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Feast your eyes on the definitive puzzle game for the DS.

With almost no fanfare whatsoever, Panel de Pon DS has arrived on US shores at last in the form of Planet Puzzle League. What’s that, you ask? You’re not familiar with the name Panel de Pon? Perhaps Tetris Attack for the SNES and Pokemon Puzzle League for the N64 ring a clearer bell. Regardless of whatever version you played or haven’t played, Planet Puzzle League is the definitive version of Panel de Pon thanks to the unique capabilities of the DS.

The premise of Planet Puzzle League is simple; you have a wall of blocks that continuously rises up from the bottom, bringing up a new row of blocks each time it rises. If the top of the wall touches the top of the playing field for too long, prohibiting any new rows from rising up, it’s game over. To prevent this you are able to swap blocks horizontally along their row and attempt to align three or more of the same type of block either vertically or horizontally. Doing so will cause the blocks to disappear and whatever blocks were on top to fall down and fill the gap.

The beauty of this system is that it takes a little bit of time for aligned blocks to disappear, during which the wall will stop rising, allowing you to set up elaborate chain combos. For example, let’s say that you aligned three red blocks horizontally and there are two blue blocks stacked vertically on top. Before the red blocks disappear, you see a lone blue block one row below the red blocks. Quickly you slide the lone blue block under where the two blue blocks will land once the red blocks disappear. This would be an x2 chain combo. It doesn’t end there, however; you can keep on chaining for as long as you can, with some of the most skilled players being able to get over x15 chain regularly and without breaking a sweat.