Gaming Target - Game Boy: Super Puzzle Fighter II

Written by Tim McGrew on October 14, 2002

First Impressions: One of the greatest puzzle games ever made makes its way to everyone's favorite handheld this winter.

Street Fighter is quite possibly the greatest fighting franchise in existence. Its primarily 2D format coupled with its incredible amount of depth and huge fan following guarantees that each version sells incredibly well, is played by many for extended periods of time, and is always good enough to be picked up again and again over the years. The depth is incredible for an arcade fighter and it is never fully realized unless one spends hours mastering each character. The games are superb on almost any platform.

About four years ago, Capcom released a rather niche spin off of its Street Fighter universe mixing cute child like versions of their popular characters with a puzzle engine that let them duke it out with exploding blocks and gems in a game called Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo that was released on the Playstation, Sega Saturn, PC, and an online version for the Japanese Sega Dreamcast. Speaking as an editor who owns nearly each and every version, Puzzle Fighter is a beautiful game and finally anyone will be able to take it with them wherever they go and challenge anyone they wish to a game of block smashing goodness on the Gameboy Advance.

Puzzle Fighter is a rather simple game resembling Tetris in that you are given a small portion of the screen to work with and different colored blocks will drop as each one is placed on the field. Match the colors up with each other in any pattern you wish and then drop an exploding block of that color down on top of them and the blocks will shatter, sending a varied number of timed solid blocks to your opponents half of the screen causing it to fill. Whoever fills the middle of their field first is the loser and whoever has fewer blocks at the end is the winner.

Although that sounds simple enough, there is a great deal of strategy involved with the game. For example, one little trick, referred to as a special move, combines four like blocks of the same color into a single large chunk of that color. Add more to this block with the same color, either vertically or horizontally keeping the edges completely flat, will make the block even bigger. The bigger the color chunk, the more blocks that will be sent to your opponent when you destroy it. Plus, if you time the placement of your explosive blocks correctly, you can chain the destruction together causing devastating damage to your opponent and quickly winning the round.

As mentioned before, as you destroy blocks, a series of them will be dropped on your opponents that have a timer on them that will unlock provided that your opponent survives the countdown. Once it counts down, the block changes color and your opponent can then use that to their advantage since the drop pattern is not randomized at all. Each character has a specific drop pattern based on how many blocks they destroy. For example, Ken drops a lot of red colored blocks onto his opponents if the player does a lot of single breaks and combos. As he increases the number of blocks he can drop, it will do more lines in his particular pattern so it would be safer for a player using Ken to do chains of combos rather than a number of smaller combos.

Players can also stop these blocks from falling onto their field by performing combos of their own either canceling a few blocks or even canceling it altogether and sending some back to their opponent instead. Also included is a silver gem that, if dropped on a certain color, will shatter that color in its entirety on the field leaving quite a bit more room for one to maneuver with. Although the gems deal much less damage than an honest combo to your opponent, it is a good way to clean out your field of a color that is impeding your progress.

As the players perform combos, the hand drawn characters in the middle of the screen will animate based on the number of blocks you drop on your opponent. A simple combo will result in a taunt while larger combos will cause them to do special moves on each other and larger combos will cause them to do super combos on each other. Having them drawn in such a child like fashion makes the animations look hilarious and just plain cute. There's nothing like baby Ryu stomping baby Ken with a super fireball from a 99 block combo causing the traditional orange and yellow glow from a finishing move ripped straight from the Street Fighter Alpha games.

The characters in the game are quite varied including those not only from Street Fighter, but from Darkstalkers as well and two hidden characters that can be unlocked after playing the challenge mode. Each character has their own pattern as well making your selection just as important as your play strategy in both versus mode and the standard arcade modes.