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.
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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. 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.