And we’ll all float on okay.

To Beat: Defeat the final boss
To Complete: Get the true ending
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 10/4/20 – 10/7/20
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Video: Bubble Bobble Longplay

The “clear ‘em up” is a game subgenre that I have heard of in passing but has not stuck as any sort of general gaming term.  With a little explanation, I can get it to make sense.  Clear ‘em up refers to a single screen action platformer where the object is to clear out all the enemies in the stage before moving on to the next.  These games at one time were really prominent in the arcades, and I think they hold up as an ideal arcade experience.  These are simple games that you can look at and understand easily, often with very colorful, eye catching graphics and tons of powerups and collectables.  They are fun games that can ramp up in difficulty quickly enough to convince you to pop in more quarters and keep going.  I really enjoyed playing Snow Brothers a few years back, but now it’s time to get to the most well known game of this style that certainly inspired many others after it.

Bubble Bobble was first an arcade release in 1986, developed by Taito.  The game was designed by Fukio Mitsuji.  He wanted to make a game that would appeal to everyone, particularly women.  Therefore, he put focus on bubbles as a core gameplay component as something that he thought would be appealing, as well as two-player cooperative play as a way to engage couples to play together.  The game was a big hit for Taito and was widely ported to many computers and consoles.  Bubble Bobble would go on to have around 20 sequels as well as an entire side series, Puzzle Bobble.  The NES version began in Japan on the Famicom Disk System, released in October 1987.  The North American NES port was released in November 1988, and the PAL version came out in October 1990.  All these versions were developed and published by Taito.

The story of this game follows two brothers, Bubby and Bobby. The evil Baron Von Blubba has kidnapped their girlfriends and transformed the brothers into bubble-blowing dinosaurs named Bub and Bob.  To rescue them, they must go 100 levels deep into the Cave of Monsters.  The NES manual tells a slightly different story for this port of the game.  Bub and Bob are already dinosaurs and must rescue two friends who were captured by Baron Von Blubba.

The gameplay loop is Bubble Bobble is simple.  Like the arcade version you can play alone or with a friend.  Both players control identically.  Bub can walk around with the D-pad.  You press A to jump and press B to blow bubbles.  The idea is that you blow a bubble at an enemy, trapping it inside.  You then pop the bubble to defeat the enemy.  You can jump up into the bubble, fall through the bubble, shove it again the wall, or simply run through it.  You just need to apply enough force to pop it, otherwise you push it around.  If a bubble is popped, any bubble it touches is also popped, chain reaction style.  If you clear multiple enemies in this way, you get a nice score bonus that scales up with how many enemies you kill at once.  When all enemies are defeated, there is a short delay before you proceed via bubble to the next stage.

The bubbles also afford you some movement options.  By holding down the A button, you will bounce off of any bubble in the stage.  This is most easily done from above, but you can also jump up against the side of a bubble if you can get just slightly above it.  You can use this bubble riding technique to reach higher ledges or escape enemies in some situations.  Every level has these invisible currents in the open spaces that push the bubbles in some direction.  Throwing bubbles all over the place (and you can throw a lot of them, go crazy!) will help reveal the currents and help you route the stage.

The walls also have some interesting properties in this game.  Each stage layout consists of only open spaces and solid tiles.  A lot of times enemies appear to be trapped inside the walls, but they are reachable.  The wall tiles are solid in every direction except from underneath, so that you can jump up and through the floor.  But once part of you is inside the wall, then you can pass through any consecutive wall tiles freely.  From there, any open spaces make adjacent walls solid again.  This is a tricky explanation that probably doesn’t make much sense, but it is easy to grasp when you actually play the game.  It’s both complicated and intuitive.

There are many different enemies in this game.  They have different names depending on where you look, but for this review I’ll use the names listed in the NES manual.

Bubble Buster: Basic enemy that appears in the first stage.  They walk slowly.  Sometimes they stop and jump up, catch the ledge above them if there is one.  This is the basic enemy movement that is shared with several other enemies.

Stoner: This is a white hooded enemy that looks like a ghost.  He moves similar to Bubble Buster.  Sometimes he will toss out a slow, indestructible rock at you, so you don’t want to spend too much time on his level.

Beluga:  Kind of looks like a beluga whale if you squint hard enough.  This enemy flies through the level at diagonals, bouncing off any walls in his path.

Hullaballoon:  This floating enemy sort of resembles a balloon, I guess.  This enemy bounces off of walls like the Beluga, opting for greater horizontal movement than vertical movement.

