Last July, I
bought a PS2, having never owned a Sony console before. My first
thought, upon suddenly having the entire library of PlayStation and
PS2 games open before me, was that I could finally play Super Puzzle
Fighter II (or just Puzzle Fighter to its friends). I had played a
bad PC port of Puzzle Fighter, arguably the best puzzle game of all
time (or at least second to Tetris), all throughout high school, and
it is easily one of my ten favorite games of all time. However, when
I went to try to buy Puzzle Fighter for PlayStation, I was met with
laughs of disbelief. Copies of Puzzle Fighter, I soon discovered,
were rarer than hen’s teeth, and the few copies floating around eBay
and similar sites were asking in the neighborhood of $80 and up. I
may be a dedicated gamer, but I’m also a realist: Puzzle Fighter is
good, but it wasn’t good enough to make me cough up that kind of
cash for a copy of questionable quality, assuming it would even
arrive at all
Then, a couple
of months later, my prayers were answered. Capcom announced that
they would be porting Puzzle Fighter to the Game Boy Advance, home
of classic games past, present, and future, and all for the paltry
(in comparison, at least) sum of $35. I was overjoyed. I called the
game store obsessively until it finally came out, and I had my
Puzzle Fighter goodness again. However, once the euphoria died away,
I was left to wonder if it lived up to my expectations.
What, you may
be wondering, is the big deal about this game? Basically, Puzzle
Fighter is a fast-paced puzzle game featuring characters from the
Street Fighter and Darkstalkers series. Gems of four different
colors fall from the top of the screen to the bottom, two at a time,
and the players line them up so that similar colors are adjacent.
When a “crash gem” comes into contact with a regular gem of the same
color, all the gems that are touching the crash gem break in a chain
reaction. So you drop blocks, and then hit them with crash gems to
clear them away until you don’t have any room left for blocks to
fall. On the surface, the game is extremely simple.
The twist is
that each game, either single player or multiplayer, is set up as a
duel, so two players are trying to clear their boards
simultaneously. When you clear away blocks, a corresponding number
of blocks are dumped into the opponent’s play field, and they stay
as junk blocks for a certain number of turns before they turn back
into regular gems. Arranging gems into a rectangle or a square
creates a “power gem” which will dump significantly more junk blocks
onto the opponent’s field when cleared. Of course, every block that
you dump on your opponent becomes a gem that can subsequently be
cleared away and dumped on you, so games often become back-and-forth
matches until the very end. Even when your field is almost entirely
full, it’s entirely possible to come back and win with one
well-placed crash gem. As such, it’s the perfect multiplayer game,
since it is nearly impossible to completely dominate.
The Street
Fighter aspect comes in with the block exchanges between the
players. Each player chooses a certain character with a particular
drop pattern. For example, Ryu will drop a different color block in
each column, while Ken drops a full row of red, then blue, etc. Each
drop pattern, much like a character in a fighting game, has its own
advantages and disadvantages. For example, Ken has a fairly good
drop pattern because he doesn’t cause any power gems to form when
his junk blocks turn into gems. However, if he drops a lot of small
numbers of blocks instead of a few big blasts, then the opponent
will be left with a ton of red blocks that one red crash gem could
clear away with disastrous results for Ken’s player. What really
makes the game fun to watch, as well as play, is that the different
fighters stand in between the two play fields and attack each other
when each player clears away blocks, with more impressive attacks
resulting from bigger numbers of gems cleared away at once. These
attacks, it should be noted, have absolutely no effect on the game’s
outcome, but they do lend the game its own unique feel that really
has not been replicated elsewhere.
Of course, it’s
more or less a generally accepted fact that Puzzle Fighter is a
great game. After all, if it wasn’t such a good game, you wouldn’t
have to take out a loan in order to afford a copy of the PlayStation
version. The question to be answered here is how well Puzzle Fighter
makes the transition to the small screen. The answer to that is very
well… for the most part, that is.
