~ Estimated Reading Time: 6 min ~
Bubble Bobble is one of the first games to understand the playfeel of popping bubble-wrap. You're granted brevity to spam bubbles on-screen as long as you please. They only jiggle when you walk into them for less than a second, so you have to push into them with a subtle force to break them. You can just instantly pop them by jumping into them, but that requires some spacing as well. Popping a chain of enemies has a good mixture of a loose objective with a requirement of inertia - the result is I have to make committal jumps, without necessarily needing a fixed arc jump. It feels fun! And then a bunch of food rains on screen, like batting a pinata. Bright, popping colours barraging the screen every win, in combination with the way its music loudly blares out of an arcade machine, gives it a feeling of both prettiness and overstimulation.
Though, the game operates on a lot of surprisingly opaque logic. It is a game that, without visual indication, will suddenly change the patterns and directions of how the bubbles you blow move around - as if some levels were windier than others. The physics will change on the whim of each level...so you have to adapt, and feel out the breeze. The lack of rules is a consistent rule; sometimes, enemies will be super aggressive, moving 5000 miles a second. Or maybe they'll just pop out of your bubble instantly. From as soon as the beginning of the game (if you play good!), it's established that popping a chain of every enemy at once will reward you with a giant fruit - or ice cream, or beer or whatever. But you're not owed this; there is no consistent rule this will always be an obtainable win condition. At one point, the big fruit literally spawned inside a wall. There is no "perfect" high-score.
By lacking consistency, we are able to achieve genuine variety in a way games with more of an aversion to one-offs couldn't possibly obtain.
And a lot of the resulting nuances of that come down to its embracing of tech. It took me a dozen levels to notice that there is an extremely rigid input to jump off bubbles, and it even stops them from breaking. This results in an emergent silliness to the early courses, which are built off the assumption players won't be pulling it off often. As the game goes on, though...it begins to build around these mechanics, and aggressively so!
I often think to myself the pervasive viewpoint that retro games were only difficult or obtuse for financially exploitative reasons is a horribly misinformed one. Like, the Medusa Heads in Castlevania are mean, but they are visibly readable, reactable, and completely consistent in their behavior. There's nothing wrong with simply not enjoying it, but every attempt to objectively define that sorta thing as "unfair" feels close-minded. The initial intuitiveness of something shouldn't be everything, and we still have the neuroplasticity to learn how to naturally respond to new challenges.
So, I apologize if I have been a bit hypocritical for this, but,
oh my GOD bubble bobble is some BULLSHIT lmaoooooo
I'm talking about enemies that sit in one-tile deep trenches, move back and forth at hyperspeed, and you're expected to snipe with a weapon that only shoots horizontally. Sometimes, it feels untested in beautiful ways; there was this time in which an extremely difficult level was oddly slanted in the second player's favour. Which...was me, and I kinda felt like I had helped out in a sense by clearing it. A lot of the latter half of the levels have me pulling off awkward, unhinged tricks; perfectly blowing a bubble in the first half of my jump arc, so it bobs below me, letting me bounce off it. Chaining bubble jump into bubble jump into bubble jump....they'd be genuinely neat in a game with even slightly more lenient inputs, but my hands were really cramping up after this one... It gets to the point in which it feels like I'm not really supposed to see the second half...but that's true, isn't it? I had been credit feeding to the point that I would've been broke if it was on a real machine. So the real question of good-will becomes "should I be hating on a game for its end-game, when they focused their testing on the only half of the game I would've seen?". But just as importantly....I found some of those bullshit levels - at least with all the digital quarter munching I had been doing - kind of great regardless.
i just wish it didn't hurt my hands :p
There is honestly a lot of pros to building your game's challenges around tearing the engine in half. Especially in the arcade-era - when everything was built around simplistic inputs, and instantly-readable actions - depth will come from what emerges. Despite how much of it looks like I'm solving something the wrong way, it shows that the developers were intimately familiar with their engine, and began to actively craft challenges built around its idiosyncrasies. And Bubble Bobble's skill-opacity is well-balanced despite it all; being able to spam bubbles at round start makes testing things very low-risk. If the game thinks you don't know how to do something you'll need to do later, it'll force it on you. It'll literally lock you in a little corner with a single exit with one obtuse but obvious solution - like when they put their hand in the toilet in a Saw movie. So, when the final levels send you to arthritis world, I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. When you start the last stage before the final boss, you'll notice there's a singular enemy that has been placed in confinement, surrounded by wall from every angle. But at this point, you have been rigorously tested, and you have to know that walls lose their collision box at the very top of the ceiling. So after a hilarious amount of fiddling, there's this genuinely cathartic moment to getting to the top of the screen, jumping into the walls from above, and screen-wrapping infinitely up and down until you clip that one enemy.
It feels like you've totally surpassed the game's confines - and it taught you how to. It's both adjacent and different to how we intentionally let you break the game in modern imm-sims; it doesn't give you the satisfaction of feeling like you're above the designers, you're just reaching their level. I think awareness of this style would help a lot of indies in figuring out how to squeeze all the juice out of their game engines. What the 80's pioneers, and new DIY scenes share are necessary compromises in scale; Bubble Bobble reaches the same conclusions of engine-exploitation-as-baseline-challenge to something like Sylvie Lime.
At the end of the game, if you beat it alone: the game puts a message on screen saying that you haven't REALLY beaten the game if you don't do it with a friend. Then when you beat it with a friend, it tells you that you learned the real value of love and friendship. Fair enough.. But then, it suddenly tells you that you haven't gotten the TRUE ending, because this was a "Key of Secret" game all along. Nearly 40 years before "Metroidbrainias", Taito touted that the plot twist to their video game was its Genre. This kinda broke my brain. There are some baffling structuring choices on this game that sing "we went mad with power as soon as we could fit an extra megabyte of memory onto our arcade machines", but this one's at the top. I don't know if I have the energy to look deeper into the Bubble Bobble rabbit-hole, but I think that's kind of okay!