K-SCORE: 44
Designer: Fukio Mitsuji
Spoiler Level: Minor
I played through Bubble Bobble in an attempt to sink my mind into the realm of nothingness I assumed ancient NES games could provide. They’re so minimalistic, designed often by a single person, with an obvious, usually broken gameplay mechanic that is repeated hundreds or thousands of times. I’d never played Bubble Bobble before. I thought I’d give it a shot.
What a terrible mistake I made. This brutal platform, bubble, shooting-things game was designed by a guy with the fitting name Fuckyou. In most platformers of the era, once you hit an enemy, that was it. You cleared them. Safe. The challenge was in never getting hit yourself because the creators decided to make you an armorless, bullet-magnet left to face unending hordes of baddies alone. Well, Bubble Bobble is the same except they make you hit the enemies first with your bubbles and then with your body to pop them. You still are one twitchy frame away from getting posterized by a pink floating pixel. To make matters worse, the levels have hidden walls all over the place. Just because they painted a block onto the screen doesn’t mean you can jump on it, or jump through it. It also doesn’t mean you can’t. So as you progress, and the levels get denser and harder to navigate, you end up starting to traverse blind. Thus Fuckyou captures the feeling of being helplessly alone in the dark.
That’s really not the problem though. It’s the presentation. If Bubble Bobble had better graphics, it’d be the universally recognized as the scariest game ever made. Forget Dead Space, Silent Hill, and Alan Wake. Bubble Bobble plays a delightfully happy circus soundtrack on loop that is exactly the same in every single level. It’s the kind of thing psychotic clowns would whistle. As it plays, you descend level by level in an area called The Cave of Monsters. And these aren’t recognizable monsters. You won’t find goblins or orcs, wizards, trolls, dragons, gargoyles, harpies, undead skeletons, zombies, ghosts, fire elementals, snakes, bats, rats, mummies with crossbows, flying swords, fireball conjurers - no. Bubble Bobble went with character designs that look like an abstract expressionist's drug-induced visions of demons from another universe. They’re a perverse mixture of color and cuteness and they have one mission and that’s to see you die.
If you can survive in the Cave of Monsters for long enough, but the game decides your initiative as a bubbly hunter is lacking, it’ll speed up the tempo of the crazy carnival theme, pop enemies in existing bubbles, and triple their speed. Moments later a white shadow - sorry, that’s the best term I have for it - a white shadow will come to consume the remains of your mortal soul in what I can only assume is the most undignified way possible.
Fortitude and more courage than I thought I had took me to level a hundred. What I found there, I dare not speak of. I do know, that after working very hard to steal the power of lightning and firing off bolts left and right until nothing could possibly be left alive in the horrible depths, Bubble Bobble displayed a message. “Bad Ending,” it said. “This is not a true ending. Take the magical crystal ball, and you will find the door to the secret road.” No way up. No way out. I took the magical crystal ball.
Shhh…
Don’t make any sudden moves.
…
Did you hear something.
OH GOD!
WHAT IS THAT?
WHAT IS THAT?!