Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 82: Bubble Bobble and Family

Episode Date: January 2, 2017

The original Power Trio — Bob, Ray, and Jeremy — follow up their recent look at Wonder Boy to take on the next needlessly convoluted franchise: Taito's Bubble Bobble (et al.). Confusion guaranteed for all! Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, now updated daily! This show is an entirely independent and a self-sustaining concern for 2017. Please help support our livelihoods through Patreon!

This week in Retronauts. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another hellish episode of Retronauts. I say hellish because I'm going to splice the bubble-bobble theme underneath the entire episode. No, I'm not going to do that because then we'd lose all of our patrons. This isn't a laser time show. That's going to activate some sleeper agent somewhere, I think.

Yeah, right. Play it backward. I have to kill the Prime Minister. The Manchurian bubble bubble. Yes, so hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and I'm hosting a show, and I feel weirdly unready for this. This was supposed to happen like a month ago,

and it was washed out by our hurricane. Was that Matthew? It was Matthew, the worst apostle. And so here we are, a month later, and I've forgotten everything that we were going to talk about in this episode. So if it's a little weird, that's because, of an act of God.

We can actually blame higher powers on any inadequacies in this show. So anyway, me, Jeremy Parrish, the usual suspect. Also, Hi, I'm Bob Mackey.

I'm here because this is one of the few playable games with a, sorry, one of the few games with a playable character named Bob. There's a fat guy in Tekken, I think,

and that's basically it. Is there somebody else named Bob in video gaming at all? Probably somewhere. Yeah. Oh, yeah, there's a marathon. All the board on board colonists, or just called Bob.

Well, that's not being fair. Yeah, but he says, like, he killed Bob! So, yeah, it's in there. I don't like that. You're an army, basically. And in the third game, they give you plasma rifles and stuff. Okay, well, I feel better about that. You're super dangerous, actually, trying to kill the player.

The era of Bobbs has fallen now. We're now in the era of... The post-Bob world, post-Bobberness. Yeah, it's sad. And then finally, the third usual suspect. You could have introduced yourself as Bubble Bob Mackey. Oh, Jesus, Ray. God.

Oh, start over. Okay. No, it's fine. It's fine. I'm a little sick, so my pun center of my brain is slowed down a bit. That's fine. Yeah, I'm here for you. Yeah, it's me, Ray, everybody.

Hi. It's the Bobble Barnholt episode. Yeah, I mean. Okay. Yeah, this is going nowhere. So, anyway, this is the second episode in our What the Hell trilogy. We previously had Adventure Island, and we'll wrap it up with Falcom's Legend of Heroes, Dragon Slayer series at some point, but for now, we're talking about Taito's Bubble Bobble.

And we're not just talking about Bubble Bobble, but we're talking about everything connected to Bubble Bobble, assuming we don't run out of time, which is entirely possible because there are so many games tied to Bubble Bobble that it's kind of ridiculous. There are lots of games, but I will say, as someone who was here for the Wonder Boy stuff, it's not as the Wonder Boy. No, I mean, that's like a Gordian, not a video game lineage. The problem with the Bubble Bobble Family Tree is mostly just a naming thing, as opposed to Wonder Boy, which was like naming and porting and sequelizing and offshooting and stuff.

Yeah, I mean, basically it's been, for the most part, Taito making Bubble Bobble Games, whereas Adventure Island, Wonder Boy, you had like a schism with two different developers. And Tito was the one, you know, caused all the problems in the naming. It's all their fault. At least it's not like Bubble Bobble and it's also called Dinosaur World Bubble Bubble Part 2 and all that stuff. Well, there is a little bit of that in some of the sequels. I guess so, yeah. There are at least two stories of Bubble Bobble. I can deal with that.

I can deal with that. All right. So I'm just saying that it's a little convoluted, so if you get confused, don't blame us, blame yourself or Taito. We can confirm that none of these games aren't the dynastic hero,

so Jeremy, you're good there. That's great. None of them are rescanned as like Brazilian comic book. No. That's true. That's true. Brazil never got to taste

this sweet, sweet fruit known as Bubble Bobble. Monica Bobble. Yeah. So anyway, without further ado, Let's get going. So this whole Mad Cap episode begins with a simple game called Bubble Bobble.

And it was released in arcades in 1986 by a little company called Taito, whom you may know of for having made a whole bunch of really cool games like Elevator Action 2 and that game with the shooting and the stars and Chubbacca from space. Oh, Space Invaders, that's it. They were kind of a big deal for a while. And Bobble Bobble, Bubble Bobble, I can see this is going to go well. Bubble Bobble is one of their, they're sort of like, how do you describe it? Like, they never really had another game as big as Space Invaders.

That was massive. And I feel like they didn't really chase that level of success. Like, it wasn't like a company obsessed with, you know, like recapturing that moment of glory. It was more like, let's just make some cool, fun games. I'm probably wrong, but that's what it seems like. In some ways, they were just like, they were just overwhelmed by all the clones and other companies coming in making and trying to cash in on their own success. And it was just like, oh, God. That's true.

I think they didn't do more with Space Invaders because everybody else did. So they did a lot more with Bubble Bobble, that formula than they ever were with Space Invaders. Yeah, and actually, I guess if we wanted to go chronologically, we would say that the Bubble Bobble story begins in 1985 with Chack and Pop, which is kind of like, It's not a part of the bubble-bobble series, but if you play Jack and Pop, it is basically like the rough draft. It's where they were putting down their sketches and concepts. You know, it's weird.

I have never, I wasn't able to find any information. Maybe I didn't look hard enough about who actually created Bubble Bobble. Yes, Taito, but like who's the director? Who was the person who came up with this mad concept? Because there is this sort of indelible stamp on these games from that era. And the sort of Bubble Bobble family, extended family of games, It seems like maybe like one person kind of had a vision. Sort of like if you look at Capcom's games from the same era,

you sort of see like the Tokoro Fujiwara style in there. But I don't know who that would be for Bubble Bobble. A lot of it's credited to Fugio Mitsugi. Okay. So clearly I didn't look hard enough. Who has since passed away just fairly recently. But yeah, I believe, I mean, again, I'm kind of running off fumes here a bit too. but it's just like I think he

at least designed some of the characters and designed some of the games himself because he then left Tidal to work on some other puzzly type games and things like that. So he was an accomplished designer that way. Okay. So I'm pretty sure he had his hands

on a lot of these one way or another. Well, there are a lot of really interesting and fun and pretty unique ideas in these games and elements that sort of you wouldn't think would necessarily be common themes but that connect to the games altogether and can kind of surprise. prize you in certain ways.

I was just wondering what the Chack and Chacken Pop means. Is that like one of those times where they don't translate the Japanese Anamonopoea like Clu-Clu-Land? It's just like Chak means something in Japanese, but... I think it's just the guy's name.

Chack? I think his name is Chacken. Chacken? Okay, weird. Is that like a... It's like the pre-cursar-to-Tecan. Okay. No, Chacken doesn't really scroll that much.

Chack-and-pop. It has like a little bit of scrolling, I think. I can't remember. It's been a month. A whole month. I think it's a single-screen game. I was actually thinking of another game called Chacken or something that sounds similar

where it's like a warrior, I don't know. Oh, yeah, the Forever Man. Yeah. Chacon. Oh, okay. That's like a Genesis game, right? Yeah, that's something totally different. Let's not confuse this year.

We're already getting off track. Yeah. I'm sorry. No, Chacken Pop is not dark and horrible like Chacken, the Forever Man. It's cutesy and fun and charming. And actually in some ways is more complex in Bubble Bobble

because your character could jump and stick to ceilings. So you're like climbing around and inverting gravity. It's like a... It's a little hard to figure out if you're just doing that front of face value. Yeah. It's not your ideal arcade experience

because you don't just pick it up and say, I get it. Whereas bubble bubble, definitely you start playing and you're like, oh, I get it, even if you don't necessarily grasp the... But again, it was reflective of that sort of like figuring it out era. It does share some characters, though, like the little white mages that throw rubbles at you

and what I think are supposed to be whale, like belugas or what I don't know what they're called. Like the little purple ghosts. Yeah, they're like ghosts, but they also look like fish. Yeah. Or whales. Maybe they were just called whales in the instruction book for America or something like that for a bubble bubble. I don't know.

I remember, I think I'm thinking the word beluga for some reason. That sounds good. I like that. It sounds like a word Japan would borrow and like call and enemy. Balugan or something like that. Yeah. So check and pop in my notes, I said it's kind of a crazy platformer, almost like a maze chase. It does definitely kind of bear the hallmarks of like, you know, something like mapy

or something, where it's sort of like a side-scrolling platform or single screen. You're jumping around, and it's a very complicated on-screen setup. Like I said, sort of a maze that you have to navigate. The hero can walk on ceilings. It does include some of the same enemies as Bubble Bobble, and Bubble Bobble actually includes level designs taken from Chack and Pop. So, you know, even though they're not named the same thing, I mean, you really, you kind of have to consider Jack and Pop, like,

bubble bubble, bubble, bubble, the first mission, I don't know, act zero, that's it. Maybe not act zero. No, that would be Chacon, which would be the ready reboot. Wow. It all fits. Yeah. And yeah, the game also features a mechanic where you drop bombs that explode into smoke.

And you use those to kill monsters and unlock cages that have hearts in them and the hearts you need to collect to open important doors, which then let you advance to the next stage. So there's kind of a lot going on. of this game. The bombs can also kill you like in Bomberman as well. It's no hits you. It'll kill you. There's lots of dangers in doing that.

Yes. So again, like we said, it's kind of this complicated game. I've never really had a chance to play it, but I watched a lot of videos and kind of tried to absorb its wisdom. And it definitely seems like one of those games that you'd have to spend a lot of time with to really get a handle on and really kind of master the mechanics. I'm sure it's fun once you do that. But compared to the immediacy and appeal of Bubble Bobble, it definitely needed some refining.

So a year later, we get Bubble Bobble, which really kind of takes the check and pop concept and just prunes it. It's like it slices off everything that doesn't work or that isn't interesting or that's too fussy. And you have this incredibly simple, incredibly pure video game experience. And yes, that's what we're going to talk about. What was your first experience with Bubble Bobble, each of you? I think, definitely the NES version. I did not see this in the arcade until I was an adult. And I went to a lot of arcades as a kid.