Coiley: An enemy with a spring bottom, Coiley moves in forward hops.  He is a faster moving enemy than most.

Incendo:  Looks like a rock with a face.  Incendo has the standard movement pattern but will fire a quick moving fireball at you.

Willy Whistle:  Another standard walking enemy.  This one throws a bottle at you with boomerang action and will throw his bottle rather quickly if you cross his path.

Super Socket: This enemy is called Invader in other regions and understand why when you see it.  This enemy only walks, no jumping, and he fires a downward laser shot at a consistent rhythm.

Baron von Blubba: This enemy is shaped like Beluga and only appears when you have been in a stage for too long.  You’ll get a “Hurry!” message first, followed soon after by the Baron’s ominous arrival tune.  Baron von Blubba is invincible and moves orthongonally toward your position through walls in short spurts until either he catches you or you defeat all the enemies.

This game is also known for the wide variety of items and powerups.  Simply defeating enemies cause them to get knocked away dramatically until they land and turn into a food item.  Beating enemies in a combo turns each enemy into progressively better and better food items, from a points perspective.  There are many, many other items that appear throughout the game, too many to list.  Evidently, all of them have some sort of condition that triggers them, stuff that you will do naturally through gameplay but are not tracked in any visible way so that it feels random.  Some examples of items are candy that enhances your bubbles, shoes that increase your running speed, umbrellas that warp you several levels ahead, crosses that give you various screen clearing capabilities, and many more.  There are also gobs of items that just give you points, like food, gems, crystals, etc.

Some stages also have attack bubbles in them.  There are three kinds of attack bubbles.  The blue water bubbles when popped drop a small stream of water that flows down through the bottom of the screen, defeating any enemy it touches, leaving a nice point item behind.  The red fire bubbles that look like they have balloons on them drop a flame that covers the ground in flames for a short while.  These flames kill enemies but stun you a bit, preventing you from jumping and causing you to walk slowly while touching them.  Green lightning bubbles fire a bolt of lightning across the screen in the opposite direction you are facing.  When enemies are placed in hard-to-reach spots, these attack bubbles are most useful.

Another thing you will see are letter bubbles.  These are triggered by combos of three or more enemies.  They can only appear on stages with an open top or bottom as that is how they enter the screen, but they will queue up for later stages in you spawn them in an area they cannot enter.  There are also powerups that can cause these to appear.  Pop these bubbles to add the printed letter to your side of the screen.  The goal is to spell out EXTEND which, when all collected, ends the current level immediately and gives you an extra life!

Once you reach stage 100, you come across the boss.  In the manual he is named Grumple Grommit, though I have always heard him referred to as Super Drunk.  This is a very large enemy that looks like a Willy Whistle but moves like a Beluga.  He also shoots a spread of bottles ahead of him periodically.  The boss is too big to capture in a bubble on your own.  At the top of the stage is a lightning potion that turns your bubbles into lightning bubbles.  The level counter at the top of the screen becomes the boss’s health meter.  Run his health out to enclose him inside a bubble, then pop it to defeat the boss, but what happens next you’ll have to read about in the spoiler section later on.

At the start of the game, you are given two extra lives per player.  One way to earn extra lives is by meeting these point thresholds: 30,000, 100,000, 200,000, 400,000, and 1,000,000.  The EXTEND bubbles also give you an extra life, as well as a rare item.  When you run out of lives, if you are playing two player and the other player has lives remaining, they can gift you a life to get you back into the game.  When all lives are lost, it is Game Over.  There are passwords for each stage in the game.  The passwords are five letters long, only characters A-J.  The only downside to Game Over is that your score resets to 0, if you care about such things.

Bubble Bobble was one of my childhood games.  We had picked it up used at some point, not sure where.  I do remember reading about this game a lot in old gaming magazines, and I’m sure that was what prompted us to search this one out.  It is a common enough game that we may have grabbed it at a yard sale or something.  It will forever be a mystery.  I do recall that I liked this game enough to search out its sequels: Rainbow Islands and Bubble Bobble Part 2.  I was able to get the former but not the latter.  Bubble Bobble has hovered around a $20 price point for many years now.  I know I sold a couple of extra copies for about that much a few years ago back.

