Pong and Beyond

337th played so far

Genre: Platform
Platform: Arcade
Year of Release: 1986
Developer: Taito
Publisher: Taito

A while ago we covered Puzzle Bobble after a trip to Brighton in order to find the elusive game Final Furlong. The fact that we found it in some rather beaten up arcade on the seafront is pretty miraculous.

I got to choose a game to today and I thought I would go for the cute factor and revisit Bub and Bob in their first incarnation.

Our Thoughts

Aside from the first thought that enters my mind (which is a resounding cute) this game is incredibly addictive. The idea behind this game is simple enough, you blow bubbles to disarm your foes and when you pop those bubbles you collect the random treasures left behind; ranging from melons to diamonds depending on on your luck. There’s a nice bit of variation here as well – while you start with some enemies randomly walking around that are easy to outrun and escape from, you later get more complicated enemies, with ghosts running around and firing things at you. Combine that with things like fake bubbles and you get a pretty large variety of levels and challenges.

You are also able to so something surprising… move before your foes are able to. This is something I found by accident but whilst the name of the level flashes on screen at the beginning you are able to move and they are not able to. This actually means you can easily clear the first few levels in under 15 seconds as long as you have good timing, and since this game does time you invisibly you need all the help you can get before the enemies glow red and become a bit psychotic.

Another interesting thing this game did, which neither of us were skilled enough to reach, there are actually multiple endings depending on how well you have done in terms of lives lost and secrets recovered. There are a number of secret rooms within the game that only open up if you go for a number of levels without losing a single life, which is a lot harder than it looks for a cutesy game such as this.

Finally there is the music. It is the typical repeated piece of music that you find in most of these era games because the lack of room for a complex soundtrack (something I have really come to appreciate since starting this blog) but sometimes simple works. A genius on Youtube has created a seamless 10 hour version of the music which now leaves me to find a way to turn it into a ringtone and possibly find myself a miniature version of the dragons.

And had we mentioned yet that it looks adorable? It does.

Final Thoughts

Going into this game, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Its basics were pretty simple – capture enemies, defeat them while avoiding them. The game does a lot more though, and does it a lot nicer, with cute graphics and an earworm as its main theme. It’s a real arcade classic, and the attention to detail in it shows.