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| Source // Game Oldies |
It's easy to lose track of which versions of Street Fighter II you've played when there are at least eight of them out there, most with wacky titles that make little to no sense. Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting, anyone? The series' title structure, or lack thereof, is a joke that I didn't think Capcom would take too well until researching Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo.
There is no Puzzle Fighter. There is no Super Puzzle Fighter II. There is just one game and its title serves as a joke, poking fun at the absurdly named Street Fighter series that it dabbles with.
Here, 'fights' are less about your braun and more about your brain, as you carefully place and destroy blocks and gems in order to clog up your opponents' playing field before they clog up yours.
It's so simple that you don't even need to learn how to quarter circle, so I've no excuses.
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| Source // Eurogamer |
Frustration
I first came across Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo as a PS3 demo via its HD Remix - yet more words to add to an already lengthy title. At the time, I saw it as little more than a small game to pass five minutes waiting for something more important to happen.
"Right, so, you drop gems into place, then blow them up with another kind of gem, and that sends blocks over to the opponent's screen, and the first to have no room left loses. Gotcha."
That was it. Puzzle Fighter was a novelty. There wasn't even a game here. Why did I bother downloading it? What's the point in playing this?
Fun Times
Fast forward another decade and I'm playing the full Puzzle Fighter, and while I still don't see the lasting appeal, I do at least see what's going on, and it's more than 'dropping gems onto other gems'.
The key concept revolves around countering, and chucking a load of useless crap onto your opponent. You can smash any number of the same colour blocks if you have a detonator of the same colour - I really should look up the correct terms for these game elements, by the way. Getting rid of, say, three of your blocks sounds good, but it'll cause so few problems for your opponent that you might as well not bother.
What you should do instead is group like colours together into larger power gems, for when you manage to get rid of these bad boys, entire waves of gems bury your opponents' progress. That sounds more useful, doesn't it? Watching your opponent struggle with dead gems for a few moments is great.
And then they counter, and fill up half of your screen, sending you into a panic.
You see, each block you manage to send over to your opponent will eventually turn into a useful block, and those useful blocks are likely to have landed in such a place as to create a large power gem or at least a scary grouping of gems that can be destroyed in an instant to send a load of useless blocks back over to your side of the screen.
It's then a game of trying to beat your opponent quickly, so they can't counter you, but also efficiently - destroying colours in a chain reaction, for example. But you have to think about your defence, too.
Your game will be over if it is impossible to drop two gems into place at the top of the screen, so keeping a channel open to work with is a must, but you still need to have access to your hopefully well-built blocks of colour, because they're useless until your destroy them.
Further Frustrations
I mostly played the HD Remix which changes a fair few things, as well as adding new ways to play and mix up the game. Going through as one character was easy. I might have lost three lives over the course of play, but each life was to a different opponent and each opponent was subsequently defeated at the next attempt. It was challenging, I suppose, but it felt a lot like luck. I was playing on Normal difficulty, with two harder modes and an easier mode my other options, but I breezed through it.
Emulating the arcade original, though, I had a much harder time. Be it the controls or the difficulty - again set on normal - it was only the second fight of eight where I encountered problems. Maybe I'm just having an off day, or pink isn't my colour, but it is noticeably different to control.
Final Word
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is easy to pick up and it can sucker you into feeling like there's nothing to learn, but there certainly is if you want to be competitive. You don't pay attention to your caricatured fighter, but they are animated to have a fight whose moves depend on the strength of your 'attack', and with the back and forth nature of sending useless-but-actually-potentially-deadly-if-used-against-me blocks over to your opponent, you could be in for a tense time.
Panic can quickly set in when row upon row of blocks fill your screen, but it's not over immediately and the calm and quick thinkers out there will likely be able to turn things around. In multiplayer, this must be pretty fun indeed.
Is it as fun as a traditional fighter? Maybe. Among certain groups of players, perhaps. It's definitely a different feel, despite using characters and even menu presentation from the fighting game genre.
The takeaway from playing it is probably to not judge a game by its screenshots. We keep falling into that trap. Ugly games can be fun too. This isn't ugly, it just doesn't look like something I would purchase.
Until, you know... I did.
Fun Facts
Super Puzzle Fighter III Arcade Edition Ultra 2 releases next year.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, developed by Capcom, first released in 1996.
Versions played: Arcade, 1996, via emulation.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, PlayStation 3, 2007.