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.
