Five of the Best is a weekly series about the bits of games we overlook. Things like crowds, potions, mountains, hands. Things we barely notice while we're playing but can recall many years later because, it turns out, they're fundamental to our memory of the game. Well, now is the time to celebrate them!

Today we're celebrating...

Blocks! Or do I mean cubes? Don't! We had a whole argument about this. Cubes are a kind of block, as far as I'm concerned, and so are other shapes like the lower-case L Tetris block. If we confined ourselves only to cubes, we'd have to talk about the Companion Cube from Portal, again, and then I'd be forced to counterbalance it with Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube just to be mean. But no, I'd never be so cheeky as to put a red herring in the list...

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For two games that are pretty much nothing alike, it's suprisingly easy to find yourself pondering the differences, large and small, between Tetris and Lumines. Yes, one is a marathon while the other is a sprint. And yes, one is about things that collapse while the other is about things that, often maddeningly, remain fixed in place. Playing Lumines Remastered over the weekend, though, sat cross-legged on the bed as though it was 2005 all over again, I was struck by a new point of difference - or rather an old point of difference that I had simply never really noticed before. Something about the texture of your mistakes, I think. Oh yes, it's this: your mistakes feel very different in Tetris and Lumines.

A mistake in Tetris is a terrible thing indeed. This is because of the sprint-like nature, I guess, the fact that Tetris is really the survival horror of the puzzle world. Mistakes stick around in Tetris for a very long time: those gaps remain in the bedrock beneath you, a bit like a group of old friends who are always ready to remind you of a terrible faux pas you made when you were 12 (just me?). The mixture of sprint and fixed in place means that Tetris doesn't forget anything. And it in turns means so much of the game is spent trying to undo earlier mistakes in a bit of a sweaty panic. And of course, because you're in a sweaty panic you make more mistakes. Tetris thrives on mistakes.

So does Lumines, I think, but in Lumines your mistakes are often on your side. Lumines isn't about building a wall to unbuild a wall, it's about growing territory of a certain colour. You rotate the coloured sections of the blocks that fall so that the two colours for each stage will match up harmoniously before the timeline sweeps through. This is why some people get a bit bored with Lumines. They think you can beat the game indefinitely by dividing the screen up into sections and storing block types in specific silos, and inching your way to victory. I have never played golf, but I wonder if these Lumines min-maxers also turn up at Pebble Beach in early Spring or whenever it is people play golf and ask Ed "Porky" Oliver - I Googled him - if he'd considered just faxing the ball over to the hole.

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Is there anything more wonderful in gaming than those rare moments where hardware and software come together in perfect unison? Call it synergy, if you must, but really it's some fantastical alchemy at work where both parts help elevate each other, until you've got something truly special. Back in 2004, Q Entertainment and producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Lumines offered up one of those moments, arriving in tandem with the PSP and becoming an unexpected highlight of the handheld's launch line-up.

Perhaps it shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. The PSP was billed as nothing less than Sony's attempt to do for portable gaming what the Walkman had done for portable music players, though that message got lost in a muddy mob of ill-advised attempts to get big console gaming on the go. Mizuguchi got it, though, and set about creating something in tune with that ideal: a puzzle game for the MTV generation, complete with pulsating pop art visuals and its own impeccable sense of style.

Lumines was to be to the PSP what Tetris was to the Game Boy, or at least that's how the theory went. And at least that's how it played out in my house, where an import PSP left wanting for new games in the fallow first few months for the handheld became, quite simply, the Lumines machine. Other great games eventually came along to the PSP, of course, but an indelible connection had already been made; that glorious 16:9 TFT LCD screen was always meant to be paired with a decent set of headphones for a serious Lumines session.

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