As far as the
technical aspects of the game are concerned, Puzzle Fighter
transferred perfectly to the Game Boy Advance. Other than a couple
of differences in fonts here and there, the game looks exactly like
the big-screen counterparts that I remember. While the play fields
are obviously much smaller, and some detail can be a bit hard to see
in the heat of the moment, but that is just a matter of adjustment
more than anything else. The fighters scaled down nicely as well,
and all the original fighting animations (as well as the
entertaining intermission sequences) are recreated as well, though
there might be a few lost frames of animation here and there. While
the graphics are absolutely clear and crisp on the GBA SP, original
GBA users may have some difficulty, depending on the light
situation, differentiating between the different colors. I, in
particular, had trouble distinguishing the reds from the yellows and
the blues from the greens (and, no, I’m not colorblind).
Sound also
translated extremely well to the GBA. Each fighter has a decent
number of voice clips that sound exactly as they did in previous
versions. In other words, when Ryu shouts, “Hadoken!”, you know what
he’s saying there, and it sounds good. There are also some
background music selections that are decent enough. The volume for
the background music is set so low by default that it’s extremely
hard to hear over the voices and the tinkling of the gems, but that
is easy enough to fix in the options.
That’s the
good, of course. The bad comes in with the multiplayer capability,
arguably the most important aspect to Puzzle Fighter. Inexplicably,
the game requires that two players playing over a link cable must
each have a copy of the game in their GBA in order to play.
Personally, I thought that the GBA was supposed to eliminate this
necessity, but obviously Capcom wasn’t copied on that memo. I have
two GBAs now (as I imagine many people do following the release of
the Game Boy Advance SP), and I’d love to be able to play against
friends with my one copy of Puzzle Fighter, but that’s simply not
possible.
In order to
compensate for this, Capcom decided to add a “Vs. Mode” in addition
to the standard “Link Battle”. Vs. Mode allows two players to play
simultaneously on a single GBA. Player one takes the d-pad to move
gems left and right, taps L to rotate the gems, and holds L to drop
the gems. Player two has a similar setup on the right side of the
GBA, using A and B to move and R to rotate and drop. If it sounds
awkward, that’s because it is awkward. First of all, the amount of
time between the rotate and drop presses is very small, so you often
drop when you mean to rotate, which obviously does not help one’s
game, and the whole setup feels extremely awkward. Simply put, it’s
like trying to eat soup with a fork. Secondly, this scheme does not
seem to fit either the original GBA or the SP well. I can’t imagine
two players finding lighting sufficient for two people being able to
see the original GBA screen at the same time, and the amount of real
estate on the GBA SP is simply insufficient for a control scheme
such as this. I don’t know who thought this was a good idea to
include in the game, but Vs. Mode just doesn’t work. It’s doubly
disappointing because it’s the only way to play with two players
without two copies of the game.
There are a
number of single player modes to keep the player busy, of course.
There’s standard arcade mode, with four stages (Easy, Normal, Hard,
and the unlockable Master), and eight difficulty levels to choose
from, to keep even the biggest hotshot busy for a while. There is
also a Street Puzzle mode, which is essentially a challenge mode
where you participate in one game matches, with different goodies
unlocked for each win. You can unlock sound collections, special win
icons, hidden characters, the aforementioned Master arcade mode, and
other extras. Like any challenge mode, this is fun for a while, but
you’ll eventually unlock everything there is.
Technically,
Super Puzzle Fighter II is an excellent port of the PlayStation
classic. Judging on the single player mode alone, Puzzle Fighter
gets top marks. Unfortunately, the GBA version loses points due to
the woefully inadequate multiplayer mode, which severely limits the
game’s replay value. If you’re mainly going to play by yourself,
then Puzzle Fighter is well worth the $35 investment, especially if
you’re new to the game; Puzzle Fighter is one of those few games
that anyone must have played in order to truly call themselves a
hardcore gamer. However, if multiplayer is what you’re after, the
PlayStation version might actually end up being more affordable in a
few months than two copies of the GBA version.
