Class of '09: Puzzle Showdown

Fast paced, high skill ceiling, very funny dialogue.

it isint really that good not much story and not rlly worth the money, get it on sale

There's a fine line between inspiration and plagiarism. It's clear that this game was made with a lot of love for its source material, it plays a lot better than most other Panel de Pon clones and fangames I've tried. I was even able to pull off several frame-perfect advanced techniques from the original games (though I've also noticed some odd quirks with midair chaining, so it's not perfectly 1:1). But being a wholesale copy, right down to the UI being ripped from PdP64, means that this game has nothing to offer that the original series didn't do better. The game's biggest shortcoming is its laughably weak CPU. Even on the hardest difficulty, it doesn't seem to know how to defend and will make no effort to clear garbage. Send 1-2 good chains early and you win. Super Famicom was harder than this, and that's saying something. Online multiplayer was advertised, and was really what I was looking forward to in this game. But turns out it's friends-only, no matchmaking, so I wasn't able to try playing against a human. But there are better ways to netplay PdP anyway. Also missing from the original games are puzzle mode, 4-player, 3D, speed/level settings in versus, ! blocks, and perhaps most critically, a sixth color on higher difficulties. Not that it is necessary for this game to feature everything the originals did, but because there is nothing *new* to offer I feel the need to point out just how much less content there is than the game it's ripping off. I suppose the only real thing that's supposed to set this game apart from its source material is the cutscenes, but compared to a full VN there's not enough of that to justify a $20 price tag. Subjectively, it wasn't even all that funny, or maybe I was just too annoyed to laugh after having to grind eight full playthroughs of Line Clear mode for just a few extra text boxes. Just play the original Panel de Pon instead. GameCube version is still peak.