I just never saw it there. I didn't even realize it was an arcade game until I got the internet, really. But almost all my friends had it, so I played lots and lots and lots of two-player game. It was a really fun two-player game. And for some reason, like, I don't know why, but when I was a kid, games with lots and lots of items were really appealing to me. and I think, like, designers realize that, too. So, like, even the thing like Fester's Quest, which I covered seemed interesting at first

because, oh, there's, like, 10 different items I can play with at Metal Gear. So, like, the idea of being in this world and it's like, what does this shoe do? What does this light bulb do? What, like, just that was compelling to me to want to play it. Yeah. I mean, I knew it from the AAS version, too. I think I first saw it, like, Nintendo Power, but it was in, like, the classified information section. So it was, like, codes about things that I couldn't understand, but the screenshots looked interesting.

But then later I found out, yeah. you know, kids around school and stuff or renting it and stuff. And it did become sort of a popular game. And I think that's why it's sort of, it's ended up in the mini-NES, because, like, it did sort of become, like, a favorite game among NES kids at the time.

On the other hand, no one I knew played the NES game, owned the NES game. I never had really heard of Bubble Bobble aside from advertisements. Like I would see it advertised in these full-page ads in comic books at the time. But this was, you know, 1988, 89, and by that point, NES games were starting to look really nice.

You know, this was contemporaneous with Ninja Guidon and Mega Man 2 and Castlevania 3 almost. Like, you had buying a commando, like, you had some really sophisticated looking complex platform games coming out. And I saw these ads for Bubble Bobble in my comic books and was like, this looks stupid. This looks like one of those old games. It was really visually underwhelming to me. And without being able to play it, I couldn't. understand, I couldn't understand the appeal. It doesn't seem like the best game to put in a comic book.

Yeah. No, I mean, I mean, I'm, I can see. Like, you have to keep in mind that comic books were different in the, in the 80s, late 80s than they are now. They weren't geared so much toward adults, but more towards kids. The content is still kind of like, you know, the actual art and stuff was a bit. Yeah, I can see that. Boy centric. Was the NES version 87 or 87 or 88?

I want to say 87. It came out in 88. Oh, 88. Wow. Yeah, like the end of 80s. And I think it might have come to the U.S. in 89. I didn't actually put the dates down. But, yeah, like the arcade game was 86,

and the NES version didn't come out until quite a bit later. And, yeah, like I said, the NES had really started to kind of come into its own with some of that, like, really sophisticated third-generation content. I mean, Super Mario Bros. 3 was coming out in Japan around that time. So, like, people really had a grasp on the console and what it could do. And then there was this game that kind of looked like an early 80s. arcade games, single screens, just plain black backgrounds, really simplistic graphics. If you just look at it from that context, you're like, why should I care about this?

It was, it always kind of baffled me that there were these big ads for it. But, you know, there were big ads in the comic books like full page ads for other games like Demon Sword, another by Taito. And I was like, that probably isn't very good either. So, you know, people just threw a lot of money advertising bad games. So there was no way for me to know without playing that Bubble Bobble was not, in fact, a bad game. It wasn't until years later that I, you know, started to see people like at the Gaming Intelligence Agency, right, these hegeographies about it and talk about how great it was. And I was like, really?

This game? So, yeah, it wasn't until maybe like 10 years ago or so, a little more than that, that I played it with a friend at the Metrion on some, like, super arcade cabinet and was like, oh, I get it. it. This game is really cool. That's a real label movement. That's like, you know, 20 years late to the party. But I'm finally glad I got there. Well, I mean, I appreciate it. I can't say I totally love it because I don't really like 99 stages of anything too much.

That's a lot of stages. That's always torturous, I think, no matter what. So bubble bubble doesn't always stick with me that much. But there are ways to warp through and skip around. Yeah, well, yeah, if you at least have some sort of knowledge. of that. I don't think many people stumble upon that that often if you're just playing it blind, which was me a lot of the time.

And there are sort of like pro strats in this game, which I think you actually need to take advantage of to beat the game where it's like you can jump on a bubble and if you hold the jump button in, your dinosaur will just bounce on it. So that's essential to getting to areas to kill enemies and things like that. So it starts off as a cool strategy

but eventually becomes necessary. And I'm sure the arcade machine tells you how to do that. Like usually there's just a bunch of like instructions on the side of the screen. Avoid missing bubble for high score. Yeah, but I mean, you wouldn't know any of that because when you just look at the game, it looks super simplistic. I mean, you play, you have two characters or one if you just play single player, but let's say

you're playing two player. You have two dinosaurs, a blue one and a green one and a green one and a blue one, bob and bob and whatever. Anyway, and they can run, they can jump a very like a little short hop, and they can pop their heads open like a pez dispenser and emit a bubble. and the bubble shoots forward and then starts to float up but if it hits an enemy when it's shooting forward the enemy will become encased in the bubble

and that's where a lot of the gameplay comes in because you have to pop the bubbles while an enemy is inside and that turns the enemy into fruit or other pickups that you can collect for bonus points and you start getting into these chain combos where you break a bunch of bubbles at once and collect a bunch of fruits and get all the fruits before the end of the stage

and so on and so forth. it definitely has that sort of arcade mentality I mean even the concept of like a two-step process to defeat an enemy get them in a bubble then pop the bubble like that's out of joust or balloon fight or something where you have to like knock off the enemy from his mount and then bump into the enemy or you know Mario Brothers where you have to

knock the enemy over from underneath and then kick it so it adds it's kind of like that I guess second wave golden arcade style concept where there's a little bit of complexity to the actions. It's not just like shoot something, but it's definitely straightforward in its design. I know Pac-Man was designed in part to appeal to women, apparently, I guess, according to an interview with the creator, with the use of like food items as rewards. Do you feel

the same way about bubble bubble? There's a lot of like ice cream and there's just like 20 different food items that are pickups in the game. Now, here's the thing. It just looks simple enough to be appealing. I think it's the same thing as Tetris. You have a lot of block patterns and a bubble of what bubbles case they're made up into different

sorts of designs and patterns things and a lot of them are pastel color let's say and just you know and the game is just fairly easy

to play and so I do think that that's part of why it became such a big NES games because a lot of girls were playing it

and yeah it's mostly about the visual stuff not so much not because has ice cream in it I don't think the

girls love ice cream come on people am I right in Japan yes I don't I don't think the I don't think the design of

the game was specifically intended to say female players come, come to us but I don't think the look of the game hurt its appeal across a broad spectrum of players

Bob and Bob are very cute I love their little trash can house. Everything is very cute everything is just adorable even the drunk final boss and I think also there is a puzzle element to the game especially once

the levels start ramping up and it integrates more of the screen wrapping because you know you fall through the screen and go back at the top a lot of the times And so you just have to figure out your way through the level that way. You might have to, like, fall down to the bottom to actually enter from the top

and then go inside the level, for example, and then find your way through there and get more enemies that way. So there's that puzzle on that I think that also appeals. Right. So, yeah, I mean, I think the look of the game, by that point, I would really say that Japanese developers had sort of kind of created a collective style that was very sort of super deformed anime manga influenced where, you know, you had like little tiny bodies and big heads, which allowed their characters to be expressive and that kind of works with, you know, Japanese. manga art style more than it does with American art style because Americans usually go for more realistic proportions in their artwork. So I think it was just kind of like a natural evolution of what was happening in Japanese games anyway. And there does seem to be sort of like a food

obsession in a lot of manga and anime and as a result games. Like, you know, anything by a Karatoyama, there's always like a food theme to his characters or frequent. but not just a Karatoyama, but throughout. Like, it's just, it's something that's simple and appealing, like a little watermelon slice or a little Sunday or even a martini glass, which they surprisingly didn't take out of the NES version. Like, they're simple and colorful, and you get what they are at a glance. Yes.

And it's based on real things. Yeah. And, you know, they are, you know, coveted in some way. You know, fruit and sweets and stuff, those just became, you know, power ups for a lot I mean, desserts are sweet. I think there's also like frosty mugs of beer in the game you can pick up too. Probably.

I'm sure it's root beer in the NES version. But yeah, like Ray said, it's, you know, it's something that has a real value and is really easy to depict and is kind of universal. So, I mean, for the most part, I don't really think Bubble Bobble had stuff like Unigiri or whatever.

It was not, it was not like culturally specific. It was much more just kind of like everyone loves great. grapes. Who doesn't love grapes? Eat some grapes. And, you know, there's a positivity about fruit. Like, these things are sweet and delicious and they're good to eat. So yes, of course, this is a good thing to collect. Yes. Martini's also. Nice and healthy if you've been turned into a dinosaur. Yeah. It's like in the Bonn games, the fruit heals you, but the junk food just gives you points. Right. So, yeah. So you have this kind of like super simplistic game, very simple

graphics, very cute and charming and appealing, but you only have two actions. You can shoot and jump, and that's pretty much it. But there's a lot of complexity, like you were saying earlier, that kind of emerges from these two mechanics. And really getting a grasp of those is essential to being able to complete the game. I mean, there's basically two things you have to do, three things you have to do to be able to beat Bobble Bobble and really beat it. One, you have to play through it with a friend. So that's difficult mode. You have to have a friend who's willing to play video games with you for a long time. You have to be willing to play through 99 levels.

And you have to really kind of experiment with some maybe not intuitive advanced abilities, like jumping on bubbles and making use of those water slides and things like that. So it does become a little bit tricky, but you also have to be able to put up with that music for a long time. I can do it. It's good music. It's the catchiest music in video games. I think I've heard it looped at least 2,000 times in my life by now.

I mean, already in this podcast, playing in the background. I think I always thought it was funny as a kid, though, like a game sort of targeted towards what I viewed as younger people, this very colorful, cute game. It's like, the goal is to stop being a dinosaur. Like, no, I want to be a human kid again. I was like, no, no, I want to keep being a dinosaur. This is better. It's a better arrangement. Yeah, which they ran away with in the sequels, which we'll talk about.

Yeah, it's like, you play this little chubby boy. Just go back to the dinosaurs, for God's sakes. I do, I do really love the special bubbles you get to play with, like, the fire ones. The water ones especially are lots of fun But the lightning one That's what the entire final boss is based around You like you drink the potion And you just spit out the lightning bubbles

Where it shoots lightning the opposite way you're facing When you hit when you pop them It's like a kind of complicated technique That you can have a lot of fun with if you're good at the game Yeah So they do a lot with just the few little game elements That appear in Bubble Bobble And I think that's a big part of its

Enduring appeal Is the fact that even though it looks so basic there's a lot to do and a lot that really kind of hides beneath the surface and if you ever want to I'll post it in the notes for this episode but there's a technical breakdown of the game

that explains how all the power-ups appear and like how the scoring system works and it's so complicated like you would never think that this game would work like that but just like how the extra life extend pickups that you get appear

it's really intricate and requires you know it's like kind of something on the same level as Tower of Drouaga almost. Like there's all these secret stipulations that you have to observe. They're not necessary like they are in Tower of Duraga,

but they're there. And if you're really going for a high score, then you need to sit down and it's not quite frame counting, but it's close. It's like keep track of how you kill enemies and so on. I'm sure there's some speed runner out there

who has just memorized and uses it to just bend the game over his leg. I don't doubt it. So from geek.com, bubble-bobble keeps track of tons of player actions. How many bubbles you've blown and popped, how many times you've jumped, et cetera, and uses those to determine the power-ups that appear.

