"It was an interesting idea..."

Ah, Williams. During the Pac-Man era of arcade games, they were probably the best American developer on the market alongside Atari. They gave us the Defender games, Robotron 2084, and Joust, which are four of the all-time classics of the era. But nobody’s perfect, and Bubbles is proof. It’s a decent game, but not up to the impressive standards set by the four games I just mentioned.

The idea, according to the video clips found on Williams Arcade Greatest Hits for the Playstation, was that the concept was a Pac-Man game without walls. The ideas came up from there, until you had the game as finished product. You play a little soap bubble in a sink, and you’re supposed to collect the crumbs, grease spots, and the little ants to clean the level. As you get bigger, you eventually grow a smile. I know, it sounds trivial, but it comes into play eventually. Your goal is to either clean up the entire sink, or enter the drain once you’re big enough.

You’re competing with sponges and scrub brushes to clean the stuff up. Once you have “found your smile” you can try and knock them into the drain, but you lose a size level every time you do it. Any smaller, and you’re scrubbed. Giant roaches will come out of the drain to attack you. It doesn’t matter what size you are, they’ll get you if you don’t have a weapon. That weapon is a broom, and you can get one from the cleaning lady that’ll fly in on the broom, clean up a little, and fly out. You have to hit the boom before you hit her, first, or you’re out of luck. The last of the obstacles you have to worry about are razor blades. You can only avoid these stationary hazards.

The game in theory couldn’t be easier to play. Run over the stuff you’re supposed to get, avoid the rest unless you can handle it. No buttons to worry about or anything. But the field is like an ice-rink, and you don’t really stop unless you hit a wall. You’ve got to be pretty good on the controls if you want to survive the sinks, and getting the broom from the cleaning lady is practically an art form. And the levels get hard pretty quickly, especially if you opt exit through drain instead just clean up everything.

Graphics are simple but fairly effective. You can tell what’s what for the most part, and the cleaning lady is pretty detailed for the period, though the sponges look more like those squishy face finger puppets you can get in vending machines. There is almost no music to speak of, but that’s also par for the course for a lot of these early video games. The sounds that are there are simplistic and un-noteworthy.

Basically, Bubbles was a good idea in theory, but didn’t quite come out 100% in execution. It’s fun to play every once in a while, but it’s not an instant classic like many of Williams’ other early hits. Few Bubbles arcade machines still exist today, but you can find it on Williams Greatest Hits on a variety of platforms with its contemporaries from the company. And in the company of the Defenders, Joust and Robotron, not to mention Sinistar, Bubbles is just the icing on one very nice cake.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/23/02, Updated 09/23/02