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Description
Kaku's Rambles 195 - Strange Ramble Fills Time Terribly

You know, last week I talked about less arcadey puzzlers, and suddenly this week, I feel up for a fight. A knock-down drag-em-out fisticuff fight... fought entirely by dropping four different coloured blocks in a pattern, and then breaking them strategically to cause massive painful combos to dump eight gallons of garbage blocks on and fill up my opponent's screen. What am I talking about, you may ask? Well I'm talking about one of those games that I have played a bunch of, Super Puzzle Fighter Two TURBO. Yes, it's the first game in the franchise. Don't worry about it.

Okay, you're worrying about it. I can tell. Well, the name is a joke, you see. Two years prior, Super Street Fighter Two Turbo had been released and this cheeky little game wanted to make fun of how absurd that Capcom had become in naming their fighting games at that point. I guess. I'm not really sure, but I do know that it was not what I was expecting when I picked it up. See, you have a total of 11 playable "fighters," each with their own unique "attack patterns" ranging from Ryu, Ken, Dan, Akuma, Chun-Li and Sakura from Street Fighter, Morrigan, Donovan, Felicia and Hsein-Ko from Darkstalkers, Devilot from... some game that no one has ever heard of or played I'm sure called Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness. Now, of course, the screen is mostly taken up by the usual suspect, a big rectangular box of space to be filled with your various boxes of four colours, there's not that much room for these various characters. So, they are instead compacted down into chibi shape and react accordingly to how well or badly you're doing. As an example, Felicia getting more and more tired when you're doing well to actually falling asleep after winning, to her getting teary eyed and scared the worse you're doing, up to flopping forward on her face and being knocked out.

Regardless, though, the game isn't just Chibis and a basic puzzler, though let's focus on that puzzle aspect. So it's not tetris style block clearing. In fact, you will find your screen filling up with blocks and getting the same coloured gems next to each other causes them to merge into bigger gems. Eventually, you'll get an orb with a circle around it of one colour, or a flashing gem, which will then "break" all of that colour which are touching it, or in the gems case, remove every square that matches that colour from your board. Of course, you then pile garbage blocks onto your opponent's side, which require either to wait out a number of turns before they turn into whatever coloured block the number is, or can be destroyed by blowing up a regular block nearby it.

Now, the real meat and potatoes here, however, is the tone. We're not some super serious fighting game tournament here, no sir, it's just 11 different characters trying to beat each other by well-timed blocks and it uses a mix of cute and surrealness to make the player laugh and feel at home even though the battles can swing WILDLY in both directions. Yes, Felicia is a kitten who absolutely falls asleep, attacks a butterfly in her victory pose and mentions her litterbox when you win with her. There are two secret characters you can play as, Anita and Lei-Lei, which if you know the two Darkstalkers characters, you might recognize those names. But basically, Anita is the little girl that follows Donovan around, and Lei-Lei is the little flap of paper on Hsien-Ko's head. Hsien-Ko's opening has her teleport run into view on her side, but when playing as Lei-Lei, she just KEEPS GOING and leaves her little sister to fend for herself. I don't quite remember what happens with Anita, but I'm sure it's adorable. Oh, and there's an intermission section where they have the various characters do gags and goof on each other, like Akuma surrounded by cartoony devils and getting a bit underwhelmed by them, or Morrigan flipping between being dressed as normal, then backflipping into a human appearance, then turning into a then to Chun-Li and doing her battle pose with a "Gomen ni~", then Sakura and doing her battle pose and laughing, and finally flipping into a Dan outfit, and doing his trademark thumbs up just as Dan rolls up and does it with her.

Now, for the bad news. Yes, the game did get an HD Remix made sometime during the PS3 era, but you don't want that game. You want to seek out the original. While the PS3 game does exist and you can play it online, it also cut a hell of a lot of content from the game for single player fun. So, your options are surprisingly the Playstation 1 Original game or the GBA version. Now, I don't actually have a copy of this game officially, because of course not, but I do have both ROMs and have played both. The GBA version is rougher and of course suffers from screen crunch like something fierce, but the PSX version is perfect.

So, what makes these versions better? Well, for one, you get to unlock all the things. There's a Puzzle mode, here's that word again, where you get alternate character colours, victory icons, the codes to play as (most of) the secret characters, oh, and of course the ability to watch the weird cutscenes at will instead of randomly seeing them in the ending theme. There's also some music to unlock too, I think, but again, it's the main eight, Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Sakura, Morrigan, Felicia, Hsien-Ko and Donovan, with six things unlocked by playing each of them. Of course, they are balls hard and really tough to do so, but I have done it on both versions.

Also, uh, yeah, the game is kind of hard. Like ridiculously hard, in fact, mainly because the AI is kind of broken but also cheating heavily? See, while you're using your puny earthling brain to match colours close to each other to allow for some stellar and killer combos, the AI is just rapidly spamming up on the D-Pad and pushing things to either side to utterly stack everything up and praying. There's no artifical intelligence here, it's just straight up spam until you win or lose. Also, no you can't beat it at its own game, they can spam faster than you, being a robot. However, I don't feel like it matters much. It's still fun, at least to me.

Next week, hopefully, I'll be back to normal stuff and feel more normal. You do not know how hard it has been to try and get these out lately.

