Bubble Bobble!! (Bubble Bobble)

Member Name: Burning_Darkness

Product:	Bubble Bobble
Date:	17/08/09 (15 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Original concept, great simple gameplay, appealing visuals, fantastic music

Disadvantages: None

Made by the same team responsible for the Rainbow Island series, Bubble Bobble is a light-hearted, cartoony little game for one or two players in which you play as dragons who breathe not fire but bubbles. Contact with enemies is instantly deadly, but firing bubbles at your enemies imprisons them, sending them floating up slowly towards the ceiling and requiring you to jump at them to kill the baddies encased within, the level ending when all you enemies have been dispatched. Should you not manage to catch them however, they will drop from their bubbles in 'angry' mode, moving twice as fast as they did before.

The levels are simple on-screen affairs made up of lego-style platforms and block patterns, and should you disappear down a hole at the bottom of a level you will reappear at the top of the screen, pacman-style. You can also collect snake eggs, which then burst open and send a snake whizzing downwards across the level's various platforms by the path of least resistance, taking any enemies or other players with it as it goes. Your enemies are an interesting mix of pacman-style chomping robots, boulder-rolling ghosts and diagonally-moving jellyfish-like blobs, and should your timer run out you will also have to deal with a red blob creature who can move towards you in any direction he likes making him very, very hard to avoid.

Bubble Bobble has hundreds of levels, getting gradually more difficult as the game progresses, although there are umbrellas dotted throughout the levels which allow you to skip forward through a half dozen levels or so at a time. The levels are also dotted with special items such as fruit, ice-creams, diamonds, fast-food, cakes and so on, appearing both randomly and when you kill an enemy, and providing you with points that add up to give you extra lives. Its an incredibly simplistic and wholly addictive game that's suitable for all ages, and its pure, arcade-style gameplay means that it is still perfectly playable today. Perhaps its best feature however is the music: a simple, cartoony, 30-second long looped midi track that is in itself incredibly addictive and makes the game even harder to put down. A classic.

Summary: A timeless classic