Game:

Bubble Bobble (1986)

Duration: 44:08

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5

I finally managed a 1-credit clear of the arcade game Bubble Bobble. Played with WolfMAME 0.261, final score 4,081,060. I used the power up code - mostly so that I wouldn't need to power back up after losing a life. (I also need to put up a good score for the Yolympics without using any codes, but that's a problem for tomorrow)

Bubble Bobble is a fun game! It's got a simple core concept, wonderfully woven into a variety of levels that mostly look feel very different, with a wide variety of items and several big juicy secrets to spice things up.

Bubble Bobble is a famously difficult game. It has cute graphics, and the difficulty curve starts off very gently. But soon it reveals its true colors. About 40 rounds into the 100-round(!) game, it starts to feel like a kaizo romhack of itself. A lot of late-game levels rely on exploiting non-obvious mechanics, like "kissing" enemies to defeat them at point blank range, or throwing bubbles through walls. Learning it on your own in an arcade would be an exercise in trial-and-error. Thankfully I was able to learn strats by watching 1cc runs by LordBBH and Ben Shinobi, putting my own spin on the approach to some rooms like the infamous Round 81. Once you have a plan for how to approach each level, and you manipulate item drops to stack the deck in your favor, it's not an excessively hard game. It's very easy to die along the way to a mistake or just bad RNG, but between score-based extends and E-X-T-E-N-D bubbles you should have around 10 lives to work with in all.

This is an iconic game. Anyone who walked through an arcade in the late 80s, or played one of the home ports, will recognize the peppy theme song. It had several sequels - the oddball Rainbow Islands, later Bubble Symphony and Bubble Memories with the same core gameplay, and the spinoff series Puzzle Bubble. And Bubble Bobble inspired many other single-screen platformers like Snow Bros and Tumblepop, which in turn inspired Neo Geo games like Nightmare in the Dark and ZuPaPa, as well as a wave of mostly-forgettable single-screen platformer arcade games from Korea. But none of those other games have quite the same retro charm - and inscrutable depth.