Every time I fire up a Lumines game and am not instantly greeted by the mellow beats of Mondo Grosso's "Shinin" from the franchise's 2004 PSP debut, I can't help but feel a little disappointed.

Lumines was one of the best games on the original PlayStation Portable. It was sort of a rave version of Tetris, which was a very good thing. The successor to the PSP is now upon us, and so is a new Lumines, subtitled Electronic Symphony.

Years of playing games like the original Lumines, Harmonix's Frequency, or Squid in a Box's PC shooter Waves have left me with a voracious appetite for electronic music, which is why the 34 tracks included in Ubisoft's Lumines Electronic Symphony have me drooling.

We think Lumines is one of the best games for the PSP. But damn was it ever hard to experience everything the game had to offer. In the first game, players had to grind through the entire game to hear all the music or see all the trippy synchronized visuals. Lumines II improved on that with tiered difficulty settings…