My Super Puzzle Fighter Review

I dove in and bought Puzzle Fighter on XBL for 800 points. It's as good as it has ever been. Played it for about an hour online and had no hiccups or lag at all. It was just like the guy was right next to me. It has the same online setup as Street Fighter Hyper Fighting does, so you can create a room with up to 4 people and watch as your friends duke it out until your turn comes up.

After some firsthand experience with the new drop patterns...it feels much the same to me. I am not claiming to be some Puzzle Fighter god, however, so that is probably why. A few characters had a notable difference: I couldn't lay out break gems the same way as I always had. Chun Li definitely dropped a lot more gems than I ever remember her doing in previous versions. So the changes are definitely there, I'm just not good enough to notice the many nuances that the developers have implemented.

The two new (to some people) modes are not all that, though.

Y Mode

Y mode plays much like Columns did back in the day. The point here is to build stacks of 3 or more like colored gems. Unlike in the normal or Z modes (in a minute, I'm going alphabetically), once you have the requisite stacks they will break automatically. The problem here is that Puzzle Fighter's system was not built around gems breaking automatically. Many characters have drop patterns that will instantly result in many, many, many gems being shattered once the timer counts to zero. Meaning with little to no work on the opponent's end, the gems you drop will be sent right back to your side in short order. I managed to defeat a friend several times by simply waiting out the attacks he dropped on my side.

Unique to this mode is a type of "Super" meter. As you break gems the super meter fills up. Once it does you can press the Right Bumper (or Right Trigger, I'm playing on 360) to summon yourself a diamond. The diamond comes down a certain color, it will turn every gem of a certain color to the color of the diamond. So if you get a blue diamond, place it on a yellow, it will then turn every yellow on y our board into a blue gem. It's pretty cool and saved my ass more than once.

Z mode

This mode is reminiscent of Tetris Attack. Instead of gems falling like Chocolate Rain, they rise from the ground one row at a time. Your job is to rotate the gems two at a time in order to form the squares of power that you normally would with gems from above. Any attacks you send cause your opponent's screen to lift suddenly. It's a much slower paced game, but it works much better in this system than Y mode does. The goal in this mode is pretty much the same as X (default, normal) mode, it's just going about getting it done differently.

There are some things suspiciously missing. I seem to remember a challenge mode in the PSX version of this game that allowed you to unlock colors and things. The game features a remixed soundtrack that I'm not particularly fond of. When playing online you have to hold the left or right trigger in order to talk. I'm sure there's a reason behind this, but it was annoying to me. For 10 bucks there's plenty that you do get and online play is where it is at. This is one of the best puzzle games ever, so if you have a console that can play it (and it's been released on EVERYTHING, even gba), go grab it. Single or multi, this game is tons of fun.