Columns (Game Gear)

Puzzle games and handheld game systems have gone hand in hand ever since Nintendo’s Game Boy hit the market with the insanely popular Tetris as its pack-in title. When Sega was looking to enter the handheld market themselves, they just so happened to have a tile-matching puzzle game franchise on hand for it. Columns began as a computer game created by an employee at Hewlett-Packard, but soon Sega bought the rights to the puzzle game concept and set to work creating an arcade version of it, which is odd since playing a puzzle game in the arcade feels like the least appealing choice of all the different ways to play a video game due to the inevitable time crunch as others wait for their turn. Once Sega started to focus more on home hardware instead of their arcade cabinets though it did make its way to consoles, and the Sega Game Gear quite wisely featured it as a launch title to try and tap the same vein Tetris had. While it wasn’t nearly as successful, Columns is still a name closely associated with the Sega brand, and it might be in no small part due to its presence as a Game Gear pack-in.

 

Columns’s concept is similar to many other block dropping titles, the player aiming to match a set of three or more similarly colored objects vertically, horizontally, or diagonally to make them disappear so that the play area isn’t filled up. In Columns’s case, the blocks being dropped are actually colored jewels with slightly different shapes, although the player does have the option to switch their visual appearance so that you can instead play with fruit, dice, card suits, or simple squares. The player also has the option to set how many variations of these objects there are, with easy mode only asking the player to manage four types, normal taking things up to five, and hard culminating in six different tile variations. The default jewels certainly feel like they were designed to be the most readable on the Game Gear’s screen though, an important feature since progress in Columns will upgrade you to higher speeds where identifying incoming pieces quickly is vital to avoiding the jewels piling up so high they reach the top of the play area and end your run.

The reason behind the game’s name though is that these jewels don’t just drop in one at a time. Instead, a small vertical stack of three jewels will drop into the play field all at once, the player able to guide its path as well as shift the order the three jewels are in to better suit the jewels that have already landed in the play area. The small jewel columns can only have their pieces essentially shift up or down with the bottom or top piece moving to the other side depending on how you’re shifting it, so not every arrangement of gems is possible in a stack. Stacks can contain duplicate colors though, some even coming as a set of three so you already have a match made as soon as it locks into place in the play area. However, for the most part you’ll want to shift these jewels around to line up well with the jewels already in play in order to clear the field as best you can. It is inevitable that you will lose in the game’s Original mode, the goal instead to play as long as you can while angling for a high score. While a straightforward match will earn you points, doing matches that contain more than three gems, pulling off multiple matches at once, or clearing away gems that cause the gems on top of them to drop to make new matches will prove to be more rewarding when it comes to hitting a higher score.

 

The column arrangement of incoming gems actually makes setting up matches harder than it first appears. If you are only interested in vertical or horizontal matches, you’ll inevitably find that the field will be filled with colored gems that tag along with the ones you’ve lined up for a good match and stick around after. You can survive for a bit with this straightforward approach, but you’ll soon find yourself struggling to keep up as the piles of unused gems start nearing the top of the screen. Diagonal matches are actually the key to success in the long run, the player needing to make sure they’re setting these more flexible opportunities up while throwing in vertical and horizontal matches where they can be found. Diagonal matches are prime territory for creating match chains as gravity pulls the gems down to replace the ones that disappeared beneath them, and more importantly, it’s much easier to shift a set of three vertically attached gems around to connect diagonally since it doesn’t require a flat surface like a horizontal one requires for consistent set ups nor does it rely on a column not having any wrong colors to interfere with the vertical matching options.

 

Unfortunately, once you realize the utility of diagonal matches, playing in Original mode becomes much less challenging. If you were to stick to mostly horizontal and vertical you’d find things more difficult though, so essentially the knowledge and ability to set up diagonal matches determines if you’ll be able to stick it out for a while at the cost of making much of the play a bit too easy to enjoy. However, as you get deeper into a session and the speed increases, the game eventually hits speed level 9 which feels like the point the game just wants you to be done playing. The jump up from level 8 to level 9 is certainly the steepest increase in speed, and while you do have a few seconds to shift the order of gems in a column even if it is already making contact with the pile, level 9’s speed will soon lead to errors or not having the time needed to guide a piece properly. Essentially, if you’re good at Columns, you’ll only really feel the squeeze when you’ve hit the speed that’s a bit too rough.

There is hope for Columns on the Game Gear though, because Flash mode is a mode where fair difficulty is much easier to find. Flash mode involves one single gem being selected as the gem you need to clear, so the moment you can match that gem with a few others of its color, you’ve won a round of Flash. However, the player is able to set the difficulty of Flash mode, this determining how many rows of pieces are already in play when the game starts. The Flash piece is always at the bottom, so if you choose a larger opening pile, you’ll have to work a lot harder to get down to the piece you need to clear. Having only two rows is of course incredibly easy to work with, but the game lets you start with up to 9 rows already in the field, meaning that half of the play area is already filled with random colored gems. With the rows only being six pieces long as well, you’ll have to really consider what’s already in play when placing new columns to ensure you can actually break through the pile rather than accidentally building it up to the point it’s impossible to manage. Flash feels like the more entertaining mode because of its ability to better cater to the specific skill level of whoever is playing, but it is a shame the game immediately ends a round of Flash mode when the piece is cleared rather than introducing a new set of gems so you can keep playing for a high score. Instead, it’s all about clearing the flashing piece in the best time for that specific difficulty which doesn’t have the same longevity of an endless score challenge.

