While a title like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix might seem ridiculous, the actual art of puzzle fighting isn't all that different from other vs. modes in other puzzle games like Bejeweled or Tetris. Puzzle Fighter HD is actually a remake of the original Playstation classic. The game features updated visuals, sounds and brand new tweaked gameplay modes. The game contains the original gameplay mode (X mode) as well as tweaked X mode called X' which has rebalanced some of the original characters' patterns. The game also introduces two new modes , Y and Z. which are radical takes on the classic gameplay, but also feel familiar as call backs to other traditional puzzlers.
So how does one "puzzle fight"? In X and X' mode the game works like this. You are given a 2 gem piece of 1 of 4 colors (green, red, blue, and yellow) that drop down to the game board. This can be rotate horizontally or vertically. Match up same color gems of 4 or more to build bigger gems. You can clear sets of colors by using a breaker gem, and this will send a drop pattern of gems to your opponent. The number of gems sent to your opponent is determined by the type of clear you get. Clear a huge solid block of same color gems and watch the pieces fly. Even chaining gem clears together gives you a modifier to your attack. During play you have two little anime style SF2 characters fighting it out mid screen, but really it's just for show and bragging rights. Your characters are chosen from 8 available, as well as 3 unlockable.
When you attack your opponent, gems are 
dumped into their playing area from the top of the screen in the form of blocks with colored numbers on them. These numbers represent the number of gem drops you must perform before these blocks are converted into their respectful colored blocks. It's good to mention that if a numbered block is adjacent to a block that's being broken, it will also shatter regardless of its color. It's not the most efficient way to remove numbered blocks, but can sometimes save you in a pinch.
Y mode is a call back to the Sega classic columns. Gems are presented in the 2 piece sets and are rotated the same way, but automatically break when three or more gems of the same color line up in a row vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Another addition to Y mode is that breaking blocks fills a gauge above the characters' heads. When this gauge is filled, players can unleash a "special attack" which makes one of the next gems a colored diamond. What ever colored gem this diamond is placed on, all gems of that color are changed to the color of the diamond, which can unleash MASSIVE chains. The gameplay is a little slower in Y mode, but can get almost as intense as X mode. Setting up lengthy chains is key, as when your opponent goes to send you 50+ blocks, you want to not only clear your screen to make room, but have several chains to lighten the damage.
In Z mode fighters move a 2x2 cursor around the screen rotating the positions of the highlighted gems; more gems are added from below, moving all the current gems toward the top. It's sort of a reverse Tetris effect going on. Players can speed up the oncoming blocks by holding in the RB button instead of waiting for blocks to come up, but doing so can be treacherous. If any of your blocks touch the top of the screen, game over. To accommodate the new style of gameplay, attacks are handled slightly different. The numbered blocks are delivered underneath the opponent and the counter represents the number of gem breaks the player has to perform to turn them into solid blocks. Like Y mode, this style of gameplay is slower than X mode, but is slightly more furious than Y mode. I found myself building enormous blocks and frantically moving breaker blocks to save my skin time to time. It seems this mode is the opposite of the Y mode: chains are less common whereas building big blocks is almost unavoidable.The controls on Z mode sketchy at times. Once blocks are built into bigger blocks (the minimum is a 2x2) they can not be moved. While this adds more welcome challenges to the mode, blocks that you attempt to rotate around the corners of the bigger blocks isn't very intuitive. They stop rotating, and instead swap 1 of the 3 blocks depending both on the location of the unmovable block, and whether you're attempting a clock-wise, or counter clock-wise rotation. It still remains a bit confusing which just adds, possibly unnecessarily, to the frantic pace.
While the single player experience is good enough, the multi-player is where it's at. Unlike the original, this version seems to lack a "Master Mode", which was near impossible to defeat, but gave the title a more lasting effect. The focus was definitely the online play in this version which master mode would surely have taken away from. At the same time the lasting effect of the game is preserved in online play. Hardcore players will have to find one another in ranked matches for some real challenges. I did experience some drops and connection issues when there was more than 2 people in a match. You can have up to 4 players in a match for an arcade style quarter battle.
Super Puzzle Fighter II: HD Remix really DOES feel like a fighting game. You can be at the brink of defeat and suddenly unleash a 3 or 4 chain combo on your opponent that defeats them in one shot.
Overall if there was a downside to the game, it's the character art. While the game and art looks gorgeous in menus, in the actual game the character art looks upscaled and blurry, in fact, it looks like it was ripped directly from the PS1 disk. While the original animations are great, when everything else is in HD, it just makes it look lazy. Capcom does have a history of ripping animations directly out of games and reusing them (Marvel vs. Capcom 2) even if they look off-key. While this is disappointing its certainly not that big of a deal as there is very little time during the fighting to look at your character.
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