So I don't know, maybe there's like some sort of crazy super-scoring game where the, like, you don't ever jump unless you absolutely have to. Like some of those crazy Mario Maker levels where they're like, you jump and you die. I don't know. I don't really, that's the kind of minutia that I don't like to explore in video games.

because it's too much like real work. But for people who are into that, I could see Bubble Bobble, you know, like really having a lot of appeal. I'd love to see, you know, like a master face-off, like a tournament of top-level bubble-bobble players to see who can make it the highest. I assume it would be like a really interesting tense challenge

and not just people doing the exact same thing as each other. I think there's enough randomness to the game. It's a game about friendship, Jeremy, not competition. Well, you play with a friend as you compete against. to your enemies. That's fair. I think that would work. Right.

So, I don't know, is there anything more to speak about with Bubble Bobble Bobble, like the way the game plays? I mean, like I said, it's pretty straightforward, aside from the hidden stuff. Yeah. But then again, so was Wonder Boy. Yeah. That's true. We're not going to fall down into that spiral of hell, though.

Let's see. We're going to be close. Okay. I don't think there are any major differences between the arcade and NES version. and they look slightly different, but obviously it looks better on their cake. They're pretty close. The arcade version has a screen that says,

like, the highest player, the best player of that day on like a little chart, but that's basically all I can, all I notice when I played it. It's definitely one of those easy to port games. Yeah, because of its simplicity. Lots of interesting details, bubbles that contained water that would sweep the stage,

spelling Xen for one-ups, hidden stages, warps, esoteric rules behind, okay, true ending B, yeah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so yeah, we've pretty much got it. Everything's there. And Bubblewobble has shown up on a lot of systems. It's one of those games that actually gets licensed for things like virtual console.

So it's even on the new NES Classic Edition. And who owns Taito at this point? Square Enix. Oh, Square Enix does? Wow, okay. Yeah. And that's one of the few properties from Taito that they bother to do anything with. There was like some elevator action stuff that shows up occasionally.

But for the most part, Taito. Yeah. And then Space Invaders. So it's one of like the three or four enduring Taito creations. They don't even release their own games. I'm surprised that they bought it with Taito. But I guess it's just like an easy way to get money out. How hard is it to make a Bubble Bobble Game?

Tito's really sort of like their arcade-focused arm, I think, now. Because they still make stuff like Group Coaster for the arcade. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like the iOS version. It's sort of, yeah. Yeah. So Arcade and Mobile type stuff every once in a while.

Yeah. Have you guys played any of the remakes? Bubble Bobble Old and New for Game Boy Advance? I haven't. That hideous DS game and just had the worst cover art.

Yeah, the cover art might be worse than the River City Ransom Game Boy Advance art. Is it worse than the Bustamove for Super NES? Or no, is PlayStation with the baby

with the spit bubble? At least that had a good but revolting concept behind it. This just is amateurish. Like the River City Ransom Game Boy Advance is like Penny Arcade fan art.

That's what it looks like. And this is just like they hired some guy at the street. Can you draw dinosaurs? Get in here, buddy. I'll give you a sandwich. They just took a screenshot of color, a dinosaur, for any of us. Yeah.

Squionics may own title now, but, you know, back when they were doing that sort of thing, they really licensed out the games and their franchises to, you know, different sorts of distributors across the globe, and they didn't always interpret their games that well for the marketing. Yeah, actually, there were two remakes for DS. There was Bubble Bobble Revolution. I think that's the one you're talking about. It's just really awful.

Like, the game itself looks as bad as the cover art. Yeah, the Revolution games are awful. And then double shot, which is not as bad. It kind of features a silhouette mirage style color matching mechanic, which I guess kind of blurs the boundary between bubble-bobble and bust-a-move, puzzle-bobble, which we'll talk about later. Which became the more popular version of this whole thing, I think. Alas.

Yeah. Was it more popular or was it just... The more viable, I think. Yeah, like, I agree with right. I wonder, I wonder if, yeah, I wonder which series is actually sold more. More ripped off. Yeah, that's for sure. snood

Yeah, so I actually missed out on bubblebopal old and new for Game Boy Advance That was kind of like the first attempt to Really consciously revisit the original game There was more than one old and game in the old and new series, right? Yeah, there was elevator action old and new Did that come out here? No. I didn't think so.

But I did import that one because I loved me some elevator action I knew you wrote about that, so I was asking so Well, like, so the old game was just the part of the arcade series Yeah, pretty much. What did the new entail? In Bubble Bobble? Yeah, like just new graphics? I could have told you a month ago.

Okay. That's the one thing I didn't look up on this whole list. I was just curious. No, I think it... Oh, God. I can't say... Sorry. It's lost of time and no one will ever care.

There's a lot of notes here. Yeah, I mean, that was back when... Let's not get fixated on one port. Yeah, I agree. A lot of ports and GBA. But anyway, the point is, Bubble Bobble Endures. Like I said, 30 years after its debut,

it's on the NES classic console, mini-consul. So, I mean, that's a pretty healthy sign of its... I would say a lot more European fans know it better from all the computer ports because it was on every computer as well. So not just any as. Oh, yeah, it's probably like Double Dragon where it had like 30 ports or something like that. Was there an Atari 2,600 version of Bubble Bobble?

Oh, God. And so why not? It might be now as a homebrew, I think. Yeah, that's too many care. I think the Double Dragon port had like one enemy at a time. Yeah. They just wait their turn on the side of the screen. Time to fight me now.

So that was bubble-bobble. Now it's time to get into the strange world of bubble-bobble 2, which is like five different games. is the real sequel. Ray, this is where we're going to need your help. Of course. So on my list here, I have Bubble Bobble Part 2. That would seem pretty straightforward.

But then there's Rainbow Islands, the story of Bubble Bobble 2, which is not the story of Bubble Bobble Part 2. It's a different story altogether. Yes. Then there's Bubble Bobble 2, aka Bubble Symphony. Yes. Then there's Parasol Stars, the story of Bubble Bobble 3,

or Parasol Stars, the story of Rainbow Islands 2, depending on who you ask. So that's not really bubble-bobble, too, but it does get into that sort of like, which sequel is this? What is this game? Yeah. They didn't pay a lot of attention to their numbering.

And a lot of the discrepancies of numbering kind of happened across different versions of the games. In regions. In regions, yes. And so it's a big mess. Yes. So why don't we talk about bubble-bobble part two first? because that's probably the game,

I was going to say the game Americans might know best because it was released here on NES. But then again, it was apparently released in really tiny numbers because that game sells for a lot of money now like every late-era Taito game on NES. It's like a 93 game or something very late. It was very late.

Yeah, I remember this being very disappointing. Like I rented it liking Bubble Bobble, and I found that it looked pretty neat, but it felt pretty sterile, didn't have the kind of life in it that the Bubble Bubble Bobble One had. Didn't have new music. Let's give it that.

Different music. The same time I was Stockholm syndrome into loving the original music. Oh, okay. I don't know. I think it looks better, obviously. It definitely looks very better. Like, everything has like a black outline around it

instead of having the stark black background. Sort of like Bomberman too on NAS as well. It's just kind of like upgrading graphics, but sort of keeping the same core gameplay intact. It does. It's prettier, faster, and has a greater variety in scenery, according to my notes. But it is largely identical in terms.

terms of play design. You know, there's like new stuff to do, but not a lot of it. There's some mini games, including like a volleyball match, which I think is just something you kind of stumble into, not randomly, but you have to like trigger it as a secret. And then after so many levels, I think 25 levels, every 25 levels or so, you fight a boss. So there's not just super drunk. There are bosses throughout the game. I think one of them is like a scorpion or something.

I haven't really played this game because I can't afford. a copy, but it's I don't know, it seems charming but again you know, do you really want to play this game all over again? And also, one big absence in this game was cooperative play. Yeah, I was going to say you're very elite here.

Yeah, sorry, I should have started by immediately condemning this game. Like saying, damn you, bubble, Bumble too. That's probably the sterility you're talking about Bob. You can't play with another person. It's true. It's a game for lonely children. And I was, but I stole.

They would eventually buy PlayStation's and play RPGs, while brown, dying their hair brown. Yes. There was like a weird sort of like abandoning of two-player simultaneous games on NES. Like after TMNT2, it's like you didn't really see that anymore. It was a lot of single-player-focused stuff. Yeah, our competitive. I guess because it made more sense on Super N-S.

Who knows? But that was kind of when co-op design took off in the arcades. Like once Ballers took over, that was what everyone wanted. Although I guess, you know, 93, that would have been the rise of fighting games. So maybe the idea was that competitive or cooperative play was falling by the wayside in favor of competitive play. They probably made the sprites too big. Yeah, I mean, honestly, there's probably just too much going on. I mean, you know, those advanced memory mappers on NES could do a lot, but they still had their limitations.

You were dealing with decade-old hardware at that point. So what is the price as of now? I assume you know these kind of things, Jeremy. No, I've stopped looking at Taito NES games, especially complete in box, because they just make me sad. But, I mean, that's, you know, Little Sampson, Power Blade 2, Surprise on Dinosaur Peak. Like, all of these games sell for upwards of $1,000 if you get them complete. It would be fine if they weren't all, you know, good. I mean, they are all good, basically.

Not great, but, you know, like, Tito really put in some extra effort. I mean, I love me some Power Blade, too. Yeah. I really wish I had bought that game when I had the opportunity. I wish I'd bought Little Simpsons. But anyway, yeah, so that's one Bobble Bobble 2, but that was only Bubble Bobble 2 on NES. That version did not show up anywhere else.

So then you get to Rainbow Islands, which was the arcade sequel, basically. And chronologically came first. Right. I guess we should have started with that, but I'm disorganized. It's fine, I think, just keep it going. We figure it out later. Rainbow Islands, the story of Bubble Bobble II.

