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!