Grand Text Auto

My first PuzzleScript game is a concrete poem that, after a few levels, taunts you, the player, with a metapuzzle.

It’s “The Great Vowel Shift.”

Consider it not in French, but Italian.

There are obsession-inducing transmissions, audio transmissions.

The ending is ugly … overall and in one language, at least.

But the story is a poet’s story – it begins with O and ends with O.

“Description,” my 2014 New Year’s poem, was sent out as a text file at the end of 2013; it’s now online in a solvable and checkable form, in a new Web edition.

Puyo Puyo games are simple puzzle games that require the player to rotate falling pairs of objects to build combos of four or more of the same color.  If the objects aren’t matched, they stack up and if they reach the top, the game is over.  As the levels progress, players must rotate the pairs more quickly in order to survive, as the speed at which the pairs drop increases.

One commercially successful example of a Puyo Puyo game that I played as a child is Sega’s Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine.  The final level is depicted below, so you can get an idea of the gameplay.