Gaming Memories - Bubble Bobble

Gonna try something a little different. I've been seeing the gap between reviews get longer, and it's possibly going to get worse as the year goes, so I was thinking of making mini-articles about gaming memories. Games I either once owned and remember, or owned and barely remember. Since my next review might take a few more weeks to be finished, I figured this was a nice tradeoff. These won't be proper reviews, and will be more personal in nature. I'll start with...

Bubble Bobble

NES

Release date: November 1988

My proper introduction to gaming was a Nintendo Entertainment System I got off of a garage sale. The console and something like 14 games, for a measly 10 dollars (this was, I believe, in the late 1990s). Insane deal. I never ran that fast back home to get the money and buy it. On the plus side, this meant that I already had a bunch of games to choose from! On the other hand, this also meant I did not choose the games I started out with.

Bubble Bobble was among those starting games. More famous titles like Super Mario Bros. attracted my eye more, but I remember trying this one out every so often. Fun fact, the cartridge had a big ol' hole at the back. It affected only the back cover of the NES cartridge, so nothing else was affected; game still worked perfectly. Since I was a little kid and couldn't really work around screwdrivers and such, and did not know it was possible to replace pieces of a cartridge (as some helpful YouTube channels nowadays show), the cartridge remained with its hole all the way up to when I sold it away.

The game itself feels very much like an arcade title, though it has an end. 100 levels, all with enemies and different variations of screens, usually made up of mosaics (notably, some stages happen on mosaics representing enemies from the game). There's a handful of mechanics involving power-ups, collectible items with scores attached to them, and even some way to skip stages for the lucky few who can figure it out. On cheat code websites, every stage had its own code so you could resume playing wherever you were at. It goes all the way to a boss at the very end, which I don't recall ever beating on my own. This will be a recurring theme for these articles: Games that I failed to beat.

Overall, I do have pretty good memories of this one. I thought the little bubble dragons and the enemies were cute. I distinctly remember struggling in some stages, where the enemies were just too damn many, and other stages where the "mosaics", as I described them, basically blocked players and enemies alike and made it impossible to finish some levels, timer notwithstanding. I never legitimately got to the boss, either. I imagine it would take some pretty great skill to actually get through the 100 stages.

Anyhow, that's about it for this one. Tune in next time for another one!

Beyond Good and Evil (Part 2)

Resuming from Part 1, which you can read here.

Slaughterhouse

Today, 2 people protesting with signs. Tomorrow, 4.
The next day, 8? Give it two weeks, and the Alphas are toast!

Good thing we even have that hovercraft, since Hillys
is mostly water all over the place.

Jade’s photojournalism is working. People are rising up. It’s getting clearer that the Alpha Sections are in cahoots with the DomZ. But it’s not enough. The IRIS Network gives Jade her next mission: The victims taken to the Nutripils Factory get shipped into the abandoned slaughterhouse. Once more, she’ll have to sneak in there and take pictures proving the “guards” claiming to fight the aliens are actually working for them. The place is closed off, but there’s a secret hatch the hovercraft can sneak into from within the third circuit of the underground racing league.

The hovercraft will need the ability to jump in order to enter the hatch, so it’s off to Mammago’s again for a jump kit. 15 pearls, pay up. Of the 88 Pearls in the game, you spend 71 at the Garage, all mandatory upgrades for plot progression. As a result, you’re better off not leaving any Pearls behind, just in case you need them later.

Racing to save the world - why not?

Then, Jade and Double H join the race and find the secret passage. Props to this game, it tries to feature all of its major gameplay elements somewhat evenly; be it combat, the occasional puzzle or piloting the hovercraft, though stealth takes over at some point. Really, if it weren’t that the camera often goes haywire when you turn around too roughly with the hovercraft, it would be great. (The camera is a regular issue in the game, because you don't have control; it automatically positions itself where it deems necessary, and it often clashes with what you’re trying to do. Not a great system, but it was a frequent issue in games at the time.)