Review
When the bubble bursts
by Craig Grannell (October 19th, 2010 at 3:31 pm)
Game: Bubble Bobble Double. Publisher: Taito. Price: £2.99/€3,99/$4.99. Buy the game
The original Bubble Bobble is one of my all-time favourite arcade games. I realise Stu’s now about an inch away from deleting this entire review, replacing it with “Craig is a stupid head” and “Rainbow Islands FTW”, but I don’t care, because I think Bubble Bobble is great. The single-screen platforming action is fun, sometimes intense, varied, and great in co-op mode. (Of course, we’ll ignore Taito cleverly wrecking later levels by making them almost impossible.)
It's Bubble Bobble, Jim, but not as we know it.
So, fast-forward 25 years and Bubble Bobble finally arrives on iOS. Pix’N Love Rush and Qwak have both shown this type of game can work well, so all Taito needed to do was not screw up the original game in a rather bizarre way and weld a minigame-like ‘new’ mode to it that’s being marketed as the star of the show.
*downloads game*
*plays game*
Bugger.
If you’re old, you’ll be more interested in the ‘classic’ mode. When you fire it up, it’ll be all you can do to stop yourself hurling your device away from you in disgust. Presumably due to the awkwardness of the original arcade game’s resolution, Taito got stuck figuring out how to place the game on-screen. The end result: make it tiny, and surround it with a mock-up of a retro handheld as envisioned by a five-year-old armed with a copy of Photoshop.
To be fair to Taito, the game itself survives intact and is a decent port. Your wee dino bounds around the platforms, capturing foes in bubbles and bursting them, along with collecting power-ups. It’s all quite jolly, until you die for the third time in ten seconds at the hands of the cruddy controls. Oddly, the co-op mode has been kind of retained in that you can activate blue dino, who is then controlled by AI that can only be described as ‘random’. It’s as if Baron Von Blubba has given blue dino a lobotomy. As he clatters around each level, it’s all he can do to stop himself dribbling. And he nicks your credits.
In case you're wondering, the 'zoom' button makes the play area about five percent larger.
So, on to the new mode. Oddly, Taito went for castle defence. Green dino sits somewhere on the screen and foes from the original game rush in. Tap once to bubble them and again to blow them up, trying to catch more foes in chain reactions akin to those in Sneezies or Splode. This game is superior to those efforts, though, since it’s far less random. There is some strategy involved once you learn each level’s monster patterns, and the game can become quite exciting at times. There are also bosses to battle by flicking bubbled enemies at, and some extra modes for added longevity.
When I first fired up this game, I decided that I hated it. On extended play, I’ve instead come to the conclusion that it’s something of a missed opportunity. The new mode is actually quite fun, despite not bearing much relation to the original game. And the original game is in there somewhere, but it’s buried underneath poor execution and controls. To that end, Bubble Bobble Double is not something I can recommend (especially at £2.99/€3,99/$4.99) although if it drops to 59p/€0,79/99¢, it’s worth a look.
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