Land of the Rising Thumb

The game I've been mostly playing this month is a DS 'puzzle and relaxation' title called Theta. The fact it's the work of a studio based just down the road from my apartment in Kyoto – a four-man team called Vitei which is led by an English ex-pat who is a thoroughly decent chap – I suppose adds to its charm.

But Theta is more than merely charming. It's unique, treading new ground and bringing together seemingly disparate concepts such as aquaria and lock-picking.

Theta is, of course, the eighth letter of the Greek alphabet (thanks, Wikipedia). It looks a bit like an '8', and it's symbolic of the basic puzzle concept in this game. Both screens display dials, and each dial has three niches cut into its edge. You can turn the dials on the touchscreen (with the stylus), but each rotation causes a dial on the top screen to turn as well.

Into this lock/safe kind of set-up Vitei introduces some multicoloured pips, designated as 'Atoms', which you can pass from dial to dial by lining up the niches – although the pips will only move down the screens in line with gravity. If the pips/Atoms fall off the bottom of the touchscreen, though, they'll defy gravity and end up dropping back into the top dial on the main screen.

It's your job, as controller of the dials, to line everything up so that three green pips fill the three niches in a green dial, while three red ones occupy the niches of a red dial, and so on. Only when everything is held in place can you collect a bonus ('Atom Get!') and move on to the other side of Theta. The other side of Theta being an aquarium. Naturally.

The aquarium feature has you guiding the Atoms you've collected from the main game into grouped formations, with the desired grouping indicated by easy-to-comprehend symbols. Again, it's a colour-coded pic 'n' mix play style, but without the mind crushingly difficult situations you'll encounter in Theta's puzzle half.

Aquarium mode is the relaxation bit, you see, where you can watch the pretty fishes (new fish can be collected as rewards in Puzzle mode) while having your eardrums gently patted by skittering minimal techno and underwater electronica. It's quite the experience.

So that's Theta. Interested? Direct your letters of petition to Nintendo of Europe, somewhere in the German countryside. Or just import.

As for other formats, my Samsung mobile hasn't seen a great deal of game action recently. But that will change next month, for sure, when Meteos Online Mobile arrives in these parts.

Meteos Mobile was released here last year and Gameloft also did another mobile version of Meteos called Astro Blocks, apparently. I must confess to not having played those. But it seems like Meteos Online Mobile, as its name hints at, peddles an online two-player versus mode, which I look forward to playing against my puzzle-queen wife (she really is good at these things).

Otherwise, Meteos Online Mobile looks like a crisp rendition of the DS original, and it might actually benefit from being limited to thumbpad control: with the DS version there was always a temptation to rub the touchscreen, as effective results could be gained that way.

Anyway, I'll let you know just how well it translates to the mobile phone – and how enjoyable the online aspect is – in next month's column.