Taito has decided to dig up all its dead family members and dry hump them, resulting in confusing birth on DS and PSP! We've already seen Space Invaders Revolution for DS (and Evolution on PSP). Both tried to add new stuff to Space Invaders, which is already the most complex game ever made. Both failed. Time for Bubble Bobble! This currently hasn't been released in America, and there are no plans for a release by the looks of it! It came out mid-last year in Japan under the name of Bubble Bobble DS, then a few months later in the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand under the name of Bubble Bobble Revolution.
First off, the title screen spoils who the secret characters are right away. The manual makes a big fuss over the game having two secret characters to unlock, created by one of the dudes who worked on the original Harvest Moon game. Then BAM, they're RIGHT THERE on the title screen. GRINNING. AND WALKING. Getting to the main menu, you're presented with Classic or New Age. Classic is obviously the original Bubble Bobble (I know, it shocked me too). It's emulated really well, in fact it runs even better than the version found in Taito Arcade for PS2 and Xbox (seriously). It saves your high scores, which is nice. Nice like a gift basket filled with smaller gift baskets.
So let's go to New Age. This is a totally new BB game, unlike the New Age mode found in BB: Old and New for GBA, which just added new music and little else. Once again there's a hundred levels. Now broken up into ten worlds. A stupid boss awaits you at the end of each one, watch out! EVERY BOSS just simply farts around mindlessly, running into walls, falling off the bottom of the screen, groaning. Which is highly arousing! Some of them will shoot missiles out of their face or something. The uh, actual levels are pretty simplistic. But that's a good thing, because it's friggin' Bubble Bobble. It's split across both screens, with no 'dead zone' at all. Now you can power up a bubble, which can capture many enemies at once. You NEED to do this in some levels to actually get to the last world. The manual or the game itself makes no mention of this, I had to go to GameFAQs.
GameFAQs. That alone makes the game lose points.
There's a clone item! This will make a clone (WOW) appear on the other screen! It can walk through walls and uh, stuff. Some levels are puzzle based, SOME of them actually even made me try and think. It hurt a fair bit. Oh I uh, GRAPHICS! The graphics are terrible. There. I said it. 'are'. I don't know what the hell Taito were using, possibly a Mega Drive development kit, because it has the same sort of weird grainy effect. Nothing looks 'clean'. The backgrounds are especially bad. Check out the sky in this,
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Because it looks
worse in-game. Sprites are nicely animated, though! Music? Surprisingly, the music is great. It's the same old classic (looping death) theme music, but they change it around for each world. It can sound really happy, dramatic and so forth with more words placed here to end the sentence. Sometimes you'd be hard pressed thinking it's the same theme in the later worlds, but it is! MASSIVE INTERESTING! A 'bonus game' is here somewhere in each world, too. It's touch screen based. You simply touch three huge buttons to keep bubbles blowing in the air. It's about as difficult as eating chocolate. The silly DS microphone also comes into play for certain levels, where you're required to blow chunks of saliva at the DS to turn on fans (these make the bubbles go everywhere!)
Overall, I like it. Because BB gives me a bit of an erection anyway. If you've never heard of the original, you'd probably hate it! To death! Because you're VIOLENT. I don't know if it's worth importing if you're from America land, though. PRETTY EXPENSIVE, also it was discontinued in every place that isn't Japan already. (Atari was the distributer so no big surprises there). 7/10! And finally...
Japanese box art awww, how cute!
OH GOD FLACCID.
Topic: (DS) Bubble Bobble Revolution (Read 7617 times)