So, yeah, like I said, that started in the arcades and really did feel like a full sequel to Bubble Bobble. It doesn't play at all alike. It's very different. But, like, the idea is you play as Bub and Bob, who are now humans, dressed like little geeks. Little chubby boys. Yeah.

I mean, it is, I guess, canon, because after they finished the first game, they get turned back into boys. They had an adventure in the cave of monsters and became boys again. I don't want to be a rosy-cheeked little boy. I want to be a dinosaur. I know.

Lame. But yeah, like that was Wasn't Rainbow Islands Like the first game Working Designs published? No, it's Parasal Stars. Okay. It's up next.

They added a bunch of fart jokes. I'm kidding. Did they publish Rainbow Islands or was that someone else? No. Okay. Rainbow Islands did show up on NES though. It did. I played that.

So there's two different versions. Two bubble bobbles on on NES. And two Rainbow Islands. No, there's two Rainbow Islands on NES? Yes. Wait. There's a Western.

version made in Europe and then the Japanese port. Whoa, I missed out on that. Oh, I didn't know this. Tell me more, Ray. One is good, one is not. Oh, okay. Is the Western one the... I bet the Japanese one is the good one. I honestly forget. I might have to, like, look it up here on my magic device. I mean, like, is one of them by Ocean or something? Yeah.

U.S. gold? Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, there you go. No offense to anyone who might be listening who, for, you know, whatever reason, worked at Ocean. It's, you know, it's a job. It's fine. Yeah, okay. So, so this game, Unlike Bobble Bobble Part 2, did not play like Bubble Bobble. I mean, yes, it's a single-screen platformer, except it's not. It's scrolls. So it's not even that.

But it's a platformer with chubby little characters. So, you know, you've got that going for it. And when you beat enemies, they turn into, like they're human enemies or humanoid enemies, a lot of them. But they turn into bubble-bubble monster sprites when you defeat them. So it kind of raises this question Like, what is the real form of these characters? Are Bob and Bob really supposed to be human? So my theory is

The Monster World is the afterlife. Sure. And when you kill the... Okay, so that's my theory. I'm just going to put it out there. Okay. And Bob and Bob were dead and killing Super drunk brought them the life as well boys.

It's a Reddit theory. Yes. All online theories are that thing was really dead this whole time. It's like a bad Twilight time. It was dead. They were playing around

bit too much with the Necronomicon, and shit got wild. The Cave of Monsters was actually a hellmouth. Yeah. Okay, so the big change in this game is that instead of blowing bubbles, you shoot rainbows. So someone talk about this, please. The rainbows are bigger than bubbles. They arc out in front of you, and you can basically use them as stair steps, essentially. Just keep layering them on.

And that's how you basically get up the stages later on. It's kind of strange. There's no animation for shooting the rainbow. just kind of just like extends out of you and like I don't know it felt kind of like cheap a little bit because Bob and Bob would open their mouths it's just like I want to see like a hand shoot out of a rainbow it just sort of like appears out of you it's like you know care bear stare it just comes out of their heart yeah exactly that's gross from their essence is it it's perfect that I like care I need a biological like backing to this it's a secretion okay so besides that also like

the rainbows fall after a certain amount of times and they'll just fall down to the screen And so you can also use that sort of like in the way that the bubbles were used to like cascade down. They can just fall down and hit enemies on the way down and sort of like, actually, it's a lot like burger time in a way. You just send these layers down the screen and you can get more enemies that way. Yeah, and you can barf out a whole lot of rainbows at a time. Yeah. So the game is, you know, kind of like a climbing game. You know, think like Yoshi Touch and Go or something like that where you're trying to get to the top. I don't want to think of the Yoshi Touch and Go.

Oh, come on. That game was good. It just wasn't a full, it didn't merit a full release. Yeah. It should have been a mini game on something else. I agree. But anyway, the point is this game did show up on DS. So there you go. No, that wasn't the point. The point was that, yeah, like, you can actually do some pretty interesting stuff in Rainbow Islands. I've never really wrapped my head around it, but I've watched, like, you know, time attacks and things like that. And like, wow, people are good at this game that I suck at. So there's something to it. There's some substance.

And the game, again, as with most Taito games, contains tons of injokes, you know, like Space Invader references, and there's stages that look like Arconoid. So if you love Taito, you love Rainbow Islands. And each of the game's 10 worlds has a boss battle. Yeah. Was that not a true? It's a big step up.

Wait, what? It's a big step up for Bubble Bobble. Yes. More than just one bosses. Yeah. I have one thing to add, though. Okay. The music I found really interesting, I want to play it if I can on here.

It is, but they got, um, they got Seinfeld's bassist to play chip tune music. Craver's about the bust in the rainbow islands. The funny thing is like, I feel like that's different enough to not be a litigious issue, but with later ports, they really backed away from that song. I feel like somebody at the company was like, we can't do this anymore.

Yeah, it's not in the S version. Yeah. The same thing. So, yeah. So there was rainbow stars. Actually, let's skip to number four here and talk about, or rainbow islands. Let's talk about,

there's rainbow islands. Now let's skip to number four on the list. We'll skip over number three for now of bubble bobble two's and talk about parasol stars. Okay, so that was the one that working designs published. Yeah, that was their first two. First game, yeah.

And this game also features human Bob and Bob, and it has a much more esoteric mechanic than the previous bubble-bobble games. It's getting more into like the jack-and-pop style where it's kind of complicated. Like your characters can't really attack directly, but they carry parasols, hence the name. Yes.

And it's like they, took the fact that there was like the water flooding mechanic and bubble bottle and said let's build a game around that. Yeah. So, so basically everything you do involves catching stuff on the tip of your parasol. So like if stuff falls from above,

you can hold it on your parasol and then you kind of like spin it around and then you can fling it forward. But you can also like kind of use your parasol as a weapon. Yeah. So it's strange. It's not nearly as like, oh, I get it as bubble bubble bubble was.

There are a lot of Japanese games that we're using umbrella as a weapon, and I love it. It's just very whimsical. Like, the most fragile thing that should never be swung around. It's just like they're shooting things out of it. They're hitting people with it. Sorry, right? No, no. I was going to say, you can think of that parasol as just like a bubble that's always stuck to you.

Yeah. Because you use it to hit it and it captures the enemy, and then you play them that way. Yeah, it reminds me of, what does it remind me of? I think I put in the notes. I didn't. Okay. Well, I did put in my notes that it's maybe the cutest game ever. I would like for someone to contest this.

No, I agree. I was going to say it's the platonic ideal of video game cuteness. Everything is very chubby and like adorable. I want to pinch everybody's cheek in the game. Ray seems to disagree. Oh, Ray. I think the later games are cute. The later arcade games.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I do. Well, Bubble Symphony is very cute. There's like an entire level where you're fighting these cat enemies that look just like Pushin. Like how can you beat that? I'm going to say this could be controversial on the cuteness argument. But I feel like adding more detail to things might subtract from the cuteness a little bit just like the shading and stuff.

I feel like the simple, chubby, very colorful graphics of this game make it a little cuter than bubble symphony. It strikes a balance. The character sprites are pretty flat. And then there's no shading on them, but the backgrounds are more shaded and stuff. So, yeah, they pop out more. So, yeah, that makes sense.

So, yeah, this one was, I admit I've never actually played it. It's pretty easy to find, isn't it? there's collections and stuff that have it. Oh. So it's just like me failing at life? I don't think it was collected too much. No. No?

Okay. It was a turbographic game. It was a PC engine game. I've only played it emulated and I played it a lot like when I was in high school. I love this game. And then ported in Europe where it was called the story of Rainbow Islands too. Right. Okay.

Well, me not being European and not having owned a PC engine back in the day or turbographics, I guess I missed out. But Bob, tell me, like what was it about the game that appealed you so much besides the cuteness. I think that was really it. And also, there was more variety in blah, blah, blah. Like I said, I love just all the items and different kinds of enemies in this game was sort of like the logical, I won't say conclusion, but next step or third step maybe, where it's just

like the same kind of action in a way, but with a little more variety to it. And again, the nicer graphics, nicer music. And did we say this was an arcade game first? No. It wasn't? Oh, it wasn't. No. I wasn't sure.

Actually, I don't think I said that. Okay, so it's only a PC engine game. Yeah. Wow, okay. Yeah. And then the port's again. I thought originally. It struck a good balance between arcade simplicity and sort of like platformery complication in a way.

I don't know if that makes sense. But it wasn't as simple as Bubble Bobble. There was a little more to it. Oh, and by the way, apparently I think on the Japanese cover of the box, it's a misprint. It has to be a misprint. It says the story of Bubble Bobble Bobble 2. The actual game and everything else says Bobble 3 on the Japanese version. I've not actually seen it in my hands in person, so I have.

I don't know for sure. I've only seen pictures of it, but I think it's misprinted. Okay. So that just helps this whole lot of level too. Isn't three bad luck in Japanese? No, it's four. It's four. It's four.

Okay, yeah, she, right? That's racing. Yep. What? Okay. So anyway, and that takes us back to number three, which is actually number four now. So that's just leading to the confusion. Sorry, Bob. No what? Bubble Bobble 2, Bubble Symphony. And this one was also an arcade game, right?

Yes, this one. Yes. Arcade and Saturn for this one. Oh, yeah. And that's it. It hasn't been on anything else, right? I think that was in one of the legends. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. So this was, yeah, I love this because, you know, the Japanese name was bubble symphony, right?

And then for every other region, they just called it Bubble Bobble, Bobble, too. Which is like, couldn't you at least look back to a little bit to see the other games you made? Remember that other game that you distributed? So was there an American arcade version of this ever? I don't know. It's weird. It's weird. Maybe one of the things where it's like in Maine but called World, so it's just not necessarily.

necessarily American. It's weird. Maybe the distribution was weird in Ohio, but I never saw like Taito games in arcades ever. Like I saw none of these games that were in my arcades. Yeah, this isn't the time where like, you know, American arcades are pretty much, you know, on the way out. And a lot of it was either Neo-Gio or NBA Jam. Yeah. So I think, you know, Mortal Kombat.

Unless you were in like some very luck. Excuse me. Yeah. Unless you were in some very fortunate test market. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to agree. Like, Taito kind of disappeared after Darius and. what was it, Ninja Crusaders with the...

Ninja Warriors, okay, with the triple screens. I remember those because, like, look at those graphics and the screens, wow, crazy, what the hell. And then, yeah, I don't remember seeing Taito game. They had some trouble in the 90s, yeah. A lot of their 90s arcade games are not that great. Like, this game I learned about through messing around with MAME, like, oh, there's more bubble-bobble games.

