Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 054: Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move

Episode Date: January 9, 2017

Having survived the Bubble Bobble episode, Jeremy mops up the franchise with a look at its most popular (or at least most imitated) branch: The iconic color-match puzzler Bust-A-Move... more sensibly known as "Puzzle Bobble." 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, come sit next to me, you fine fellow. Last week we tackled the complex and confusing world of Bubble Bobble, which turned out to be so convoluted and extensive that we ran the entire episode without managing to spend any time on what is arguably the franchise's most important branch, the puzzle match game, puzzle bobble, or bust a move if you're nasty. Where plenty of game developers imitated the general bubble-bubble concept and vibe back in the 80s and early 90s, few of any of those games could be said to have been full-on clones. Plus, for the most part, the bulk of those games came from Bubble Bobble Creator Taito anyway. In a sense, Puzzle Bobble strikes me as less an offshoot of Bubble Bobble, then it does a case of the company using one of their more popular brands to help sell a concept they'd been picking away at for a few years.

You know, the time-honored question of how to swipe from Tetris. Of course, Tetris had hit the games industry with seismic force, and publishers generally responded one of two ways, by asking, how can we license this? Or else asking, how can we totally rip this off? Taito was a bit of a small fry compared to second-wave Tetris licensers like Nintendo and Sega, so they took the latter route. In fact, the company developed several variants,

of the block-matching puzzle concept in the wake of Tetris' explosive success. First, there was Flipple, also known as plotting, which saw players take control of a squishy little guy who kicked different cubes into a stack in an attempt to create matches. A year later came Palamedes, which would be shamelessly ripped off in turn by Data East for Magical Drop, a game in which players ran back and forth firing blocks at the top of the screen to make matches against an advancing wall of puzzle pieces.

You could argue that Taito, in turn, swiped this concept from, Konami's Quarth, but then again, Quarath was basically an attempt to combine Tetris with Space Invaders and Space Invaders was a game that Taito created, so it seems a fair cop. Puzzle-bobble then feels like a more elaborate evolution of Palamedes. However, where the older game had you scurrying back and forth to fire blocks at a wall of boxes, very much like Space Invaders, puzzle bobble rooted the player to a single fixed spot while presenting more elaborate constructs of pieces to clear away. As the game's name suggests, puzzle-bobble was meant to connect to bubble-bobble, a puzzle variant, if you will, in the sense that matching items of similar colors as a puzzle, which isn't really accurate, but I'm afraid it's too late to do anything about this misnamed genre more than two decades later.

Though, in fairness, there is more of a puzzle element to puzzle-bobble than to most match three games. Players control a small block launcher that sits in a fixed position at the center of the playfield's bottom edge. You can't move laterally, as in Palamedes, but instead, Instead, aim the launcher through nearly 180 degrees of motion, firing a colored piece in almost any direction into the main playfield. Your active block will stick to any advancing color block, it strikes in the playfield. And if you happen to create a set of four, like-colored pieces in the process, all of those pieces will drop off the screen.

The puzzle element comes into play through the game's integration of simple physics. First, the pieces you fire will adhere to any blocks they strike in the playfield, but the pieces will bounce off walls. So it's possible, necessary, in fact, to treat puzzle-bobble like trick-shot billiards, creating matches with blocks outside your direct line of fire by causing your projectiles to chrome off the edges of the screen into tiny little nooks where they can create seemingly impossible matches. This ties into the game's second key physics mechanic, which is gravity.

I mentioned that matched pieces drop off the screen. Well, I was using the word drop literally. When you create a match, those pieces fall physically off the screen. This reflects the fact that Puzzle Bobble's playfield observes simple gravity. The adhesive nature of the blocks you're firing at means the only thing holding them aloft is their connection to the ceiling of the stage directly or by linking with another block. If you sever a piece's connection to the top edge of the screen and isolate it from other blocks,

it will drop off the screen. Even if you didn't actually create a match with that block's color. Herein lies the true strategic hook of Puzzle bobble, the drive to drop as many pieces as possible with a single match. You can create nothing but simple matches by firing bubbles at the nearest edges of the descending construct, sure. But to truly excel at Puzzle bobble, what you really want to do is find ways to create matches in the upper zones of the screen, Whittling away its spots where only a single block or two connect a dense tangle of pieces to the top edge. For every piece you can cause to drop without its being directly color matched, you get a double score multiplier.

