Capcom Puzzle World

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New collection brings the love with seven old-school classics

If you were much of a puzzle game fan in the '90s, you probably came across Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo at some point. A combination Street Fighter parody/Tetris clone, it had players arranging falling gems into giant, similarly colored groupings and then smashing them for points. The bigger the groupings you smashed, the more gems would rain into your opponent's side of the screen, forcing them to deal with your runoff as they tried to keep their side from filling up.

It's Puzzle Fighter that's the centerpiece of the collection, though (as well as the only part of it we've been able to get our hands on). Puzzle World not only features the original version of the game -which it calls "X" -but also "Y" and "Z" variations. All three feature big-headed characters from Street Fighter and other Capcom fighting games squaring off on the puzzle field. But while X has players making big gem-groups and then smashing them with a "bomb" piece, Y is much easier, as players only have to form lines of three or more same-colored gems to get rid of them. (Old-school gamers, think Columns.)

Mikel Reparaz
Mikel Reparaz
After graduating from college in 2000 with a BA in journalism, I worked for five years as a copy editor, page designer and videogame-review columnist at a couple of mid-sized newspapers you've never heard of. My column eventually got me a freelancing gig with GMR magazine, which folded a few months later. I was hired on full-time by GamesRadar in late 2005, and have since been paid actual money to write silly articles about lovable blobs.