 

There is another mode to be had still in Game Gear’s Columns port, that being Versus. If you can find someone else with a Game Gear and Columns and one of you has a connecting cable, you can play a competitive mode of either Flash or Original mode where you are able to interfere with each other. If you can manage to match four or more gems or set up multiple matches at once or in a row, you can make a row of garbage blocks appear at the bottom of the opponent’s play field, pushing up their gem piles. The only way to clear this row is to perform similar matches to send them back to their creator, so jostling over the garbage block rows on top of creating new ones can make even the regular matching a bit more interesting than simply trying to earn a high score. Flash mode unfortunately has a built in timer in multiplayer so it isn’t just a straightforward race to grab the piece first without being eliminated, but both modes at least let you set different difficulties so players of different skill levels can have a few equalizers to make things a bit more even.

 

Also, while it’s not as pronounced as it is in other versions of the game, it should be noted that Columns has an interesting Phoenician theme to its presentation. In this case it mostly manifests as a small Phoenician city serving as the background for any area of the screen not devoted to important information like the score, your current level, or the next incoming piece. There is the cute touch of the different speed levels leading to a progression of time so you go from a clear day time sky to a dark one filled with stars gradually with each leap in speed. There are three themes that can play as you actually do the gem matching, and while the sound font of the Game Gear does mean they can be a bit too digital to be outright relaxing, they’re still a decent if not incredibly memorable set of background tracks to listen to while you play. All of them feel like a good fit for something that is nominally meant to be set in the past and they tend to lean towards thoughtful and relaxed tones, Theme C nearly sounding like a piano composition and Theme B almost feeling like it echoes as it plays a song that would fit for a contemplative exploration of an old ruin. Theme A sounds like it would play when things aren’t going well because of its hard opener, but it does soften some eventually. The three options all loop after only playing for about 90 seconds though so the long sessions where you’re doing well can make the appeal of these songs weaken, but they at least mostly seem built to fade into the background once you’ve truly engrossed yourself in the puzzle-solving focus of Columns.

THE VERDICT: The unique arrangement of the Columns pieces as they enter the play field does demand a close eye for quality matches over easy ones, but the overall challenge of the game seems to struggle to find its sweet spot no matter your skill level. People focused on simple matches will soon learn that they can’t get by with such methods, but players who know the value of diagonal lines and combos will find most options too easy save for the speed level meant to end the game. Original mode Columns thus can’t quite be as infinitely replayable as Tetris, but Flash mode makes up for it with the adjustable row amount making its change in focus a more interesting challenge. A solid Versus concept and serviceable background music help to round out enough decent content that Columns on Game Gear still has something to offer, but the basic play is mostly just decent until it hits whatever specific difficulty wall you’re destined to encounter.

 

And so, I give Columns for Game Gear…

An OKAY rating. If Flash mode was fleshed out a bit more it could actually make for a good game even if it wasn’t bundled with Original mode, but Original mode isn’t necessarily bad so much as missing the means to really hook a player long term. Turning on the Game Gear for a bit of Columns is a fine enough way to while away some time, and if you can integrate more advanced matching methods in your play style, it’s still satisfying to see the big chains or well planned matches go off since you invested the effort to make them happen. If you aren’t being careful with your gem drops though it will not bode well and many casual players may be turned off with how easy it is to accidentally fill the field with gems that will be difficult to match, but coming to understand the game gives it more legs. Admittedly some of that additional interest gained from better understanding Columns is squandered by the main mode not knowing how to push back against such knowledge, but Flash at least gives you an opportunity to test your skills and Versus is at least conceptually an interesting way to play even if the likelihood of two people with all the necessary hardware coming together now to play Columns is very low.

 

Most of Columns’s mediocrity comes from the very feature that makes it stand out from other tile-matching puzzle games. Dropping in three pieces at once in a vertical orientation isn’t as flexible as games with rotating pieces that come in different shapes and isn’t as friendly to casual players as even a two piece column would be. It’s nice to find a game that pushes you to get skilled in matches rather than letting you coast for too long, but the game needs to push back harder against that play style once it has been identified and integrated by the player. Columns for the Game Gear mostly just needs a few more difficulty rankings or minor adjustments to its mode concepts, a more gradual difficulty growth in Original and endless play in Flash both feeling like ways to ensure that Columns can better serve as someone’s go to puzzle game of choice rather than something to pick up for variety’s sake once they’ve played something like Tetris or Puyo Puyo to death.