Playing for nothing but direct matches will result in scores of a few thousand points. Taking a more sophisticated approach and dropping huge clusters can net scores in the tens of millions. The gravity-based score-building element of puzzle bubble can lead high score seekers to do some terribly counterintuitive things, like build up their multiplier by filling a block construct with extra pieces. This will bring the advancing blocks closer to the kill line at the bottom of the screen, so it's a risk. But the reward is a huge stash of extra points, so for serious players, it's totally worth it. Yes, fine, you say, but what does any of this have to do with bubble? Bubble Bobble?

Well, technically nothing. The connections between the two games are entirely cosmetic. For starters, your little block launcher is manned by none other than Bub and Bob, who remain in their dinosaur forms here. Please, for the love of God, do not ask me to explain where in the series' timeline this falls. Clearly it doesn't happen between the true ending of Bubble Bobble and the beginning of Rainbow Islands.

Beyond that, I have no idea. There's also the bubble connection. I have been cagely referring to the projectiles' Bub and Bob shoot as blocks or pieces, but in point of fact, they're bubbles. That's bubbles, as in the ones Bub and Bob belch in the game Bubble Bobble. Your dino pals don't spit the bubbles in this game, however. Instead, they're queued up from some off-screen source and fired through the rotating catapult mechanism in the center of the play space. Bub and Bob are less like action heroes here and more like medieval arbalists, launching giant bubbles from a giant mounted crossbow and an encroaching wave

of enemies. Well, technically, it's an encroaching wave of other bubbles. But in the third and final bubble-bobble connection, the bubbles in puzzle-bubble all contain different monsters from the bubble-bobble series. I suppose that's why your protagonists don't spew the bubbles themselves. They're all preloaded with bad guys, and your dino buddies only emit empty bubbles with which to capture critters. Much like having Bub and Bob at the bottom of the screen, the bad guys inside the bubbles are a strictly cosmetic detail and have no impact on how the game plays. They're just there to add subtly to the adorable bubble-bobble factor. And the game is great. It debuted simultaneously on a standalone arcade board and as a Neo Geo-Rom, and it's seen more sequels than I can

actually count on basically every platform ever created. Puzzle bubble sequels have done very little to change the basic mechanics of the original. They've added in special bubbles that have dramatically helpful or annoying obstructive effects, and mini sequels feature a story mode that allows players to choose their route to the end along a growing array of branching paths. Some offer competitive head-to-head play, or even online features. And there was even one version that replaced Bub and Bobbub with Azumanga Dio characters for some reason. Ultimately, though, Taito came up with a winning creation when they released Puzzle back in 1994, one that's been difficult to improve on in any substantial way without radically reworking

the game's fundamentals. However, there's certainly been no shortage of attempts to duplicate the game, even if those efforts haven't brought with them any particular improvements. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Puzzle Bobble is perhaps the world's single most cloned game whose origins nobody has ever heard of. Puzzle bollegs are far more common than the game itself. Speaking for myself, I hadn't even heard of Puzzle until the series' third entry hit PlayStation in 1999.

five years after the series debut, but I'd been playing a derivative for years. My time in the trenches of my university student paper newsroom was enlivened by a Mac game called Snood that I found probably on the cover disc of some Mac-specific magazine. It was an ugly little game with horrible little character graphics that appeared to have been created as an exercise in drawing with your eyes closed, and its sound effects were very likely recorded on tape cassette in someone's bathroom, but it was super fun. I had no idea at the time that it was a complete and inferior rip-off of a Taito-Archequette arcade game. But people like me evidently made it so successful that its creators could incorporate

