Puzzle Bobble Mini / Bust-A-Move Pocket review by fluX

This game should come with a health warning. On any format, whether arcade, home console, or handheld, it can suck up hours of spare time, and eat into the time you can't spare as well. At college, 90 round marathons on the Saturn version are commonplace, usually after agreeing to have 'a quick go' to waste a couple of minutes...

For those who haven't been drawn into the surreal world of bubble busting, this paragraph explains the mechanics of the game. For those that already have played other versions, skip straight to the next bit. Okay, are we concentrating? Good. Puzzle Bobble is a big twist on the classic Tetris clone. Multicoloured bubbles are arranged hexagonally at the top of the screen, and appear to be 'hanging' off each other. Bubbles are fired from the bottom of screen, aimed with a certain angle. They bounce off the walls, allowing improbable shots to slam into place. When three or more bubbles of the same colour touch, they burst. If any other bubbles are hanging off the ones that have been popped, they drop as well. This is where the real tactics of the game come in; in versus mode, dropping loads of bubbles results in them slamming into your opponent's screen. You must carefully balance building up hanging chunks with staying safe - if your trigger block is blocked off, you're screwed. On other other hand, you can think that you're stuck, then suddenly see an insane rebound shot, and one quick *pop* later, the tables are turned. Frantic, frustrating, and f*cked-up.

Onto the conversion details. In comparison to arcade and other home versions, the graphics are obviously lacking. However, they are perfectly functional, as long as you are playing in decent light (anything but the optimum lighting results in indistinguishable colours, making gameplay impossible). The small animations of the characters have been kept, keeping the look lively, and I actually prefer the undecorated backdrops, as they don't interfere with the foreground as they sometimes did in other versions. The bubbles are crisply defined with solid colour (highlighted with a speck of white) encased in a black outline, meaning any aiming errors can only be blamed on poor judgement rather than fuzzy graphics. While there is embarrassingly little artwork, the in-game graphics do what they're meant to perfectly.

That music is back. It worms into your mind, and despite being repetitive, mysteriously never annoys. Obviously the quality has taken a big hit, knocked down to 2 channels for the music (as far as I can tell), and even some nasty break-up in the bass sections, but the tunes are completely recogniseable. You'll probably enjoy it more if you remember the originals. However, if you don't like the music, there's no option to turn it off while retaining the sound effects. Basic sound effects have been faithfully reproduced, although speech samples are missing.

The control system has been well thought out; as well as the basic left/right/fire, Taito have included a fine adjustment method (by holding B and moving), and the centering method (pushing up). I was expecting there to be accuracy problems on the smaller screen, but it's remarkably good. The mechanics have changed very slightly, making it possible to slip bubbles through small gaps - not a major difference.

Three one player modes and three two-player settings help the game last. Firstly, there are 99 puzzles, varying hugely in difficulty. Some require only one well-placed shot to drop the whole load, others require battling your way through a solid screen of bubbles. Your best times are recorded for these, giving incentive to return and improve. Beating the last one gives you a quick congratulatory screen and the credits roll. VS CPU pits you against eight opponents, each with a different screen configuration, in any order. Finally, survivor mode lets you play non-stop until the screen fills up. As your rank improves and score increases, more and more bubbles pile onto the screen, making it harder. Thre are eight difficulty settings, which affect all three modes - in puzzle, you get more difficult colours to work with, in VS, the AI is much better, and in survival, you start at a higher rank. Even veterans will find level 8 a decent challenge, whereas level one is probably fine for beginners. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to try the two player, as I haven't got any frien...er, no-one else I know has a NGPC. According to the manual, there's beginner, normal, and mania modes. No mention of handicap adjustments, which is a shame. I'll update the review if I ever get to try it.

I still see those bubbles every time I close my eyes. If you buy this game, be prepared to buy lots of batteries and cancel all your appointments.