Nintendo Media Summit: Planet Puzzle league hands-on (DS)

One of the DS games on display at this week's Nintendo Media Summit was Planet Puzzle League, the newest title from the developers of Tetris Attacks and Super Paper Mario. The game is a block-based puzzler along the lines of Bejeweled and Tetris and offers easy, accessible touch controls. You use the stylus to grab blocks and pull them left or right to line up three blocks of the same color to make them disappear. Like many games of its ilk, the goal is to create chains and combos by lining up multiple sets of blocks at once. All the while as you do this, the game is constantly shoving more blocks up from the screen, forcing you to react quickly.

While playing the game, you hold the DS like a book, something thats always felt a little awkward to me. The controls are entirely touchscreen based, and the top screen (or left screen in this situation) gives you level detail and your score. The levels themselves look nice, with lots of bright flashing lights and pleasing music and the gameplay was entertaining, if not particularly original. The game also offers online play with full voice chat for two players and supports up to four players over ad-hoc wireless. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get any versus play in while I was at the event, but I heard from some other writers that the game really started to shine when in a heated battle over WiFi.

Planet Puzzle League comes out next month, and it should definitely make puzzle game fans happy, as long as they're not too burnt out on moving blocks around for points. And really, who ever could get tired of that?