with songs that you didn't need to license from other artists, and you're good to go. The Supernova suggestion above sounds good to me too.

  • SimonM7 #5 2 years ago

    Um, Lumines 1 is vastly, vastly superior to any subsequent Lumines precisely because of its licensed tracks. They were chosen with outmost care to provide the perfect audio/visual journey through it. The sequels and iterations either had tasteless western chart tracks, were chopped into incoherent shorter "modes", or haphazardly thrown together skins where the music and imagery barely fits together anymore. Speaking of fitting together, what you do doesn't even have an impact on the music beyond 1 either.

    The only thing that could possibly result in a Lumines as good as the first one again is a proper Mizu directed 3 where they tap into the philosophy of the first one again. I've been playing every single iteration of Lumines hoping the next one would be it, but alas. :(

  • jonsaan #6 2 years ago

    No it isn't. The stat tracking in 2 makes it a much better game.