Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix is an Xbox LIVE! Arcade download involving Street Fighter characters fighting each other in a puzzle solving battle of the minds.
The faster you make gem matches and the bigger those matches become, the faster you fill up your opponents board and they'll lose the battle.
When the game begins, you pick a character that represents you and fights against your opponent in the center of the screen. The characters you choose from are straight out of your typical street fighter game. You can choose from Ryu, Ken, Dan, Akuma, Sakura and many more, each represents you but does not give you any additional methods of attack or defense. The characters are there just for fun and don't really add anything to the game experience but may entertain people watching you play.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix has three different modes to play against your opponent in single player and multi-player. Each mode is a variant of the gem battle and the goal is to fill the opponents game board with gems. When your opponents board is full of gems you'll be declared the winner.
Mode X and Mode X'
Randomly, colored gems and colored bombs will drop from the top of the game board. Your goal is to match colored gems together while using like colored bombs to blow up gems of the same color. This is all accomplished in a Tetris like fashion by flipping gems and bombs horizontal or vertical for the best fit into your game board. Mode X and X' are the same type of puzzle play, but mode X' is the mode X "rebalanced" (X' levels the playing field and makes things more competitive, but I hardly noticed any difference).
When you combine four gems of like color together they will instantly morph into a larger gem of that color. While blowing up smaller gems will send gems onto your opponents board, bombing larger gems will send a significant amount of gems upon your unhappy opponent. Ultimately, you want to create large gem combo's in order to quickly put your opponent on the defensive.
Blowing up gems serves two purposes. The first purpose is to get rid of the gems on your board. The second reason is to add gems to your opponents side. Chaining bombs will also drop a lot of gems on your opponents side.
Mode Y
Mode Y puts a spin on the X and X' modes of puzzle play. Instead of combining gems to make bigger gems, you are trying to get three gems in a row. Once there are three gems in a row, they explode and cause gems to drop on your opponent. If you can get more than three gems in a row, you will drop more gems on your opponent. Again in this mode, chaining groups of three gems in a row will drop more gems on your opponent.
Mode Z
This is the most challenging mode of play because gems and bombs appear from the bottom of the screen in a pre-determined pattern while everything else remains stationary. You must rotate the gems and build bigger gems much like how one maneuvers the gems in Hexic. Rotating these gems together with like colors will build larger gems as they do in Mode X and X' while rotating bombs to like colored gems will destroy them. Blowing up gems, like all other modes, will force gems upon your opponents board and cause them much stress.
As you are dropping gems on your opponent in the puzzle battle, you'll notice your little street fighter character "fighting" your opponent's character in response to your gem explosions. The more gems you drop on your opponent the bigger moves your character does in the fight, simulating a Street Fighter type game, but honestly, I was paying more attention to the puzzles and less to the animations.
The graphics in the game are pretty good, being in high definition, unlike the original Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. However, you will notice the characters have not been redrawn into a new high definition counterpart but remain much like the former titles in this series. The backgrounds look nice, but the Street Fighter avatars are a little small, which makes it hard to see character details and the characters are a bit blurry, showing off their old-definition look and feel. The gems and gem explosions are on par with the crisp background graphics.
The sound is a squeaky high, slightly annoying Japanese "sound." It's hard to describe, I'm not sure there is any English happening in the dialog. The chatter is not too unlike some of the original female Street Fighter characters taken a few octaves higher, louder and more frequent.
Over all the game play is intense, whether you are playing online against other players or single player against the computer. Mode Z is the most challenging to play and I found Mode Y to be the most enjoyable. I thought Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix was fun and challenging enough for the greatest of puzzle players. I think it will be hard for casual gamers to pick this title on name alone because it doesn't sound like a casual title and for 800 Microsoft Points it may be a bit steep compared to other arcade titles of this genre, but the play value and replay value make it worth the cost.
You can checkout more casual game reviews at Casualgamerchick.com
