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- Reviewed on: 12/18/2006
- Updated on: 12/21/2006
- Released on: 12/04/2006
- Originally published on GameSpot: Columns (Wii) Review
It took only a little while for other developers to catch on after Tetris took the world by storm in the late '80s. That brilliantly designed puzzle classic inadvertently inspired an untold number of derivative games, which replaced Tetris' multicolored blocks with all kinds of different things, while retaining that game's basic theme of having you prevent puzzle pieces from piling up. Columns is a typical example of this. Once a budget-priced Sega Genesis game, Columns is now available through the Wii's Virtual Console service. The gameplay can still be fun for a few hours, but it's nothing that countless other puzzle games haven't done better since.
It's no Tengen's Tetris, but it'll have to do.
In Columns, groups of three vertically stacked jewels drop from the top of the screen, one group at a time, and you control where they land. You may use the buttons on the controller to shift the sequence of those jewels up or down, and when three or more jewels are aligned horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, you hear a tingly sound as they disappear, you earn some points, and any jewels above collapse down. This sometimes initiates chain reactions, which can lead to some exciting, unexpected high-score opportunities. Sure, you can plan for a complex chain reaction, but these often happen by accident, which makes Columns feel a bit random. There's also the magic jewel to keep an eye out for, which causes every instance of the jewel type it lands on to disappear from the playing field, virtually guaranteeing a big chain reaction. As in Tetris, the object of the game is to play for as long as possible to earn a high score, but the longer you play, the faster the jewels drop, eventually making it very difficult to keep up.
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