Bust-A-Move

If you've played any of the Bubble Bobble series, you know Bubby and Bobby. Taito brings 'em back for a Tetris-like game that starts out fun but ultimately lacks intricacy and longevity.

Where You Bin?

Using a launcher, you fling colored bubbles into a bin. Grouping three or more like- colored bubbles drops them off the play field. You can bank bubbles off the walls, but you must sight your shots quickly and accurately.

The control is as elementary as rotating your launcher to the angle you want and pushing a fire button. Adding to the diversity are different one-player contests, duels against the computer, or battle with another player.

As with previous Bubble Bobble games, this one delivers bright, colorful graphics -- no elaborate detail, parallax scrolling, or 3D imagery here, though Bubby and Bobby cranking the launcher's gears is cute. The audio gets a similarly basic treatment: It's functional, but it hardly pushes the SNES envelope.

Burst Your Bubble

While Bust-A-Move starts off like a sharp puzzler, it loses its appeal after a few redundant rounds. Sadly, it comes up short in the two-player mode, too. By racking up color matches, you rapidly fill up your opponent's bin and the game's over far too quickly to be exciting.

If you're really into puzzlers, you might want to give Bust-A-Move a rental test drive. Better yet, dust off your NES and take Bubby and Bobby through some Bubble Bobble, a game with the durability that this one's missing.

Bust-A-Move is the bubble puzzle game where you are in control of the bubblereleasing apparatus that spits out different colored bubbles, which stick to the others that are already rooted in the game area. The game has the same goal as most puzzle games of this type, requiring you to clear the entire screen of all objects in order to advance to the next stage.

You are in control of five different colored bubbles that must be matched in groups of three to get them to explode. With properly placed shots,

you can take out multiple bubbles by striking a weak spot in the bubble structure to save yourself more of the precious time you are racing against. There are vertical

walls on both sides of your bubble gun that can be used to bank shots off and squeeze the spheres into tight spots to get a hard-to- reach match.

Bust-A-Move may , sound like a relaxing, complete-at-your-ov/n-leisure puzzle game, but in reality you are in a constant race against time to fire your bubbles and complete the level before the ceiling of the playing area squeezes out all of the screen room and leaves you helpless.

Puzzle-game fanatics seeking a unique, mind-bending title for the 3DO that presents a new . approach to the falling block style of games, should seek this title out. It is destined to give players hours of colored-bubble fun.

The premise is simple: Make descending balls disappear by matching three of the same color. In the two-player mode, cleared balls get dumped on your opponent. The move-and-shoot controls are very responsive and the simple visuals and music are well done. This is one puzzler that isn't a bust.

Shoot colored bubbles at other colored bubbles and knock them off the wall! Sounds kinda like bath time at my house, but I've never seen any colored bubbles there. Anyway, this is a fun game for lovers of the Tetris genre.

Shoot colored bubbles at other colored bubbles and knock them off the wall! Sounds kinda like bath time at my house, but I've never seen any colored bubbles there. Anyway, this is a fun game for lovers of the Tetris genre.

Shoot colored bubbles at other colored bubbles and knock them off the wall! Sounds Cede like bath time at my house, but I've never seen any colored bubbles there. Anyway, this is a fun game for lovers of the Tetris genre.

This is an action\puzzle game that at first glance might make you think of Tetris, but really doesn't play like anything else.

The idea is to shoot colored spheres to the top of the screen. The spheres stick and hang from the "ceiling," and if you can get three of the same color spheres to touch, they explode, which also allows any spheres of a different color that have been hanging from them to drop. Of course, the ceiling is dropping the whole time, and you have a set number of spheres to get through before it reaches the floor and crushes your launcher.

This was a sleeper hit at Winter CES, and since the Game Players' booth was right next to Taito's booth, a lot of GP staff members got hooked before we even knew what was happening. This may be one of the most heavily addictive puzzle games to hit the market in a while.

Shoot colored bubbles at other colored bubbles and knock them off the wall! Sounds kinda like bath time at my house, but I've never seen any colored bubbles there. Anyway, this is a fun game for lovers of the Tetris genre.

Here is one of the most simplistic, straightforward, and highly addictive games ever made. You've probably seen this little gem on coin-op machines all over the place--usually part of those 2-in-1 deals on an SNK machine. Then it showed up on Super NES last year. Now, you can play the game, in all its glory, on the 3DO.

I'd be lying to you if I said that it took the 3DO to do this game justice, because the SNES version was fine. Like Pooyan, Bust-A-Move relies not on graphics and speed, but playability; and it's here. What I can't believe, though, is that the graphics weren't better for this version. It's Bust-A-Move, for the love of Christendom: the only thing you can enhance is the graphics. Having seen games such as Ballz: The Director's Cut and Lost Eden, I know how good 3DO graphics can be. The only answer to this is that maybe the developers wanted to maintain the look of the coin-op. Because, if you take a look at these pictures, it's pretty damn close.

If you are a fan of the game, keep a look out for this version, it's fabulous. Same sound, same great gameplay and (to my dismay) same graphics. A perfect conversion of a perfect game.