Description
Kaku's Rambles 195 - Strange Ramble Fills Time Terribly

You know, last week I talked about less arcadey puzzlers, and suddenly this week, I feel up for a fight. A knock-down drag-em-out fisticuff fight... fought entirely by dropping four different coloured blocks in a pattern, and then breaking them strategically to cause massive painful combos to dump eight gallons of garbage blocks on and fill up my opponent's screen. What am I talking about, you may ask? Well I'm talking about one of those games that I have played a bunch of, Super Puzzle Fighter Two TURBO. Yes, it's the first game in the franchise. Don't worry about it.

Okay, you're worrying about it. I can tell. Well, the name is a joke, you see. Two years prior, Super Street Fighter Two Turbo had been released and this cheeky little game wanted to make fun of how absurd that Capcom had become in naming their fighting games at that point. I guess. I'm not really sure, but I do know that it was not what I was expecting when I picked it up. See, you have a total of 11 playable "fighters," each with their own unique "attack patterns" ranging from Ryu, Ken, Dan, Akuma, Chun-Li and Sakura from Street Fighter, Morrigan, Donovan, Felicia and Hsein-Ko from Darkstalkers, Devilot from... some game that no one has ever heard of or played I'm sure called Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness. Now, of course, the screen is mostly taken up by the usual suspect, a big rectangular box of space to be filled with your various boxes of four colours, there's not that much room for these various characters. So, they are instead compacted down into chibi shape and react accordingly to how well or badly you're doing. As an example, Felicia getting more and more tired when you're doing well to actually falling asleep after winning, to her getting teary eyed and scared the worse you're doing, up to flopping forward on her face and being knocked out.

Regardless, though, the game isn't just Chibis and a basic puzzler, though let's focus on that puzzle aspect. So it's not tetris style block clearing. In fact, you will find your screen filling up with blocks and getting the same coloured gems next to each other causes them to merge into bigger gems. Eventually, you'll get an orb with a circle around it of one colour, or a flashing gem, which will then "break" all of that colour which are touching it, or in the gems case, remove every square that matches that colour from your board. Of course, you then pile garbage blocks onto your opponent's side, which require either to wait out a number of turns before they turn into whatever coloured block the number is, or can be destroyed by blowing up a regular block nearby it.

Now, the real meat and potatoes here, however, is the tone. We're not some super serious fighting game tournament here, no sir, it's just 11 different characters trying to beat each other by well-timed blocks and it uses a mix of cute and surrealness to make the player laugh and feel at home even though the battles can swing WILDLY in both directions. Yes, Felicia is a kitten who absolutely falls asleep, attacks a butterfly in her victory pose and mentions her litterbox when you win with her. There are two secret characters you can play as, Anita and Lei-Lei, which if you know the two Darkstalkers characters, you might recognize those names. But basically, Anita is the little girl that follows Donovan around, and Lei-Lei is the little flap of paper on Hsien-Ko's head. Hsien-Ko's opening has her teleport run into view on her side, but when playing as Lei-Lei, she just KEEPS GOING and leaves her little sister to fend for herself. I don't quite remember what happens with Anita, but I'm sure it's adorable. Oh, and there's an intermission section where they have the various characters do gags and goof on each other, like Akuma surrounded by cartoony devils and getting a bit underwhelmed by them, or Morrigan flipping between being dressed as normal, then backflipping into a human appearance, then turning into a then to Chun-Li and doing her battle pose with a "Gomen ni~", then Sakura and doing her battle pose and laughing, and finally flipping into a Dan outfit, and doing his trademark thumbs up just as Dan rolls up and does it with her.

Now, for the bad news. Yes, the game did get an HD Remix made sometime during the PS3 era, but you don't want that game. You want to seek out the original. While the PS3 game does exist and you can play it online, it also cut a hell of a lot of content from the game for single player fun. So, your options are surprisingly the Playstation 1 Original game or the GBA version. Now, I don't actually have a copy of this game officially, because of course not, but I do have both ROMs and have played both. The GBA version is rougher and of course suffers from screen crunch like something fierce, but the PSX version is perfect.

So, what makes these versions better? Well, for one, you get to unlock all the things. There's a Puzzle mode, here's that word again, where you get alternate character colours, victory icons, the codes to play as (most of) the secret characters, oh, and of course the ability to watch the weird cutscenes at will instead of randomly seeing them in the ending theme. There's also some music to unlock too, I think, but again, it's the main eight, Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Sakura, Morrigan, Felicia, Hsien-Ko and Donovan, with six things unlocked by playing each of them. Of course, they are balls hard and really tough to do so, but I have done it on both versions.

Also, uh, yeah, the game is kind of hard. Like ridiculously hard, in fact, mainly because the AI is kind of broken but also cheating heavily? See, while you're using your puny earthling brain to match colours close to each other to allow for some stellar and killer combos, the AI is just rapidly spamming up on the D-Pad and pushing things to either side to utterly stack everything up and praying. There's no artifical intelligence here, it's just straight up spam until you win or lose. Also, no you can't beat it at its own game, they can spam faster than you, being a robot. However, I don't feel like it matters much. It's still fun, at least to me.

Next week, hopefully, I'll be back to normal stuff and feel more normal. You do not know how hard it has been to try and get these out lately.