Bubble Bobble is one of the best coin-op games ever created in video games history. The game hit the arcades in 1986 and a year later was ported to all home computers and consoles.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Young boys Bub and Bob were cursed and transformed into small dinosaurs. Their girlfriends are held prisoners by the Giant Bee Master and now Bub (and Bob) must fight their way through 100 levels to save the girls and kill the Bee, breaking the curse and gaining back their human nature. Your main quest is to jump from one platform to another and eliminate all your enemies by trapping them inside bubbles. To help Bub (and Bob) survive the challenge, you must always keep an eye for various power ups and bonuses that appear from time to time. The most valuable bonus is the chewing gum power up that can make you shoot different and more powerful bubbles (like the rapid-fire bubble for example). Also, you have the opportunity to complete the word EXTEND by collecting all letters needed. This bonus will transport Bub (or Bob or both) to the next level at once. There are also numerous other bonuses that will transport you to more levels, make you shoot fire blasts or take you to some extra stages to collect diamonds. The best way to play this game is with a friend as there are some levels that need some co-operation! Bubble Bobble is a really fun game to play! It's also very easy to get you into and learn its gameplay mechanism while its cuteness really draws you in! Bubble Bobble is one of the best arcade platform games ever created in video gaming history, hands down!
GRAPHICS / SOUND Ok technically speaking the game here is literally an arcade perfect conversion of the original. Each level is a classic platform with great and vivid colors, unique design, smooth sprite animations and a variety of nice and cool sprites. A real gaming gem that is! Compared to the Amiga version, the differences are minimal and can be spotted mainly on the gameplay smoothness. The funny music and the sound FX are exactly the same as in the coin-op version and (as expected) superior to the ST and MS-DOS Bubble Bobbles. Especially the in-game tune, though repetitive, is very addictive!
CPU: X68000 (1987) to SUPER (1991) models - Hitachi HD68HC000 (16/32-bit) @ 10 MHz OR XVI (1991) to Compact (1992) models - Motorola 68000 (16/32-bit) @ 16 MHz OR X68030 (1993) models - Motorola MC68EC030 (32-bit) @ 25 MHz Also there is a Sub-CPU available (Oki MSM80C51 MCU) MEMORY: 1-4MB RAM (expandable up to 12 MB), 1MB ROM (128 KB BIOS, 768 KB Character Generator), 1056KB VRAM (512KB graphics, 512KB text, 32KB sprites) GRAPHICS: GPU (graphics processing unit) chipset: Sharp-Hudson Custom Chipset
Color palette of 65,536 (16-bit RGB high color depth) and maximum up to 65,536 colors on screen (from 256x240 to 512x512 resolution), up to 64 colors (from 640x480 to 1024x1024 resolution)
Graphics hardware: Hardware scrolling, priority control, super-impose, dual tilemap background layers, sprite flipping.
Graphical planes: 1-4 bitmap planes, 1-2 tilemap planes, 1 sprite plan
It supports 128 sprites on screen (16×16 sprite size), 32 sprites per scanline, 256 sprite patterns in VRAM. SOUND: Yamaha YM2151: Eight FM synthesis channels
Yamaha YM3012: Floating point DAC with 2-channel stereo output
Oki MSM6258: One 4-bit ADPCM mono channel @ 22 kHz sampling rate