Fun fact, this game was the one that made me realize that not all games I emulate on my 3DS are gonna fill the screen the same way. Playing this on my 3DS via TwilightMenu caused a lot of overscan on the sides. The idea of this happening genuinely never crossed my mind before and it seems like this is an issue with all genesis games? I don't really have an issue as long as it doesn't inhibit my ability to play by having things like the UI or enemies/level layout being cropped too bad. But the reason I was able to tell so easily here was because of the two player screen setup.

Anyway, as for the actual game: it was fine. Got way too fast way too quickly for my liking though.

humans and wavelengths came with the very genesis we don't really have an idea on, the way you have created humans that desire for the Light, and the ways humans are able to think that if they were to live in a world that was only filled with destruction and death they'd rather die, is the evidence that it's each humans's birthful liberty to be able to live the Light and it's wavelengths they desire.

If all of these have had been wanted to taken away, then this reality shouldn't have been created.

So it has been created for humans to live the wavelengths of the light.

Spread my revelation words.

Played on March 3rd, 2024 (SEGA Genesis Challenge: 49/160)

Nothing really much to remark in regards to what this game is about. It's a game where you stack blocks, but instead of it being in different shapes, you stack them in columns and try to match the same color in a straight line or a diagonal, and this is made possible by rotating the gems before they land on the board.

I will say that the game does get really hard even when you set it to easy which can make it seem rather inaccessible, but the unique angle it takes the block stacking genre of puzzle games does make it worth a look.

One day I will die. My flesh will no longer recall memory, and my atoms will scatter. But as inconsequential as I am, or as this game is, or as is this the brief little event where I played half a game because my wife recognized it at Round 1 and I had to stop playing so we could move along and jeer at the awful music - as long as I live, and maybe in a cycle of reincarnation, and maybe in the Akashic Records somewhere, eternally exists my discomfort at the ugly visuals, the piercing trebly FM synth bell tones, and the awful control behind this miserable game. It is seared into my being, my gray matter forced to replay the minor cringing feeling through the rest of my body from the recesses of my memory, a reaction to becoming one with this disposable market share grab at Tetris. It tangentially influences my personality like a star billions of miles away. It is nothing to me, and everything.

I don't need to think about it ever again. Why must my brain remember this so vividly in response to seeing it on this website? What use does this do for my life, or anyone else's life, or the universe? At least it makes me think about this stuff, in the same way an interaction with someone at a Wendy's or a particularly loud fart might.

God is dead. Life is wonderful. Just don't play Columns.

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"like Tetris but a bit better" - Glenn Rubenstein on Columns, Wizard Magazine, 1993

Columns is a puzzle game that holds itself to the gravitas of an incredible epic that could only be found in early video games. It comes at you with this ancient Grecian theming, its songs are all named after the fates, its instruction manual presents it as an ancient game that civilizations past played for endless time, now transported for you to play and join in on HISTORY. And it's... a match three puzzler where you get stacks of three colored gems and can only change their order, not their orientation. In some ways, it's far more derivative and basic than titles that came before like Dr. Mario, and similar matching games to follow like Puyo Puyo or Wario's Woods, where your maneuverability and flexibility in dropping things down greatly enhances the game. Columns, by contrast, is incredibly basic in a way that even Tetris isn't, as the need to maneuver shapes in different ways is always overshadowed by simply looking to get three or more of a color paired.

... But that makes it easy to just keep going. Columns is a rather difficult game to lose, even as it speeds up, as just looking for some kind of diagonal match usually will lead to a big chain that lowers the stack even further. Even more purely than Tetris titles released in the same era, I think that Columns is very effective at breaking into a zen state, where time ceases to exist and you simply match the colors. And sometimes the stack will raise high - Columns accelerates in speed REALLY quickly so it's very easy to misplace - but it feels like less of a death sentence here as one good match causes a bunch of other good matches and brings it down with far less effort and stress than its contemporaries. Columns is a simple game that combines its theming and self-importance with the greatest of simplicity and accessibility and makes a shallow, but transfixing experience. You will either play it for ten minutes and be done with it forever or play it for a very long run and remember very little, but ultimately be content the whole time. I was the latter, and it felt very nice to do the minimum amount of thinking required to feel smart for a while.