Meteos: Disney Magic Hands-On

Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Q Entertainment set the standard for touch-based puzzle games on the Nintendo DS last year with Meteos. Now, the developer has teamed up with Buena Vista Games to combine the quirky puzzler with nearly every Disney character you can imagine in a new version called Meteos: Disney Magic. As big fans of the original game, we had to try out Disney Magic to see if it's more than simply Meteos with Disney graphics slapped on. We'll spare you any chocolate-and-peanut-butter quips with regard to these two seemingly disparate elements and simply say that Q has certainly added more than just new skins to the old Meteos formula with this new game.

If you played the original Meteos, you'll remember a bunch of weird-looking aliens launching meteors at each other's planets in some kind of wacky galactic war. The object was to protect your own planet by sending the other species' meteors flying back at them. As you'd imagine, there aren't any meteors or aliens (except maybe Stitch) to be found in the Disney version of Meteos. Instead, Jiminy Cricket and Tinkerbell have discovered that the library containing all the Disney stories has been ravaged and all the pages have been mixed up. To put things right, you'll have to...play Meteos! You'll play through Disney-themed stages featuring every Disney property you can imagine, from classics like The Lion King to less-conventional ones such as Toy Story and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Disney Magic plays more or less like the original Meteos, as you use the DS's stylus to line up three same-colored blocks in a horizontal or vertical row to launch them--and any other blocks atop them--into the air and off the screen. Disney Magic seems like an easier way to get into Meteos' gameplay, however, since Q has made some changes to it. You'll first notice that you now have to hold the DS on its side to play, as the screens have been oriented vertically. Rather than cram more blocks onto the screen with this extra space, it seems like Q has increased the size of the blocks that were already there. In contrast to the original Meteos, where we would occasionally grab the wrong block with the stylus, we were more precise with our movements in the Disney version.

The other big change to the core gameplay is that you can now move blocks left and right as well as up and down. You can't just drag a block around freely--you have to move it vertically or horizontally, then pick up the stylus and set it back down to move it in the other direction--but this naturally makes it an awful lot easier to put combos together. Lastly, a new special move has been added that varies by stage. You'll have a special meter on the side that fills up as you clear blocks, and you can tap it when it's full to activate powers like the nitro boost, which makes the blocks fall faster but then blows them clear off the screen when you get a combo, or the slowdown, which obviously makes the blocks fall slower and lets you clear out the screen more easily.

Disney Magic doesn't have some of the more complex features of the original Meteos, such as the ability to create new elements and special items from the elements you've already collected, but it does have a couple of more Disney-centric features. There's a story viewer that lets you view all the artwork for the various Disney properties as you unlock them, and the art looks pretty nice from what we've seen, so diehard fans ought to get a kick out of this. There's also a robust download play option, which sends a functional but limited version of the game to a friend with a second DS. That downloaded version can then play a limited single-player game with only one background or a brief multiplayer game against the host with a small set of rules. The game will also have a more fully featured multiplayer component, though we didn't have a second copy of the game to test it with.

As you'd expect with a Disney product, the presentation here is looking top notch, with high-res animated character art and backgrounds on the second screen that change based on how you're playing. Meteos: Disney Magic is due out early next year and looks like it will serve as a good way for younger players to try out one of last year's best puzzle games.