Okay I’m gonna have to confess that I’m Capcom’s little monkey when it comes to fighters. Over the years I’ve played a lot of what these guys had to offer, from the cheesy horror of Darkstalkers, the epileptic effect of Marvel vs Capcom, the cutesy violent Pocket Fighters, the teenage stereotypes of Rival Schools and of course my all time favourite series, Street Fighter!
But as well as I enjoy beating up chumps my gaming passion also lies in puzzle action. Odd combination eh? One minute I’m roaring away punching, kicking and tearing up the place, next minute I’m quietly rapt in a time bomb situation trying to solve tricky puzzles at my fastest. My gamer CV would describe my experience of many Japanese puzzle action titles such as Puyo Puyo, Magical Drop, Tetris Battle Gaiden, Tokimeki Memorial Pazurudrama, Bust a Move, Pokemon Puzzle League, etc, etc. I’m used to the taunting anime characters, hyper dynamic music, the pressure for fast pace and quick thinking. Believe it or not, the puzzle world can be an adrenaline rush and a dangerous brain melting activity.
So in one hand I have beat-em-ups, in the other I have puzzle action and when I put the two together I get, “Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo”. Favourite fighters and favourite game play put together making it my first arcade purchase off the Xbox live marketplace. Puzzle Fighter is still as great to play today as I had remembered it on the Playstation 1.
Now let me break down the rules of the game. You have four coloured gems and detonators, blue, yellow, red and green. Gems are your building blocks and detonators obviously blow them up. a pair of gems will drop down at a time and you can control the arrangement of your pieces, usually trying to match colour to colour to form bigger shapes. Once in a while you’ll get a detonator attached to a gem and if the detonator connects to a corresponding coloured gem, BOOM! That particular piece will blow up and your opponent receives unwanted extra blocks, these are known as your “counter gems”. The aim is to fill up the other side until they can’t make any more moves. The bigger the things you destroy the bigger the effect of your attack, more blocks blown = more untidy chaos for the opposite person. With every replay you’ll soon start to develop your own tactics and discover how to arrange your pieces so that you perform “chain combos” where you’ll be able to detonate your coloured blocks one after the other. Obviously the opponent isn’t going to just sit and take it so they’ll be throwing some back your way. When they do, you’ll find that the blocks come down with numbers on them. You can’t detonate them until they’ve counted down with every gem you place. When they reach to zero They’ll change back into normal gems. Hopefully they’ve not messed up your strategy too badly!
As for how well you perform, some people will naturally fall into the mojo and some take a little bit longer. There are separate different difficulty levels in single player for the newbie to train to pro. However it’s a shame there’s no handicapping system for versus modes where player skills may contrast.
Among the roster of fighters they each have their own counter gem arrangements. I’m actually disappointed in how they’ve modified this version to have the secret characters selectable by default. Where’s the sense of achievement gone to?! Also the cutting of opening and ending story lines have kinda left our cute cast of fighters somewhat character-less. Although they’ve left the comedy intermissions in during single player, those who aren’t familiar with Capcom’s fighting franchises may be a bit baffled by them.
There are new puzzle modes in the game which I don’t really play much of. Probably because I’m too attached to Puzzle Fighter’s traditional grounds. Y mode focuses on the style of connecting 3 colours in a line horizontally, vertically or diagonally. Z mode adopts gem rotation similar to the style of “Hexic”. Honestly? They’re not as exciting as the X or X’ modes. There’s supposedly a difference between the two X modes, one apparently balances the difficulty between two players but whatever it’s effect during the game, it’s hardly noticeable. Still it’s nice for gamers to get a choice out of 3 puzzle styles.
The great thing about the return of Puzzle Fighter is that past 1337 players can come together to battle out online. You can have up to 4 players in a player match, two will fight and the others are spectators. It works on a “winner stays on” basis and the defeated player rotates with another in the room. Unfortunately they didn’t tune up the chat over multiplayer gaming. You’ve got to hold onto the R trigger to speak, quite a bothersome function. They could have easily implemented the same as what Bomberman live arcade has got for multiple chat.
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