Game Boy Advance: Super Puzzle Fighter II

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The original Game Boy found its way under my Christmas tree in 1989. And with it came what would be known as perhaps the greatest puzzle game of all time: Tetris. There's certainly no arguing with how great Tetris really is. And in all honesty, there's been a lot of thoughtful and insightful analysis written on the game. But the reason I bring all this up is to make it known that I in no way knock Tetris nor its importance to Nintendo, the Game Boy and the rise of so-called Casual Gaming. There's no denying that Tetris was meant for the pea-green-gray brick. And up until last year Tetris would have been my favorite puzzle game of all time, because that's when I discovered Super Puzzle Fighter II.

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Super Puzzle Fighter II is the sort of game that is made for fans; in this case fans of Capcom. There's lots of in-jokes and references. And let it be no secret that I am a fan of Capcom. Here they've taken the tried and true formula of dropping multi-colored shapes from the ceiling and having the player organize them until things get too chaotic, and somehow managed to make it entirely fresh. How the did this was by mixing the puzzle genre with the Player-vs.-Player intensity of their 2D Fighting games. As ridiculous as that may sound, it actually works amazingly well.

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What immediately draws in ~~geeks~~ fans like myself is the art style. Whereas most puzzle games are very simple -- and generally speaking, that's often the point of many puzzlers -- Super Puzzle Fighter II has amazingly rendered 2D sprites. Characters from both the Street Fighter and Darkstalkers series are reimagined in a cutesy super-deformed style. The two fighters occupy the middle of the screen and slug it out Capcom Vs. style in a representation of the puzzle-solving skills of their respective player.

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Luckily for puzzle fans the actual puzzling element of the game is just as great as the art. The game seems simple enough: gems fall of different colors; you put like-colors together until a glowing gem of that color appears. By pressing say a red glowing gem to a bunch of red gems you've piled up, you cause a bunch of crap to fall on your opponent. However, the real strategy comes in choosing which colors you'll try to build up, and how you'll arrange them -- the bigger the squares or rectangles you create, the more crap that you'll send over to the enemy. Meanwhile, in true Street Fighter fashion, it's just important to keep an eye on the other guy and think defensively. Indeed Puzzle Fighter II is one of the most addictive puzzlers I've ever played. It's easy enough for a beginner to enjoy, but then requires an incredible amount of strategy to fully exceed at.

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I also wanted to point out a very unique aspect to this game. Capcom came up with an incredibly original (and perhaps strange) way for two players to enjoy the game using only one cart. The idea was that in Vs. Mode two players would hover of the same GBA unit and each use half of the buttons. So Player One would use left and right to control the gems and the L-Button to flip them. Meanwhile Player Two would use the A and B to move their gems and R to flip theirs. I've never actually tried this single-GBA approach to playing, as it certainly sounds awkward in theory. However this means that a single Puzzle Fighter II cart can be inserted into the Gamecube Game Boy Player, and can be played totally co-op with each player using his own controller since the Game Boy Player recognizes any controllers plugged in at the same time. Certainly this wasn't Capcom's original intention, but it's definitely a bonus for current enthusiasts of the Game Boy Player.