Okay, I'm on board, and that's where I played the most of this. It seems like Taito distribution in the U.S. just kind of sucked in general in the 90s because that's why all those NES games are so expensive. and why they license everything out all the time to like everybody. Right. Yeah, so like Parasol Stars

probably wouldn't have come here if it weren't for working designs, as my guess. Yeah. So this makes sense, yeah. So you never saw Bubble Symphony ever. We're hearing about it for the first time here on Retronauts.

It's really, really good. I can see why they would call it Bubble Bobble too, though, because it really, like this is the next Bubble Bobble. Like, it is Bubble Bobble, but you can play as twice as many characters There's four characters now. It's crazy.

It's like the outfoxies, but with bubbles. To make a famous Bob Mackey analogy, I feel like Bobbubble I want is Legend of Zelda. This one's like a link to the past. Like same sort of mechanics. Damn. More complicated, but delivering on the same sort of essentials. I'll buy that. It feels like a sort of Nintendo style remake in that way.

Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that works. Okay, sure. Thank you. No argument. Finally. But unlike a link to the past, this has not been.

in the black hole around from whose gravity that franchise has never escaped. True, but I don't think they have many chances after this to develop more of these style games. Don't you remember Bubble Bobble Ocarina of Time? Revolutionized 3D bubble blasting. Well, puzzle Bobble is the

black hole, if we're being honest. That's true. Be targeting, I remember that. Yes. So, yeah, even though, okay, you could play as four different characters, but it was only two-player simultaneous. There was boblen, bublin, which are the Dinosaurs versions of Bob and Bob. They were also known as Bubby and Bobby in America.

Of course they were. It's not just the games that have six names. It's also the characters. And then there's Kululun and Khoron. And I don't know anything about those characters. Like there's probably an extensive biography on them on some fan wiki somewhere, but I don't know what that would be. Anyway, so yeah, you could play as one of four different characters, but only two people.

So it's like the two-player version of the Gauntlet Arcade Cabinet or something. There are way more enemy types, tons of bosses, but it's still pretty much like mechanically like Bubble Bobble I. It really doesn't try to reinvent the wheel or the bubble. It's just like, here's what you love, but more of it. Yeah. Well, again, that's sort of what Taito did in that period because they also did elevator action returns.

It did Archanoid returns, which sucks. I wish every game could be as good as elevator action return, if only. See? but Arkenoid isn't. Arkeno returns. And this game has even more Taito fan service than ever, not just like Space Invaders in Arkanoid, but stuff like Pocky and Rocky.

Like, they dig deep in this game. Oh, yeah. It's just like, if you love Taito, you really love Bubble Symphony. Exactly. Or something like that. Anyway, and each character has slightly different attributes, but I haven't really played much of this game

and certainly haven't experimented with Koroon and Kululun. So can you guys? speak to how different the characters are? It's probably just like speed and bubble distance and a number of bubbles, I assume. I think I only played as the dinosaurs because I didn't care about these other characters, and it felt pretty similar to... I mean, they are kind of like the

cousin Vance and cousin... Cousin Oliver? I can't remember the Duke Boy Replacements. The Duke Replacements. Yeah. Coy and Vance, that's it. I mean, they would show up in the... I mean, Koroon and Koi even kind of sound alike. They would be all over the puzzle

games, but I actually didn't ever know their names. Like, oh, it's that thing. I get it. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Oh, it's, I'm making the connection here.

All right. Well, anyway, that was the tortuous journey. That was Bubble Bobble 2's. And now let's go on to Bubble Bobble 3. Bubble memories, the story of Bubble Bobble 3. We're just going to say there's one Bubble Bobble 3. Ah. But paraphral.

Oh, oh, oh, God, I've offended Ray. What? No, it's just, no. You're not offended. I'm just like, oh, no, but there's still Parasol stars and all this other shit. Well, we did talk about Parasol Stars. I know. I'm just saying they're called Bow Blubel 3.

I know. But let's pretend. Let's pretend we're living in a happier universe. So I feel like there are timelines in place here. The official Bobbubel timeline where... All right. Super drunk is destroyed. The hero of time.

You're right. Well, it kind of makes sense because in one timeline, the dinosaurs turn back into boys and their adventures continue. On the other one, they stay dinosaurs. The bad ending. Boblin fails. Or Gannon wins. All right. Super drunk wins.

Yeah. They stay dinosaurs. Which is my preferred timeline, to be honest, even though I love Parasol Stars. So I feel like there are two timelines in place here. All right, Bob, this episode is going to be going up at the end of Thanksgiving or at the end of November around Thanksgiving. So your task by then is to come up with a timeline diagram for Bubble Bob. I'll write it for fandom and immediately get fired. Who cares about this, Bob?

So, so yes, this is your task. This is your assignment from this episode. I'll try to get away with it. All right. So bubble memories, the story of Bubble Bobble 3 is. By the way, before anything, I apologize. This is the game that was out alongside Elevator Action Returns and Archinode Returns. Oh, okay.

So, yeah. And it definitely looks like it. Yeah. But not in a good way. No. Like, I like the way Elevator Action 2 looks because it's like really, like, detailed animation and lots of enemy variety and just crazy stuff happening in the screens, lots of environmental effects, buildings blowing up and rocket ships lifting off. This game has that kind of early 90s look that you saw. and stuff like

like Buster Brothers is that what I'm thinking of and paying and that sort of thing where it's like certain ports of Tetris I mean basically like every kicks clone and like Pichinko

porn game like just a scan I mean there's no porn in this one that I'm aware of but it's like yeah it's like a bad low resolution scan in the background and then the graphics in front for some reason they're isometric like kind of with that

double dragon perspective on them and that doesn't work with the backgrounds and it doesn't work with the character sprites so it doesn't really look that good the characters look nice and there's lots of lots happening on the screen I mean in that respect

I can see the connection with the elevator action returns because that was a game that would just like throw waves of enemies at you and you'd like blow up an entire floor of a building Yeah. And you can just like blast bubbles until it fills the screen here. And there's tons of enemies on this one too. Yeah, it was on their F3 system, which is sort of like Titles equivalent to the NeoGeo.

So it was pretty powerful compared to their earlier stuff. And I think it was called Bubble Memories because it was 10 years after the first bubble bubbles. This is a 96 game. I mean, I'm going to assume that's what that is referenced. I mean, it makes sense. I don't know if it. Who knows? Remember your bubbles.

It's just one of those soft words to use. Yeah. Long a symphony memory. Tim true summers will be there and laughing too. So the big mechanical change for this one was the addition of giant bubbles. You could, instead of just shooting lots and lots of bubbles, which you could do, you could fill up the screen. But if you held down the bubble button, the belching button, whatever it is, beef or belch bubbles, you would charge up. And your charge shot would be a huge bubble, which you could basically trap.

multiple enemies in. It was basically a score thing. Like the more enemies you could trap in a giant bubble, the more points you would get. So it really, it's still, you know, even in 96 or whatever, it still had that classic arcade ethos where it was really about getting a high score. Yes, okay, go beat the game, get to the end, but who cares unless you can, you know, command the top score slot? Yeah. Like if, you know, Twin Galaxies doesn't want to hear about it, no one wants to hear about it. Yeah. God, I'm looking at some of these screenshots and you're right. this is, they're pretty bad. It's like someone put in their, like, their photo CD or something while you're playing

the game. It's like, it's like, oh, I'm playing Bubble Bobble on top of Encarta. Yeah, exactly. It's like there's a picture of a lion's face poorly put on top of another background. This happened a lot in arcade games. Yeah, no, I've definitely seen it. It's bringing back some bad memories. Man, scanning was badass back then.

I used to, like, dream about having a scanner so I could make comics and, like, put the, oh, it'd be so amazing. Imagine how much that cost them. Yeah, exactly. It's like, you're going to play Bubble Bubble Bubble Bubble Bubble Bubble on top of a a picture of a cheetah, and you're going to like it. We've got so much money to create this garbage. Yes. That's a real cheetah. Those don't come cheap.

Sunk cost, my friends. Takiuki had to stand there and slowly scan this thing over a humongous PC for your sake. By God, you're going to enjoy it. And it took Photoshop 1.0 at least half an hour to save each file. Oh, God.

So anyway, okay, we'll stop making fun of the way the game looks. Have you guys played Bubble? memories. It's only way less in symphony. Yeah, to be honest I remember symphony a lot more. These backgrounds are not very familiar. I think I would remember just playing on top of

distorted wildlife pictures more than I do now. But I mean, I like the bosses are very cool. Like I'm looking at pictures right now and I see like a giant like, yeah, dragon floating dragon boss. It looks awesome. Like I like how the characters themselves look. Yeah, this is one. It's on Taito Legends 2,

I want to say. I know I've had access to it, but it's one that I just never had any interest in playing because it's just like bubble-bobble but uglier. Like without the charm. It was that period. I mean, the only one, again, out of those three I mentioned, it's like elevator action is the only one that really lasts.

All the goodness went to that game. Yeah, yeah. Squandered. Okay, so that's basically the end of the original bubble-bubble games. From this point on, it becomes remakes, re-hashes, and sort of limp attempts to follow up on that. Oh, so limp. So we'll get to that after we take a break so we can clear out the farts.

We're back, and the methane's gone. It's amazing how much of that stuff can fit into a little studio like that. And speaking of farts, let's talk about all the remakes of Bubble Bobble. Oh, boy. I thought we already touched this. We had some revolutions in here. We did. Well, it's not just the remakes of that game, but many of the remakes for many of the games.

They're very not good for the most part. Yeah. So, yeah, there's just a few here to talk about. but all of them are kind of a little, like, what's the word? Disappointing. A let down. A travesty. A shame.

Okay, I think we got it. So I actually have only played one of these, which was Rainbow Islands Revolution. And that was enough to make me say, I think I want to pass on these. So gross looking, like pre-rendered sprites, right? Badly animated pre-rendered sprites? I'm trying to remember There's so many of these that have pre-rendered sprites

I can't even remember What I don't get about all of this It was all touch-based though Like you controlled everything With the touchscreen Oh I'm thinking about the PSP one Like I guess they were thinking Kirby Canvas curse

Like draw some rainbows But Kirby's canvas curse was a game That showed off the inherent potential of the DS Rainbow Islands Revolution Is not No

Here's the thing. I don't really understand why Taito, whoever controlled them at this point, they were really doubling down on Rainbow Islands for some reason when I feel like there was no Rainbow Islands nostalgia. No one I knew ever cared about this game. Everyone knew Bubble Bobble. Exactly. No one cared about Rainbow Island, so it wasn't just me. Okay. We don't want to play the damn kids. I mean, it was a fine game, but I feel like Bubble Bobble is much more appealing. Yeah, well, I mean, there's only so many times you can mine the same hole in the ground.

