Super Bubble Pop

"Bursts super fast."

Nightclubs are depressing places for me, and I had to suppress a surge of anger when Super Bubble Pop(SBP) seemed to try to remind me of one. You have the silly entry fee($14 plus tax for me,) some allegedly slammin' beats, main characters wearing clothes that will look even dumber in six months, and relatively silly and repetitive stuff to do. Also, the GBA screen is also dark, and you'll either be too familiar to be terribly interested or just confused. So you'll be left wondering why you bothered. But it's not all the same--you won't see any attractive women around while playing this game. And once you've figured what to do to look impressive there's really no one to show off to.

SBP isn't a bad game, but the goal seems so trivial that I can't really get enthusiastic about it. You have your choice of hip players who fling bubbles up columns from the near edge of an eight by eight grid. The bubble can roll to the edge, or it can sneak under a tower already there. If you get three or more bubbles of the same color in a row or column, then they pop. The towers will jump squares towards you(game over if they make it,) and you may also have boulders in the tower(throw five bubbles at it to pop, and the tower doesn't grow,) time, power-ups, which start off useless but morph to devices that clean over half the grid if you get six or seven without using them, or stars, which can jump you to the next level if you get enough. You can also win by clearing all bubbles after the game passes through the predefined initial bubbles and towers.

And are there levels to win! In Training, you only have a few, with two colors. The bubbles will even flash when you have a move that will take a few out. Chillin' gives a whopping fifty levels, retaining the help but speeding things up, and in fact it's rather interesting to see if you can get a 'perfect,' where you take out the starting formation with just a few moves. Some of these are painfully obvious but help cover later drudgery. With three colors, and four on the last levels, open play afterwards is much less trivial than expected. The Groovin' level eliminates the flashing-bubble aid, forces you to pick up power-ups as they roll towards you, and foreshadows the five colors in Hardcore, where the timer doesn't just track your bonus, it also kills you if you run out. And you have fewer game-continues. At least they don't kill off the display indicating the next two bubbles' colors.

SBP is fun enough to play through but not just to see the hidden characters. Your initial players have special skills, too. Every three levels or so a previously barely discernible meter fills up and flashes like crazy based on how much you've popped and how tricky it was(chain reactions, etc.) Bam, side button, a few flavors of mass bubble destruction. Between these disturbances you'll be able to establish an assembly line where you should devise a way to fling bubbles safely, concentrating on ones with powers-up or stars above. Chance plays annoying tricks here as you may have to wait for a while for these, although the wait doesn't get intolerable until 'Hardcore.' Through this I found I didn't have to adjust my strategy much after tearing through the easy level. But evaluating when and if to use a screen-wipe or power-up in a tight spot gives the game occasional excitement.

In fact in a game like this it's not tough to figure what to do and with no control problems(so many puzzle games have simple controls that still drop that piece where you don't want it, credit where it's due here) the main problem is learning to do it more quickly. Sometimes SBP is helpful, such as when it tilts the grid so you can clearly see the path you'd be shooting a bubble down, but other times the coloring doesn't work out well. I was intimidated by how all bubbles in the background looked like boulders(they aren't, but it would mean lots shooting) and found the fourth color, pink, to look a bit too much red. The fifth, yellow, looked too much like a star. These were major roadblocks in my quest to establish a rhythm slopping three bubbles together.

On the other hand, despite the general clubbing theme the game is tolerable to listen to and even gives amusing aftershocks for some top-shelf power-ups. It may spit out all manner of stereotyped versions of styles you can expect to hear, but they change often enough, from one of those mock-soulful women's shrieks to tries at ethnic kitsch. Just try not to imagine lyrics to it, and you'll be OK.

SBP is a neat action variant on Connect Four or even tic-tac-toe, and it feels good to understand what strategy there is. Once you do, though, there's little else to recommend it. There's either not enough variety, or too much is left to chance. And it's just plain ugly. Diehard puzzle gamers can do better, and more casual players will find it quickly unpalatable. For me the most super bubble pop is the old fashioned way: with bubble wrap. Which would probably get you kicked out of a nightclub anyway.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/08/03, Updated 07/08/03