Bust-A-Move 2

WE WERE FIRST INTRODUCED to cute dragons Bub and Bob in the arcade classic Bubble Bobble. Now, following a long and varied career in a number of games on other formats, they’ve finally made it onto the N64 as the stars of the wildly addictive and immensely playable arcade puzzle game Bust-A-Move 2. No doubt there will be a whole bunch of moaning minnies out there who will slate Bust-A-Move 2 for being ‘nothing original’ or for ‘not making the most of the N64’s capabilities’. You know what we at 64 Magazine say to them? We say, “who cares?” This game is more addictive than crack cocaine, and a damn sight cheaper too!

Of course, on the subject of cheapness, it’s worth pointing out that the N64 version of Bust-A-Move 2 is practically identical to the PlayStation and Saturn versions, both of which you can pick up for a mere 20 English pounds. This means that if you’ve got a Saturn or a PSX as well as having an N64, then you’re probably better off buying the cheaper version of the game – in fact, if you’ve any taste at all, then you should have it already! That is, however, the only reason not to buy Bust-A-Move 2 for the N64, and considering that the majority of N64 owners don’t own another console – many of them having sold their PlayStations to buy N64’s in the first place – that point is fairly moot, so let us never speak of it again.

BUSTIN’ OUT

For those of you who’ve been living in a closet for the last five years or so, and have therefore never heard anything of the original Bust-A-Move or its numerous sequels, the gameplay is devilishly simple.

You play a small dragon – this isn’t integral to the gameplay – you could just as easily control a large lump of yak cheese, but for the sake of completeness we’ll explain it anyway. The objective of the game is to burst a whole load of bubbles by firing other bubbles from a bubble launcher to make groups (as in Tetris) while encouraging your opponent to fail. Make sense? No? Okay... The usual style of play in Bust-A-Move 2 is a split-screen competition against a bubble throwing opponent, be they human or CPU controlled. Each player starts with a cluster of coloured bubbles at the top of their screen, and a steady supply of the same in their launcher at the bottom. Every so often the screen will shudder, following which, one row of bubbles will be added to yours at the top of the screen, bringing your other bubbles that much closer to your launcher, to you, and to the ominously named ‘deadline’. By firing bubbles of specific colours at other bubbles of the same colour you form groups. Every time you form a group of three or more, they explode, or more accurately they burst, since they’re bubbles after all. If any bubbles are hanging from the group you destroy, they drop off the screen. Destroy or drop a large group and they are added to the bubbles on your opponent’s screen. The trick therefore is to increase the amount of bubbles on your opponent’s screen so that their bubbles hit the deadline at the bottom before yours do.

BOB A JOB

Variations on this theme are the one-player puzzle and time trial modes, where you don’t compete against another player and the top of the screen doesn’t add bubbles, but instead drops lower on little hydraulic pistons every so often. The aim therefore is to remove all the bubbles before they reach your deadline at the bottom.

The gameplay in Bust-A-Move 2 is simple to learn, but quite difficult to master. The trick is to set up chains of large numbers of bubbles, but the risk in doing this is that your opponent may dump his bubbles on you when you’re not ready. A steady hand is necessary, as is a good eye for angles, because you’re able to bounce bubbles off walls at specific angles to score – and you thought that your GCSE physics would never come in handy! Bust-A-Move 2 is also novel in that the CPU player can lose the game without any help from you – and often does!

And that’s about it! There’s little more that can be said about Bust-A-Move 2 because it is such a simple, albeit wonderfully thought out concept. The final comment though must be this: it may not be new, although it is new to the N64. It may also not be stretching the ‘vast capabilities’ of the N64, but Bust-A-Move 2 is one of the best games available for the console at the moment, and is certainly the most addictive N64 game on the market so far! A Brief History Of Bub And Bob

Bub and Bob are veteran computer characters, having been around almost as long as Mario himself! They first appeared in the form of the little dragons we are now so familiar with in Bubble Bobble, a platform bubble-’em-up (like a shoot-’em-up, only with bubbles). At the end of Bubble Bobble, they became human, and set off to save the Rainbow Islands in the aptly named sequel Rainbow Islands.

Bub and Bob’s third outing was also in their less cute human form, followed directly on from Rainbow Islands, and involved saving seven worlds through the use of magic parasols, hence the name Parasol Stars.

Tired but happy after their adventures in Parasol Stars, Bub and Bob returned home to the Rainbow Islands and where quietly minding their own business when someone turned them back into cute dragons again and they set off in pursuit of some magical potions for the fourth game Bubble Memories. This was technically the end of Bub and Bob’s adventures, but some remarkably similar dragons named Bubby and Bobby (descendants of Bub and Bob surprisingly enough) cropped up in two more games, Bubble Symphony and Bubble Bobble 2.

And that was it from Bub and Bob until they reappeared in the forerunner to Bust-A-Move 2, Bust-A-Move. And the rest, as they say, is history.