True, true. So I think they just, by necessity, had to move along to other. franchises. That's my thought. Let's see, what else was there? There was Bubble Bobble Plus, not just plus, but plus, it's got an exclamation points so you know what's good.

That was for Xbox Live Arcade and Wii for the Wii 60 fan. It looks like Mighty Number 9. Owned. Wow. I'm sorry. Well, people say that game looks like an XBLA game from Olden Times. I was looking at these graphics. I'm like, oh yes. Yeah, yeah, there is that kind of like emptiness to it.

Yeah, the sort of like character modeling 101 to the polynots, yeah. Yeah, and... Not a lot of life. So, oh, someone highlighted the important part that I was... I almost buried the lead. Bubble Bobble, it's standard fare, but they finally added the four-player co-op

that was missing from Bubble Symphony, I want to say. Yeah. So four characters, all of whom are just like Blue Toad, Yellow Toad, Red Toad, except Bob and Bob. But you can play as four people together. So that's cool. Do the other characters have names? like bib and bab.

I don't know. Bluebub and, I don't know. I think part of the reason that the levels look so sparse is because they expanded the size of them and made everything inside smaller so that you would have more space to have four characters.

Because if you, let's be fair, like if you played Bubble Bobble with the same screen proportions as the arcade game, the original arcade or NES game, with four people at a time, that would get really crowded and really difficult to manage.

So they did need to kind of space it out a little bit. I guess the question then becomes, like, does adding a fourth player here, is that like a deleterious effect? Does that hurt the game? Sometimes it is in lots of games, to be honest. Like, it seems like, oh, that would be the thing I want. But then you actually get it and realize

that wanting a thing is better than having it. I guess it depends. I've never played this one, but it depends on how things escalate with more players, if it's tuned to increase enemies or power-ups with more players. If it's tuned that way, it could work. But it does seem kind of busy

for Bubble Bubble, that kind of gameplay. Yeah, as opposed to like Bomber Man, where everyone basically has to work their way towards each other. And, you know, and then something like now where we have Towerfall Ascension where it's like, yeah, it's pretty manic. Yeah, I don't know that anyone ever actually

played this four-player co-op, so I don't know if it's possible to say if it worked. It's awful, so no. Okay, there you go. Do we mention Rainbow Islands PSP, the best part about that? No, we haven't. Dutal. Well, the character designs are...

This is not Rainbow Islands Revolution. It's Rainbow Islands Evolution. Yeah, this is the one with the really bad pre-rendered graphics. Or in Japan, Rainbow Islands hurdy-gurdy Diplocan. Sure, of course. Which is... Who's herdy-gurdy-gritty? Is that Super Drunk's name in...

No, it's what Bob and Bob have. They play hurdy-gurdy-girties. What? Is that where the rainbows come from? In this one, maybe. Wait, what is a hurdy-gurdy? It's like a... Go ahead.

Oh, God. It's like a hand-cranked, not like a musical box, but it plays music. Yeah. Shaped like a... Weird, okay. It's like almost like an accordion that you play with a crank. Yeah, kind of like that. But it's shaped like a...

There's like a PS2 game called Herdy Gros. Unrelated. Anyway. A water gland. A water gland. You mean a bladder? Yes. Well, as...

We don't know those hot water bottles, those old school water bottles. We haven't got the liquid kits yet. Sorry, I am never good with words. That's why I'm a writer, not a speaker. Right. Okay, so my notes on Evolution for PSP are, it's like rainbow islands, but intensely hideous. So, yeah, Bob, to your point,

this is like the nadier of visuals for this series. I mean, Bubble Bobble Plus looks Spartan, but this is just like offensive. It's like, who would greenlight this? It reminds me of there was a fire emblem game for the DS where everything was pre-rendered in a really ugly way. I guess they were trying to go for something. It doesn't look as bad as this,

but it's just like that is just not appealing anymore. And they really should have learned better by like 2004, 2005, whenever this was. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see, there's also Rainbow Islands Towering Adventures, a time-attack game based on Rainbow Islands. So this is actually a good comparison to Yoshi's Touch and Go because it really is a race to the top as opposed to some of the other remakes, which are a race to the bottom.

I would say it's even uglier than what it's been mentioned, even more than Bubble Bobble Blubble Plus. It's just so unappealing. It's the number one culprit in the sort of what I call that XBLA disease where like everything sort of has the same sort of cruddy, puffy look to the character designs. It all moves a little too fast. and all, you know, it's all obviously, like, I don't know, direct Dixie. I can't explain it. Really flat lighting, like everything is just, yeah. You just worked from the basic elements of the DevKit, and it's just like, yeah.

I mean, to be fair, when you only have a week to put together a game for a $10,000 budget, there's only so much you can do. I guess, I just wish. I feel like these are just, you know, kind of the new shovelware, basically. No one will ever ever play them again, I don't think so. They'll never be available again. I mean, if Major Nelson is like, hey, guess what? Rainbow Island's towering adventures now on Xbox One backward compatibility

That will happen That's when I sell my system Yeah I'll demote him in the Xbox military then Oh god Okay there is one remakeish kind of game That we haven't touched on And it's one I haven't been able to play

But it actually looks good It's one that I would play If I could ever find it But I don't think I've ever seen it And that is Rainbow Island's Puddy's Party And I probably If I did see it and didn't know like oh, maybe this is a cool game.

That name alone would be enough to make me say, no. But this game is for Wonder Swan. Now, it's a black and white Wonder Swan game, not for Wonder Swan color. So, you know, part of the appeal of rainbow islands is its color. Yeah.

But I'm willing to accept that compromise as someone who is chronicling the Game Boy. That's okay. Sometimes you just got to lose the color. But this system makes use of the Wonder Swans vertical orientation, you know, you could turn the Wonderswan sideways, and it was designed so you could play it that way. So all of a sudden, you know, you get like a Tate mode screen.

It's like tall instead of wide. And for a game where you're going upward, that makes total sense. Like, again, I haven't played this game myself. I've never seen it in person, but from what I've seen of it in videos, I feel like this idea works really well, and I would love to visit that sometime. I'm going to keep an eye out for it. I watch videos of it. It does retain you over the rainbow rip-off song, too.

Perfect. It looks like it plays well with the vertical screen. So, yeah, I guess if you're in the market, if you still have a Wonderswan. It's just a little weird because, like, you don't play as Bob and Bob. You play as Patti. It should have been Patty, I think, but even in English they wrote it as Puddy. It's really weird. Is that like how Pocky and Rocky have Becky and Bob so Bobbob have putty?

I guess. It's like a character. It's like, let's mention this character we're just introducing in the title. Sure, why not? So it's just this cartoon girl who has no real relation to Bub and Bob necessarily. And, yeah, I don't know, the art of it, the art of the character and everything else just seems kind of like really dogeny, like half-assed and cheap. But the game looks okay. The game itself looks fine.

It's just kind of like weird, one of those weird sort of like late 90s aesthetics. I think that's it for the remakes, right? And sequel-ish type things and one's worth making fun of. There's probably some mobile games, but I feel like those are never really worth. I played bubble bubble bubble double for iPhone. Okay. It's like old and new. It has a port of the old game, but also like this new mode that's sort of like a weird tower defense thing.

It's basically Bub standing in the center of the screen and like outer space and the enemies come in and you just tap on them and it's like combo stuff involved. It's, yeah. I might have missed this. I'm a little sick. Are there any Game Boy ports of this stuff? There's no Game Boy Bubble Bobble. There is Game Boy Bubble Wobble. Okay.

In fact, that's coming up pretty soon in my. list of things to look for and pay too much money for. Have you played it? Is it worth commenting on? Okay. I'm only up to like August 1990 and playing Game Boy games. I don't really get to play ahead. I know it's a bit different from the NES version.

I mean, for one thing, it's like zoomed in, so it's not like single screen or anything, but it does have a bit more. Oh, they kept the sprite sizes rather than the screen proportions. Yeah, I'd say it has a very minimal sort of questy feel to it, not exactly. Yeah. Before we close this off this discussion, I'm kind of surprised that there was no. platformer, like a traditional platformer with the bubble bubble characters. They just always kept the same

arcady setup. I mean, I guess Parasol start, I'm sorry, I guess Rainbow Islands is kind of a platformer because it's like a stage that scrolls upwards. But then they just went back to, you know, the more arcadey stuff. Well, we'll sort of get into the platformery stuff

in the Bubble Bobble extended family portion of this podcast. That's right. There are some. Yeah, so as I was saying, like we've kind of wrapped up the core bubble-bobble games. I was going to include Puzzle-Bubble Bust-a-Move in this episode, but we really don't have time.

I'd rather talk about some of the other sort of spinoffy type games, and then we're going to run out of time. So I will make Puzzle-Bobble the next episode of Game Boy Micro. Look forward to it. I want to at least say Bust-a-Move was such a bad title for those games. It was such a bad idea. I mean, they were like, well, people like that rap song. It's not even rap.

But then there was a game called Bust-a-Moo. that actually made sense. But they had to rename that busted groove because Taito cyber squatting. I guess I don't know. Is it better to bust a move or a groove? Who knows?

Moves. Tidal also renamed Camelry to on the ball in this country on Superannians. Isn't Camelry an actual like a really antiquated word for something? If it is, it means to me.

Is it like the infantry but on Camelback? Like Lawrence of Arabia or something? I try and Google it, Bob. See if you get anything besides the game. I'm pretty sure I looked this up at some point when I was playing I was like, Camel Tree, what is that?

This is not the Camel Tree episode. No. Camel tree is where they grow your camel toes. Fantastic game. That's a really disgusting thing. Thanks. So now we're going to talk about the Bubble Bobble family. This is games like Chack and Pop, which you've already discussed,

that are not technically part of Bubble Bobble. They don't necessarily have anything to do with Bubble Bobble. They're not part of the split timeline canon that Bob is going to create for us. but they just have a certain some sort of spiritual connection. They feel like, oh, yeah, the same people who made Bubble Bob will probably work on this and there's a lot of the same ideas involved.

And we'll skip ahead to the second game on the list here just to address your point, Bob, the Bubble Bobble Platformer. I mean, if that's not Kiwi Craze, New Zealand story, what the hell is? I immediately thought of that as soon as you brought up the extended universe. I wonder about that.

