At Home with John and Debbie

Many years ago, we had a party at our hovel in Birmingham, and Dan brought Super Puzzle Figher II Turbo for the Playstation. We had a go, and quickly decided that it was OK, but it lacked the purity and finesse of Bust a Move II, relying instead on the novelty presentation of pretending it was a fighting game.

Then we played it again, and again, and again, forgetting to do important party things such as paying any attention whatsoever to our guests, and came to realise that it is quite simply brilliant, and knocks Bust a Move into a cocked hat. It’s a contender for my favourite game ever. Actually, I can’t think what the other contenders might be.

For the uninitiated:

SPF2T is a 2D action puzzle game with similarities to Tetris, but presented as a two player game. Each player has a well into which pairs of square coloured gems fall. As the gems fall, you can rotate and move them. If your well fills with gems, you lose. Make a rectangle of gems of the same colour, and they will merge into a big gem. Occasionally, a circular “crash gem” will fall. Put a crash gem next to a gem of the same colour, and it will explode, along with any other adjoining gems of that colour. Blowing up gems causes you to “attack” your opponent — the bigger the gem, the bigger the attack. Create a “chain” in which blowing up one set of gems causes another crash gem to land where it can cause another explosion, and the attack becomes even bigger.

An attack causes “counter gems” to drop into your opponent’s well. Counter gems count down from 5 to 1 then become ordinary gems. An attack is the best way to fill your opponent’s well — but if you’re not careful those counter gems might become fuel for a counterattack.

Between the two wells, stand two cute cartoon versions of characters from Capcom’s 2D fighting games Street Fighter and Darkstalkers. They taunt each other and perform fighting moves on each other to accompany the puzzle attacks you make. However, their presence is purely cosmetic (but fun).

Yesterday, a version appeared on Xbox Live Arcade. Great news: it’s almost perfect.

Wisely, the developers have made changes with a light touch. The screens have been subtly rearranged to fit a wide screen, and most of the graphics (with the exception of the fighting sprites in the main game) have been re-drawn to take advantage of HD displays. Other than that, I wasn’t able to perceive any changes during the game - right down to the polished transitions between game setup screens, and the speed and smoothness with which you can skip through them to get right into the action.

There are four game modes: X, X’, Y and Z.

X is the original game, and it’s perfect.

X’ is a “rebalanced” version of the original game. I believe the intent is to provide a level playing field for competitive online play. I was unable to perceive a difference, but my understanding is this: the difference between characters has always been the pattern of gems they drop during an attack. Some patterns create easier counterattacks than others, and that provides the only imbalance between characters. Rather than change the patterns, I believe the developers have adjusted the strength of their attacks, so a character with a more complex drop pattern will now drop fewer blocks for a given attack. (Edit: details from the game designer responsible, right here: both the drop patterns and the strengths have been tuned)
I mostly played X’ last night, and enjoyed it immensely.

Y is a completely new game mode which dispenses with power gems, and instead sees you exploding gems by making horizontal, vertical or diagonal lines of three or more gems.

Z is a new game mode in which you begin with a half-full well, and rotate clusters of four gems to align sets of gems and power gems.

I didn’t give Y or Z enough time to evaluate them properly; I’m not sure I’ll ever get bored enough of the original mode to give them a fair chance, unless someone else starts enthusing about them.

I have a choice: I can play against the CPU, I can play against Debbie, or I can play against people online. It seems that the CPU is the only one I can reliably beat. Debbie is a puzzle fighting machine.

Online, you can either host a game, or enter a game hosted by someone else. Up to four people can join a game lobby, but only two play at once (while the other two can comment using voice chat), and I’m not entirely sure what the structure is there.

When playing a game hosted elsewhere, things often feel a little choppy — who would have thought that such an apparently simple game would suffer from lag — and I feel that being the host might put you at a significant advantage. One helpful tweak to the controls is that tapping “up” on the pad causes the gem to drop instantly, but nonetheless it’s easy to move the gem one too many or one to few spaces left or right. In this respect, it’s more fun to play a friend who’s in the room with you.

All in all though — absolutely fantastic. I am delighted.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 10:51 and is filed under Video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.