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Life's a Beach...then she kills you..heh

I feel qualified enough to answer, so here goes!

First, addressing the character differences; whenever you break pieces on your side, you send pieces to the other person. The size of your attack determines how many pieces the other person gets, and the character you use determines what color the blocks are. The best character patterns make it hard for your opponent to deal with your attacks easily. In x' mode, most characters are pretty even, but I'd advise against using Ken or Donovan at first because they require a fair bit of skill to use well.

Now, for some strategies! yaaay strategies.

When starting off, your main attacks should be through building large blocks (which the game calls power gems). The easiest way to do this is by building in line with the other person's drops. For example, if you look at Chun Li's pattern, you'll notice that weak attacks - ones less than two lines tall - drop only green in the middle two columns. By putting all your green pieces in the middle two columns, when Chun Li hits you for just a few pieces, she'll be making your power gem larger. When it gets nice and tall, you can break it for a hefty attack. While Chun Li's is the most obvious, you can take advantage of nearly every character's pattern. Another example is Ryu - you'll see that the far left column of his pattern is all red. If you leave that column empty and put all your red in the column next to it, his attacks will fill up the slot with red and create a power gem for you.

While that's probably the simplest strategy, it isn't the one I use. Instead of going for huge power gems, I set up combos. This may be hard to visualize, but imagine you have a green power gem, and on top of this green power gem you have a blue breaker (what I call the circular pieces). If you put a green breaker on top of the blue breaker, you have a simple combo setup! When you put a blue piece next to the blue breaker and it is cleared, the green breaker will fall to the green power gem below, giving you a nifty combo bonus. The longer your combo, the bigger the bonus.

If any of this doesn't make sense, I'd be happy to play some player matches with you and talk you through schtuff (because talking is waay faster than typing this out). Enjoy!

Not quite sure i understand the whole color/column thing yet, but thanks. i can go from there. =)

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Life's a Beach...then she kills you..heh

if you pause during training mode(while fighting) theres a help option that will explain this.
there's also
http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Super_Puzzle_Fighter_II_Turbo
which gives you more advance stuff.
as for characters what you saw is attack patterns  which is what they will throw at you when they break blocks on their field, the bigger they break the more of their pattern will be sent to your side of the field.
X mode is the original game mode that the arcades use and X' is the new mode that had the characters patterns changed to allow more balance (except for dan).
the guy who designed the game for xbox 360 and ps3 wrote this article about it as well as others i think
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-puzzle-fighter.html

 galwww wrote:

if you pause during training mode(while fighting) theres a help option that will explain this.
there's also
http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Super_Puzzle_Fighter_II_Turbo
which gives you more advance stuff.
as for characters what you saw is attack patterns  which is what they will throw at you when they break blocks on their field, the bigger they break the more of their pattern will be sent to your side of the field.
X mode is the original game mode that the arcades use and X' is the new mode that had the characters patterns changed to allow more balance (except for dan).
the guy who designed the game for xbox 360 and ps3 wrote this article about it as well as others i think
http://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-puzzle-fighter.html

Thank you , thank you, thank you.....good to see there are some people who use these forums to actually HELP others and not just want to be some snarky, smarmy, pompous know-it-all you-know-what.
Very informative...i will look into that wiki stuff. Thanks.

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Life's a Beach...then she kills you..heh

not allot of snarky, smarmy, pompous know-it-all in this forum(not allot of  other people neither )
glad i could help and i hope to see you in a fight
.