What? I put it more towards Liquid Kids, really, but I think not that New Zealand story is any way bad. Oh, it's good. No, it's seriously like one of my top three title games for sure. But like I don't think it has enough related to Bubble Bobble to really consider it in that sort of spiritual. I guess, but I mean, it just like the first time I played New Zealand Story, I was like, this is related to Bubble Bobble. Like this game. The physics of it, yeah.

I didn't know that it was a tight. game. I didn't know anything about it. I played it blind. I was just like, there's a connection here. There's got to be. And yes, they're Taito games. I'm sure there is. I just, I, me, I wouldn't put it on the family tree necessarily. You're not shooting bubbles. You're shooting whatever you can find. Arrows. Yeah, a lot of times, yeah. But there's other weapons too. And yeah, it's really the jump physics, I think. I mean, one, it's the cuteness. It's adorable as hell. It's the cutest game, aside from that other game that I said was the cutest game ever. It's right up.

there. Like, it's really charming. You play as a little flightless bird, a kiwi. And, um, this means that in order to fly, you have to, like, hijack hot air balloons from bad guys and things like that. It's just like this another, okay, another, another connection that it has to bubble bubble. It's just like the sense of it's simple, but there's all the stuff you can do. Like, there's this kind of like overwhelming enemies show up and it's all sort of random and weird. And if you experiment with it, you're like, can I do this? It often turns out you can. And so you're trying to rescue other birds. And instead of being a single screen platformer, you scroll around sometimes side to side, sometimes up and down, sometimes free scrolling in lots of directions. The levels can get pretty big and

complicated. I've never played the game all the way through, but it's just, yeah, like you can pick up a bow and arrow and you can shoot it at guys and hot air balloons. And I don't know, it's just, it's great. I really like it. It's very satisfying, yeah. Yeah. And, and, to me it really does feel like to me it really does feel like it is part of that family. It's, you know, like a cousin. It's not a sibling.

It's maybe a cousin with like sandy blonde hair instead of black curly hair. The cousin from New Zealand. Yeah, exactly. It's the Kiwi cousin. Taito was smart to really hone in on one of nature's best mistakes, the Kiwi. Just like Sega chose the echidna. It's like that's a

mistake of nature, but it's such a great character to have in your game. And, yeah, it's more technical platforming. Like, there's a lot of stuff you can do with the jumping, and I'm actually not very good at it. But, man, I want them to put this on the next NES classic edition. I mean, they put bubble bubble on there. They can put Kiwi Krays on there, by God.

For some reason, this is completely unrelated to Kiwi Krays or New Zealand's sort, but I always confuse this with a much newer game that I forget the name of that also has a Kiwi kind of bird in it that's made by like Dutch people. No, no, that's another one. What? There's another one? Tokitori. Tokitori, yeah.

Yeah, so that's all like a confluence of Kiwi and bird platformers in my head that I always confuse with each other. I see. Was he a Kiwi? I think he's just a chick. I think he's just like a chicken chick. But it's like the small yellow birds. Yeah, yeah. I never played Ivy the Kiwi.

That's how you're supposed to say. That's true. I don't know why. Upspeak. Yes, it's all the rage. Okay, so New Zealand Story has been ported to a few different systems, but it was also remade as New Zealand Story Revolution for DS. No. Unlike the other Revolution game.

it wasn't complete garbage. It's not great, but it's tolerable. One of these had like a game-breaking bug. Yes, there is one that has a game-breaking bug. I don't think it was that one. Is that or bubble-bubble? I think it was bubble, yeah, it's bubble-bub that had the game-breaking bug. Yeah.

Like, you actually can't play a pass level 60 or something. In an era where things that seemingly have a big audience are only released digitally, it's very funny to think that this was a cart released. Like the New Zealand Story Revolution cart was released for $30. I assume that no one bought it. I bought it. Oh, you bought it. Okay.

Well, then you learned a lesson. Yeah, it was okay. Okay. I guess it was, you said it was the least defensive. I never, I only played the NES version of this. Yeah, like compared to Bubble Bobble Revolution or Evolution, like this game was fine. It didn't really improve on the original, but at the same time, it didn't make me a shame to like the original. So that's more than I can say for Bubble Bobble Revolution.

It's funny. Like, I was talking about Rainbow Islands, like not having a big following here. I guess people are aware of it, but it's just like who, like, I guess people don't need to ask for something for it to exist. But it's like, who was this for? It wasn't even like using the same localized name, really, as the original NES one that we got. No. It's a little thing called the DS Gold Rush. Oh, that did exist.

You're right. Everything was fair game. Remember when everything collapsed in 2009? Yeah. Good times. Oh, you know what? I got this all out of chronological order again. Yeah.

I talked about check and pop, and I totally skipped the Fairyland story. Yeah. All right, Ray, set me right. That's one I brought up. You jerk? No. Oh, God.

Fairyland story came out before. No, it came out after Bubble Bobble, but I feel like it was made before in a way. It really looks like... Kind of like Sabre Wolf versus Night Lore. Wait, did I even say that right? No, I think Bubble Bobble was made before but came after. Shit.

These dates aren't on these notes, I can't. Okay, anyway, nevertheless, Fairland Story is very similar to Bubble Bobble because it is single screen and you clear out enemies in a certain similar way. However, you play a little witch-type, grilly character. One year before, Bubble Bobble.

Yeah. Oh, yes, okay. Never mind anyway. And the backgrounds, you know, they have more detail. It's not just a black screen most of the time. They are kind of like Castle-looking stages a lot of time and just have a bit more detail to them. And it is, I think, a bit cuter in that sense.

I think that all helps it be a lot cuter than Bubble Bobble does. And that whole sort of like fairy tale sort of aesthetic. I could be reading too much into this, but I feel like there's a weird element of body horror in this game Oh, you're thinking of the, don't come around here no more video. Yes, exactly. Actually, that's perfect because you turn enemies into cake. Then you push them off of something, and the cake just like melts.

It's really, I mean, like, this was the inspiration for Tom Petty's music video. I don't think most people know that. No, that's true. That's true. It's too bad you're not blowing up like Alice in Wonderlands or whatever. But I think about when you pop the enemies, they just fly off the screen. And this one, they just like turn into cake and melt. It's like kind of creepy. I assume they're not, they weren't going for that, but when I was watching this,

So I was like, ugh. Well, what are cakes supposed to do? I guess so. Maybe it's ice cream cake. It could be. What a fate. So my notes say that the hooks for bubble bubble in this game include the earworm music. But Ray, can you hum that off the top of your head?

No. Okay. The kind of power-ups you acquire, the transformation of enemies, this time into cakes instead of into bubbles, the chain combos, and the single-screen play. Yep. I mean, not much else to say. Yeah. Beyond that. think it is a better looking game.

All right. So we're kind of building up here to Liquid Kids. Next is Pop and Pop. And I forgot to refresh my memory on what this one is. But my notes say, imagine of space invaders

were magical drop, but also King and Balloon. It's really hard to describe, I wrote. And yes, like this description that I wrote makes no sense to me. First of all, I have to describe what King and Balloon is.

King and Balloon is like Space Invaders, except like you're trying to keep a balloon from stealing your king. So this is like puzzle, Bobble, except you are firing vertically only instead of at an angle that seems like, in a way.

Based on what I was watching, it seems like it's like a prototype or like an earlier form of puzzle bubble, yeah. I don't, like, I need to, is this game even possible to play anywhere? Is it only like an arcade game? I think there's a

PS1 port. Okay. That's the thing with so many of these, I just, if they were arcade games in America, I never saw them. and I probably only played them in maim when I was pulling around with maim. So it's strange,

so many of these things are just lost. Someone really had, yeah, someone really had to be wanting to buy new title games in the late 90s or so. Truly. And I'm sure those games are now sell for hundreds of dollars

because no one bought them. No doubt. Next up is don't doodogodon and don't doco don't too, which are platformers starring little gnome dudes. I know one of these showed up on Famicom. Did both of them?

I think it might have just been the first one. I always see them at shops in Japan, and they catch my eye because they use that clay collage style, like the diorama of cover art. It looks like Picman. It looks like... I just want to like buy a collection of games that have that box art style. Or it's like a cartoony character, but also in like a realistic background. Yeah, yeah, it's great. I'm looking at it now.

It's cool. So this one actually feels a lot to me like Parasol Stars and that you're carrying a weapon. In this case, it's a hammer, a mallet, and you hit enemies with a hammer, grab them. when they're stunned and throw them in other bad guys. So very similar mechanically to Parasol stars. But it's more like your power is sort of integral, integral as opposed to Parasol stars where you're dependent on stuff in the environment,

like water droplets. I believe Dawn is the Anamontopoeia for hitting something. Something like that. Striking something. And doco means where? Yes. Yes, it does. Simper Ubi, Sub-Uvi, I don't know.

It's funny because, like, 2, the sequel, is a platformer for Famicom. Oh, okay. Yeah, Don Dokodan was a Famicom game as well. All right. They made a Famicom for it. And PC Engine. And PC Engine, too. Yeah, but number two is just like a weird Mario-ish platformer.

So there you go. There's your platformer. And also, finally, Liquid Kids. Yay. The grossest title for a game. It's really, no, Toilik Kids is worse. But Liquid Kids is pretty, pretty, it's like, well, it's like Metal Gear. Like Liquid Snake had some kids.

No, it was kid boss, had liquid kids and solid kids. If it helps, the Japanese name is Mizubaku Daibokin, which is literally like water bomb adventure. Oh, I like that more. Liquid Kids was a localized name. Yeah. Someone wasn't working very hard that day. This is another game that seems to be built around the bubbles that you can break in bubble-bobble, like the water bubbles. Absolutely.

Like that element keeps recurring in these games. Including the waterfall effect. Jets of Water. What are you playing us in this game? It looks like a pug. I can't tell what it is. Like I was watching videos of this this morning to see what this game was about. It's like this weird like platypus pug-looking character.

I could. Oh, actually it is a platypus. Okay, yeah, yeah. It's a platypus named hippo. So thanks a lot, Taito, for clearing that up. Words don't mean anything. It's a platypus named hippo that looks like a pug. So there's many things going on with this.

Who's looking for his girlfriend. How did that, okay. It's more like Kimmera kids. If you don't have a girlfriend, this guy got one, so feel bad. Come on now. Okay. It's a good game, though. It's really fun.

It looks cool. It looks great. This is what I mean. Instead of New Zealand story, this should be the one that really lift up as part of the family because obviously it has the bubble stuff. But I mean, a Kiwi is much more, like you can look at that and grasp it as opposed to a pug named hippo that's a. It's a platypus.

