The Game Developers Conference isn’t exactly known for having games on display. Rather than the show-and-tell session of E3, the annual GDC is all about business, about developers meeting with vendors and publishers and helping their projects come to fruition. But this year Nintendo had a plethora of Nintendo DS games on display, and the game that grabbed most of my attention was probably one of the most unassuming titles at the show.
Magnetica is a game much like Tetris, in which players line up like-colored objects to eliminate them and clear room for the onslaught of other colored objects. Yet the differences between Tetris and Magnetica are quite numerous. The colored objects are marbles, not bricks. The playing field is a concentric circle or funnel-like thing, not a two-dimensional column. And the marbles are moved not with a controller but by dragging them into position with the stylus, much like a magnet would be used to move a metal object.
Early levels start out simply enough, with two basic colors of marble emanating from the outer fringes of the circle. Like an assembly line, the marbles will continue to feed into the “conga line” of marbles, with the terminus of the track ending in a wormhole at the center. If the marbles stack up enough and their line reaches the wormhole, the game is over.
To keep the stacking-up to a minimum, other marbles will spawn from a location not far from the wormhole. Players must then move these marbles using the stylus to a position in the ever-growing conga line. If the line has a spot with two red marbles next to one another, and if the next spawned marble is red, players should move that new marble to either side of the red couplet, because once three marbles of the same color are lined up the sequence explodes, thus reducing the length of the entire chain of marbles.
As players advance through the game, more colors of marbles appear in the line as well as the spawning ground, and the rate at which the conga line fills with new marbles grows faster and faster. As a result, moving the stylus can be a frantic experience as players flick marbles all over the funnel, but it can also be a strategic one, as players create several couplets in hopes of eventually chaining together combinations of collapsing blocks, much like you’d do in the Puzzle Kombat mode of Mortal Kombat: Deception.
If you’re confused by this entire preview, I can’t say I blame you. Magnetica, like Tetris, is a challenging game to explain coherently, and Nintendo hasn’t released and screenshots, which doesn’t help matters any. But suffice it to say that if you’re a Tetris fan or enjoy puzzle games, Magnetica is one title you won’t want to miss when it ships for the Nintendo DS on June 5 this year.
— Jonas Allen