![]() ![]() Then there are secret rooms, full of treasure and coded messages, and hidden bonuses which will appear if you have two equal digits in your score.ĭespite the fangs lurking beneath Bubble Bobble’s fluffy exterior, it remains the epitome of a feel-good game. There are dozens of other weapons and score-boosting items besides – offing a whole chain of enemies at once will sometimes cause a giant apple or jewel to plop down in the middle of the screen, for example. Pick up a red cross and you’ll be able to breathe fire. Collecting an umbrella will let you skip a few levels. Instead, he keeps piling in extra ideas and unpredictable secrets: it’s hard to think of another arcade game from the period with quite so many different items to collect.īursting bubbles with letters in them – which together spell out the word EXTEND – results in an extra life. There’s a sense of restless creativity to Bubble Bobble. Mitsuji could have simply fallen back on the then-rare co-op mode and bubble-blowing concept and let the rest of the game design itself. On one level you’d attempt to capture a small army of clockwork robots in another you’d encounter Drunks, little hooded figures which throw empty beer bottles, while still another introduced laser-firing Space Invaders – a nod to Taito’s own coin-op hit.īubble Bobble’s colour and variety placed it in a different league from most other games released in 1986. ![]() Visually, Bubble Bobble’s an evolution of Pac-Man, with its colourful characters straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon – like the ghosts in Namco’s coin-gobbling classic, the enemies in Bubble Bobble have their own individual behaviours, though advances in processing power meant that Mitsuji could make them look and act more radically different than Pac-Man’s boggle-eyed ghosts. Alternatively, you can use your bubbles as a temporary platform by holding down jump and bouncing on top of them – a technique that becomes vital to master on later screens, some of which seem expressly designed to leave you trapped. Bubbles will rise up out of reach if you’re too slow to burst them, leaving an enemy dangling in mid-air until they escape (which leaves them charging around the screen in a crimson rage). The addition of wobbly, floating bubbles adds an air of unpredictablility to the Space Panic formula. Bubble Bobble gives this idea a bouncy new twist this time, you blow bubbles, which encase enemies on contact, and then rush up and jump on them – thus bursting the bubbles and finishing off anything unlucky enough to be stuck inside. A single-screen platform game where dragons blow bubbles and hooded enemies respond by rolling giant cookies along the floor, Bubble Bobble is still one of the best two-player arcade games ever.īubble Bobble’s enemy-nobbling mechanic appears to have its roots in Universal’s seminal 1980 coin-op, Space Panic, where aliens are killed by first digging a hole, waiting for the enemies to fall in, and then bashing them while they’re trapped. No part of this site may be reproduced without permission.What’s the greatest co-op videogame of all time? Portal 2? Gauntlet? Left 4 Dead 2, maybe? For me, Bubble Bobblehas to rank somewhere near the top of the list. Registered trademarks and tradenames are property of their respective owners. Broadhurst fire Frances Castle fruit Gary Noden gems Ghosts Graftgold Iain Wallington James Brown James Stewart Jason McDonald Jeffrey Miranda jolly Jose Doran Julie Turner jumping Kevin Holloway Mark Fisher Mark Frazer Mathew Cooling Mike McGregor Mitchell Slater Nick McGee Paul Brierly platform game Probe Software Rainbow Islands rainbows Remake Retro Gaming Sega Sega Saturn Simon Clay Single-Player spiders Sprites Stephen Root Steve Turner Steve Wilkins Stuart McDonald Tom Geddes Tony Beckwith two player water It was also released for the PlayStation, PC MS-DOS and Windows, but I’m just covering the Sega Saturn version here because they’re mostly identical.Ĭontinue reading Bubble Bobble also featuring Rainbow Islands, Sega Saturn → 1996 2D graphics Acclaim Entertainment Alex Lawrence Andrew Braybrook Andrew Brock Boss Battles British Bubble Bobble bubbles cake candy CD-ROM Charles Jackson Charles Knight Clifford Ramsey Colin Seaman Colourful console conversion Craig Kerrison Cult Game cute Dan Leslie David J. ![]() Bubble Bobble also featuring Rainbow Islands was coded by British developer Probe Entertainment and published by Acclaim in 1996. ![]()
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