Bust a Move Live! Review (Xbox 360)

I’m not sure if Guinness has a record for it or not (though it probably does), but I would expect that Bust-a-Move—or Puzzle Bobble, as it is known in some places—has to be the game that has appeared in the most permutations on the most platforms possible. It’s appeared on at least 25 different platforms, from arcade cabinets to handhelds, to now even next-generation consoles like the Xbox 360. There must be something about popping those little bubbles that really hooks people in.

I can attest to this having been hooked myself in the early 1990s. At my university’s student union, we had a small arcade that I tried to visit on a daily basis. Far from being a complete collection, it held about a dozen cabinets that changed at a glacial pace—but we did have current stuff, including two Street Fighter II machines that I always desperately wanted to get on. The only problem was, they were usually crammed with teens from the local middle school who would work me relentlessly, despite the fact they were wearing backpacks as big as themselves.
So, I usually went looking for something else, and that something else turned out to be the Neo•Geo cabinet—and within that cabinet, I always chose Bust-a-Move, the highly addictive action/puzzle game. Why I chose that, who knows? However, once I started playing it, I was totally hooked, so it’s not at all strange to me that this game has been able to find a home on just about every gaming platform anyone could ever think of.

I would find it highly unlikely that you’ve never encountered the game at least once in your life (cave dwellers and the recently recovered coma victims excepted). If you really don’t know anything about it, here’s the 50-cent tour: There’s a board in front of you with colored bubbles arranged on it and sticking to one another. At the bottom is a cute little machine that shoots similarly colored bubbles, run by a cute-as-hell little dinosaur. The machine can be aimed and fired, and the colored bubbles it shoots fly up to the other ones and stick to them. If it creates a chain of three or more, those bubbles burst and clear off the board. Any bubbles hanging beneath and unsupported by other bubbles will fall with the matching cluster. And, of course, the object is to clear the board of all bubbles.

It’s a very simple concept, for sure, but once you add in all kind of bubbles that do special tasks and consider the fact that the field will keep dropping over time, you’ve suddenly got a game with some consequences and a little bit of strategy behind it. Finding the right angles (you can bounce shots off walls) is key to reaching some of the harder bubbles, and people who are really skilled at the game quickly prove that. Yet, newbs can have a great time, too. It’s one of those dreaded “casual” games that actually has a bit of cachet amongst hardcore old-school gamers.