Lumines and Meteos producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi said he was leaving game development in 2012 when he took up the role of a professor, but now he's back and he's making a new Lumines game.
Former HAL Labs star designer Masahiro Sakurai, whose credits include the creation of the Kirby and Smash Brothers series as well as, more recently, directing Nintendo DS title Meteos for Q Entertainment, has announced the formation of his own studio.
Planets are big things. Interplanetary conflict is even bigger. Meteos, which deals with both, has been put together by Tetsuya Mizuguchi, whose work speaks for itself, and Masahiro Sakurai, who invented Kirby and Smash Bros. From our perspective then, it's a big game about big things. Yet what we find really endearing about it, slightly perversely, is the way it hits so many tiny little nails on the head with such precision.
You've probably realised by now that it's a puzzle game, and we'll do the usual round of explanation in a minute, but it's worth spending a little more time stressing its overarching achievements, because it's probably the most exciting puzzle game we've played all year - and that's on a system that's so far delivered at least a handful of traditional puzzlers, and shoehorned a number of other generic ideas in that direction with varying degrees of success.
Other DS puzzlers like Polarium have demonstrated brilliant core ideas - in that game's case, the way you switch coloured blocks to eliminate them by selecting them in one stylus stroke - but Meteos has several brilliant ideas, and is set up in a manner that gives you a great play options but also continually rewards your endeavours in a very considered way.