as Snood LLC and port the game to several systems, including the expected iOS and the bizarre Game Boy Advance. By no means is Snood the only puzzle-bobble rip-off out there. You can't swing a dead virtual cat in an app store without smacking a handful of puzzle-bobble clones these days. Even my wife, who has never heard of puzzle-bobble or even bubble-bobble, has been hooked on one of these lately. A few days ago I got an Apple store invoice for a few in-game micro transactions. Buying booster packs for iOS games is a small indulgence for my wife, something she does every once in a while when she's under the weather to distract herself from feeling sick. Usually she goes with the old standard Candy Crush Saga. But this time it was

some game about pandas that I'd never heard of. Curious, I asked her to let me check it out, and it was a puzzle-bobble clone. A tacky-looking puzzle-bobble clone, to be sure, but undeniably just a straight rip-off. Well, mostly straight. It's a free-to-play clone for iOS, which means it comes loaded with cheap and unsporting design compromises intended to coerce players into coughing up a few bucks in exchange for in-game goods to level the playing field back toward the intended design. But you get the idea. So my wife will happily play and even pay for this clone,

even though she's never heard of or played the game it was based on. You can hardly blame her for that, though. It's not as though Taito has necessarily been the best stewards of their own creation. Their biggest goof is that for some bizarre reason, they declined to localize the game by its Japanese title, Puzzle Bobble, which are two very functional English words that nicely encapsulate what the whole thing is about. It's a puzzle, and it's based on Bubble Bobble. No, instead they decided to call it Bust a Move in America.

I suppose someone thought that maybe referencing a young MC song would be more eye-catching for us? And I guess there's a tenuous conceptual connection since you're working with bubbles, which will traditionally burst, or bust, if you will, except these bubbles just fall off the screen rather than bursting, so it all kind of falls apart. I don't know. Anyway, the blame for this localization choice presumably lands at the feet of S&K, the company responsible for this series' initial debut in the U.S. But rather than walk back, a pretty terrible idea, Taito, and every subsequent licensee of the series just went with it, giving us Bust a Move 2, Bust a Move 99. Bust a Move Millennium, Bust a Move Universe, Bust A Move Pocket, and so on and so forth. This proved to be a giant hassle for a completely unrelated rhythm game series developed by Metro, which arrived a few years later under the Japanese title Bustamove,

which obviously had to be changed in the U.S. where it became Busta Groove. With its emphasis on rap-influenced music and dance, Busta Groove actually had a much more earnest claim to taking its name from Young NC, but oh well, so it goes. As the weird little cherry on top of this mess, Metro's Busta Groove was published in Japan by Enix, which soon merged with Square, who then bought Taito. So basically, both Japan's Bustamove and America's Bustammoved are owned by the same publisher now. None of this detracts from the fact that, at its heart, puzzle-bobble contains a very simple and very appealing concept. On the contrary, the fact that it's been so widely and so successfully ripped off speaks to the game's core strength.

So don't just sand there. Come on, Fatso and puzzle-bobble. For Retronauts Micro, this is Jeremy Parrish. And as it stands, this is probably the next to last episode. of Retronauts Micro. Now that I'm making Retronauts my primary career concern beginning February 1st, we'll be moving to full episodes on a weekly schedule rather than bi-weekly. Since micros began as a filler for off-weeks of our bi-weekly routine, there's no longer a need for it. But hey, if you dig the format, the good news is that you can help keep it alive. Our next Patreon funding goal will be to reinstate Retronauts Micro on its original

bi-weekly schedule alongside the standard weekly episodes. That's three podcasts every two weeks. But even if we don't reach that goal, we still appreciate your support, whether that's through Patreon, by sharing and commenting on our work through social media, by visiting Retronauts.com, which is now a daily classic gaming news blog, or just by listening to the show. So check us out on iTunes at Retronuts.com on Twitter and Facebook as Retronauts, and through ancillary video projects like Game Boy World and Mode 7. Both the podcast and videos are funded through Patreon, and every dollar brings us closer to our goals. So thanks for helping to make Retronauts exist. Bob and I will do our part by working to make each year of the show

better than the last. Here's to an amazing 2017.