Come on. It can be called a platypus. It's not that hard to figure out. I guess that's nature's other mistake. Yes. But no... The Tidal Mistake series, yeah. Nature's Mistobble, no, this is the mistake franchise.

I guess only the Arcadian came out in America, again, probably in very small numbers, because there are other ports that I've never seen. Like so many of these, I probably would have played if I had the ability to encounter them in the wild. Yeah, there's another contemporary PC engine port, but that didn't come out here. Yeah, there's a bunch of these games that I've barely touched and need to just spend the rest of my life playing. I mean, yeah, it is tragic because, like, like, I have. I said, New Zealand story I love and stuff like Arkanoid and Camelry. It's like the late

80s and early 90s title arcade games are some of the best ever, I'd say. And yet, you know, they did not really reach a lot of, a lot of this region of the world. I think they just really doubled down on puzzle bobble because that was the most viable thing they could do for consoles, it seemed like, for as long as

they did. And we didn't talk about it, but I guess it's funny, they had an Asamanga Daio version. That's pretty great. Yeah, yeah. That's true. So that pretty much wraps it up for the series. Like I said, we'll do a, or I'll do, or someone will do a micro episode on Puzzle Bust to Move. But before we wrap, I'd like to do a little listener mail. Yes, that's right.

Listener mail. It's even by email as opposed to just like people reading comments. Yes, electronic mail. I've heard about it. I have a private server. It's great. Actually, by the time this goes out, that will... I heard you delete emails, Jeremy.

I did. I delete a bunch of them. Where are the UFOs? especially if they come from annoying PR people I don't like. So here's from Matthew J. Bubble Bobble is very near and dear to my heart. It's one of those games where I grew up playing the Game Boy port way more than the NES1.

We should have had him on for this one then. For years, I'd bring it up in conversation and no one I ever met had played any version of it until I was in my 20s and found podcasts like this one. Thanks for making me feel like less of an outcast. I'm really sorry that we took 10 years to bring you into the family here with a warm embrace. And then didn't talk about the Game Boy version.

A boxed copy of the NES version is one of the jewels of my collection. It's great. Let's see. Paul Bates says, oh, here's a British guy. I played bubble-bobble on the specky. That's how I knew. Since that's, that's, oh, that's a Sinclair Spectrum to you Americans. When I was around, when I was about eight around my friend Ben's house,

my abiding memory of it was how useless I was at it. I couldn't even finish it with the infinite lives. cheat. I gave up and watched him play it after getting halfway. I've never been good at platform games. I also have the same problem with Dan Dare. So there you go. Another specky game, I imagine. I guess. I've never heard of Dan Dare. I've heard of Dondocodondo. From Tom Hewlett, when Bubble Bobble hit Wii Virtual Console, my friend Nick and I said about beating it. Nick, our friend who's been on the podcast, took us an entire night, but we did it. Bubble Bobble Bobble is great and has a single song on repeat for so long

that the only way to avoid going insane is to get to Superdrunk. Oh, is to get Superdrunk. I see what he did there. Fight Superdrunk while Superdrunk. Fortunately, he's the final boss, Bring a Friend. Aaron Polvillish writes, Have you ever played the Wiiware release of Bubble Bobble? Thankfully, no.

I think it was called Bubble Bobble Classic, but I don't remember the exact name, Bubble Bobble Plus, I believe. I played it right after it was released and got flat out stuck in an early level. I got caught in a narrow column and I could not write a bubble up out of it to save my life. Normally you just blow a bubble as you were jumping to get on top of it, but it would pop on me every time. Maybe they tweaked the controller a bit or something, but I couldn't figure out. What a disappointment to get stuck like that. It felt like an

oversight to me. I think the whole game was kind of an oversight. I really like the style of game. Some of my favorites are Snow Brothers, which was Capcom? Capcom, yeah. Developed by Toa Plan. Oh, Toa Plan. Okay. Oh, neat. Published here about it. All your snow are belong to? Oh. Yes. And Don Docodone. Ineus Snow Brothers is pretty easy, but Famicom Don Docodone is quite the challenge. I've reached the halfway point or so before running out of credits.

I plan on finishing it off one of these days. I do feel a lot of people wanted us to mention Snow Brothers in some way. Well, we did. Yeah. There you go. I'm going to go ahead and name drop Rodland. Yes. Yes. And that one was by Jalika, right?

Yeah. And I think one of the characters from Rodland, yes, shows up in Hero Shigal, Pinball Party for Game Boy. which you can watch a video about on Game Boy World, although it's not that good have been. Rodland has its own puzzle spinoff. Dang. Soul damn. Okay, from Kevin.

I didn't play Bubble Bobble much back in the day, but I remember visiting a small arcade on 8 Mile near Detroit that had a bubble symphony machine around 2001. Wow. Nice. It was in America. Actually, an arcade in Michigan is where I found elevator action, and the only place I've seen it in the wild in the U.S.

So maybe there was something magical about Michigan. There was one in my hometown in Ohio, elevator action. Actually, you know, a lot of arcade distribution was based in Chicago. So it could be that kind of areas near Chicago benefited from that sort of connection and got stuff that you wouldn't necessarily see elsewhere. I don't know what to say about Ohio, though, Bob. Sorry. Well, the mafia left Ohio in the 70s.

Okay. The distribution was not as strong there, probably. Yeah. Let's see, he says a few friends and I worked hard to finish this game, but we never did up until a couple of years ago when one of those friends bought the Saturn port. We finally managed to clear what I ultimately found to be a really fun entry in the series.

If you had just one shot, would you play Bobble Bobble 2? A Mile, get it, guys? Oh, I haven't seen as a movie. I am. Eminem is also very white. I'm a white person from Michigan, and yet I still don't know that movie. I'm just out of the rap battle game. game. I'd retire.

Bill Nilsson writes, for Bubble Bobble, I've never played it, so I just want to point to this ancient video that includes an a cappella version of the main theme at the end. Well, there you go. There's, like, one of the very first, in the O.C. Remix website, which is great. One of the very first O.C. remixes is, like, a hillbilly version of the Bubble Bobble theme.

It's like one of the first, like, five remixes they posted. It's still there. I remember that. I remember that. It's like, hey, Bob, let's play some Bubble Babel. It was back when it was overclock remix. And it was a webcomic about emulation. Yes.

Yes. That's where I discovered Snacks and Jackson. I know all of these things. That's why we're here. Because we're old. And finally, from Jess Reagan. The one thing I want to ask is why Taito's localization department

thought that it would be a good idea to change Bub and Bob from bubble-blowing dragons to bubble-blowing Brontasors? I don't actually know about this. Was this like in the N-E-S manual or something? Probably like, yeah, a choice they made in the manual. It's funny, like, we're going to talk about Sonic soon, and it's just like, so many of those naming choices

were just named by a tester, like, yeah, just think of some names and give them to us. So it's not like there was a lot of thought put behind these things. I mean, maybe Taito, like, hired Konami's NES manual writers on contract and you know the NES writer

for sorry the NES manual writers for Konami just like made stuff up wholesale the whole Hiraola Kakamemi thing There's also that one thing in Final Fantasy 6

where it's like Dragon was mistranslated as dinosaur or something like that so maybe there were some translation issues I don't know no wait there actually is a dinosaur

in the in the forest okay maybe it was translated as dragon I don't know it was like it was like Between dragon and dinosaur. It's like a super hard battle that you can fight in the world of balance. Yeah, I did that to grind for, I think,

ability points. Hell yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Altima for every character. That's right. Okay, so I think that's everything. So we have discussed pretty thoroughly,

I would say, bubble-bobble and related ephemera. Yes. Floating around it. So thanks everyone who wrote in and thanks Ray and, of course, Bob, for being here to share this. discussion with me, because it would have been really boring if it had been me talking about

this game by myself. Now let's drink some bubbly. Yeah, I brought some... No, I didn't. Sorry, I wish I had. So anyway, guys, tell us where we can find you on the internet. Ray. I'm on Twitter, R-D-B-A-A-A-A. That's about it. Aren't you, like, making a video game or something? That is, but I have nothing to announce at this time. But you have a website. Not a good enough. Okay. Do you want to cut this out? Forget nothing to announce. Okay. Ray has nothing to announce at this time. Bob, what do you have to announce at this time. I have to announce that I, Jeremy and I had a Jerry Lewis

Dean Martin-style split, and I left U.S. Gamer. And we're reuniting on this episode. No, it wasn't that dramatic. I just got a different job. So you can find my work at fandom. Go to fandom.com. That's powered by Wikia. Video game coverage. I write for them now. Check it out. I'd appreciate it. And you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo.

My other podcast is Talking Simpsons, and that's every Wednesday on the Lasertime Podcast Network. Go to Lasertime Podcast.com to find that. It's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. Every episode is a new episode, and we're in the middle of season four right now. So if you like The Simpsons, you'll enjoy the show. You've only got 26 more seasons to cover. I feel like we're going to be demoralized by the beginning of 10, I think.

Oh, that's soon. Maybe the middle of 10. I don't know. Ten's pretty bad. Ten's pretty bad. And as you can tell from my ridiculous-looking teeth, I'm the Jerry Martin of this analogy. Yes, hi, Jeremy Parrish here. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite, and I'm all over the internet, but I do cool. stuff at Game Boy World. You should check that out because it's rad. Well, actually, is it rad? I don't know about that, but at least it's going into... You've got to sell it, Jeremy. I'm talking in extensive detail about video games you've never heard of and will never want to play. If that's not exciting, I don't know what to tell you. So, thanks everyone for listening. This is Retronauts. We are supported by Patreon. You can give us money. If you give us even more

money than you're giving us now. We will start making these podcasts weekly instead of biweekly. My God, can you imagine that? We'll get some people in here who know about Atari. How crazy would that be? Whoa, whoa. I've got big dreams. But in the meantime, yes, your support allows us to make this show at all. It's actually really expensive to make this podcast. Life is stupid that way. So we appreciate everyone's support. You can find us at Retronauts.com on Twitter. It's Retronauts. We're everywhere, just whatever. So, thanks for listening. Bob, did I forget anything? That was everything. That was everything. Wow. We got

everything about Retronauts and everything about Bubble Bobble. So we're good. Thanks for listening. We'll be back in a week with Retronauts Micro on Puzzle Bob. start to dance, but then you ate so much, you nearly split your pants. A girl starts walking, guys start gawking, sits down next to you and starts talking, says she want to dance because she likes the groove, so come on fatso and just bust the move.