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Once you've completed the Challenge Modes, you thankfully get to arrange skins in any order – as well as skip those that you can't take – by setting up a custom playlist. There are plenty of well-known artists who contributed music, such as Hoobastank, Beck, Black Eyed Peas, Missy Elliot, and many others. It's an eclectic and widely-appealing set of musicians; if you can't find some of these things to like, you're not really much of a modern music fan at all.
While the Challenge Mode is the foundation, there are also plenty of other nifty things to do. Mission Mode presents a rapid series of puzzles for you to solve, increasing in complexity and difficulty as you move along. Additionally, a Puzzle Mode will have you trying to create shapes of seemingly every imaginable object, from animals to airplanes and everything in between. Budding DJs and songwriters can even create their own music tracks and skins with the shockingly in-depth (but under-explained) Sequencer tool. You can use all sorts of pre-recorded music and percussion to conjure up custom songs to then be implemented in all-new levels. Even better, these can be shared amongst friends via ad-hoc connection of their PSPs to each other.
Speaking of ad-hoc, the multiplayer modes are very interesting, pitting players against each other based upon shrinking the screen size of the losing combatant until there's no more room. This can be against the computer or another human, and gives an already lengthy title even more legs. While most of the multiplayer goodness needs to be done with both players owning a copy of the title, Game Sharing is present to allow a small demo to be shared with a buddy who's not lucky enough to have the UMD in tow.
All of this adds up to a tremendously enjoyable experience. While I could have done without a few of the tracks – and the ability to fast-forward previously unlocked skins in Challenge Mode is desperately needed – there is no doubt that Lumines II is one hell of a great game. Any music or puzzle fan with a PSP can't possibly go wrong. Unlike many puzzlers, there is a tremendous amount of replayability and pure content loaded into the game. So they didn't decide to reinvent the formula – in my opinion, that's a good thing. Sometimes taking a great game and building it out while keeping the fundamentals in place is the best decision to make. This time, it sure was.
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