Now it’s time to dive into spoiler territory about how this game ends.  Playing straight through to the boss and defeating him gives you the bad ending and the following text: “This is not a true ending! Take the magical crystal ball.  And you will find the door to secret road!”  This is in reference to Level 99 just before this.  If you read the manual, it discloses a secret in Level 99 as well.  In that stage there is a crystal ball that appears on the right side.  Grab it to open a secret door hidden behind an enemy boxed off in the low part of the screen.  You enter that door to proceed to stage A0, the true stage 100.  The door is meant to be entered using both players, one to grab the crystal and the other to go through the door, as the items only appear for a short time.  It is tough but possible to do it solo, which is what I did.  After this sequence, levels proceed on as normal, A0-A9 and B0-B2.  Following that is the same boss fight as before.  Defeat him this time, and you get something a little different.  You float over to the left and your girlfriends break free and float to the bottom, but they disappear in a puff of smoke.  You see this text displayed: “This is not a true ending! Try again with your friend.” The trick here is that you are supposed to beat the boss with two players.  Since you are saving two friends shown on screen, it does make some sense.  However, you can do this with one player as well.  Pressing Select when paused brings the second player in, even on one-player mode, if you have a life to spare.  You bubble up the boss, bring your partner in, and pop the boss bubble to trigger the Happy End.  But we aren’t quite done here, as the ending scrawl states that “your adventure is not over yet.”  You are given a password that begins an entirely new quest from the beginning.

Super Bubble Bobble is the name of this game’s second quest.  There aren’t that many changes between this and the normal game.  The level layouts are exactly the same, but the level palettes and block styles are changed.  The biggest difference is that some of the enemies are swapped around.  I had thought it was as simple as exchanging one enemy for another throughout all levels of the game, but looking deeper at individual levels, I couldn’t find any consistent pattern.  It simply depends on the stage for what enemy mix you get.  Generally, weaker enemies are replaced with stronger ones, while some levels contain easier enemies than their normal mode counterparts.  Overall, I’d say Super Bubble Bobble is only slightly more challenging as a whole.  To get the true ending, you need to follow the same beats at the normal game: Get the crystal in 99, enter the secret door, and defeat the boss in B3 with two players active. This time Super Drunk has 80 health instead of 60, but the fight stays the same.  When you defeat Super Drunk in the normal mode, he falls away typical of any Bubble Bobble bad guy.  In Super mode, he explodes in a puff of smoke when popped, and Bub and Bob’s mama and papa appear.  The true ending features a bonus screen of all characters with their non-localized names, a nice little treat.

Here’s a small bit of minutia about this game and its endings.  I had read about there being four endings, but I could only trigger three of them easily, the missing one being the alternate bad ending.  In normal mode only, if you continue with a password beyond Stage 99, the game gives you the “get the crystal ball” bad ending instead of the “try again with a friend” bad ending.  I tried a few different passwords but all gave the same result.  I then took a password to Stage 99, went through the door, and beat the boss one player in Room B3, and that time I got the proper “try again with a friend” ending that I would have expected.  Super Bubble Bobble does not have this same effect; I always get the “try again with a friend” ending from any password I tried past Level 99.  I think this is some kind of bug or omission in the game programming.  Unless you play straight through, I can see where this might have led to some confusion on how to get the better endings.

The NES port of this game is a solid home conversion, but there are several differences from the arcade version.  The NES version omits many point-bearing items from the arcade version but introduces a few new ones to make up for it.  Some levels were changed while others were added to the NES version.  Of course, this game has a password system that the arcade version understandably lacks.  The arcade version also includes secret rooms accessible by reaching certain areas without losing any lives up to that point.  These secret rooms have encoded messages for players to decipher that explain the conditions for getting the true ending, including a secret code to start the game in Super Bubble Bobble mode.  Perhaps the definitive version of this game is on Sega Master System, released in Japan as Final Bubble Bobble and Europe as simply Bubble Bobble.  This game is a set of 200 levels with no Super Bubble Bobble mode, but the biggest change is that this game has secret rooms that contain special items that are required for the best ending.  There are special conditions to trigger these rooms and I presume they are difficult to find.  The Japanese version contained hints as to the whereabouts of these rooms, but those were omitted from the European version, making it that much harder to finish.  I am definitely going to check this game out someday on my own.

I would say that Bubble Bobble on NES is one of those essential games to have in any collection.  Now I’ll be the first to admit that the presentation is a bit lacking.  This game has simple graphics and really just the one song that plays over almost the entire game.  I like the song though I know it can be a nuisance.  The controls are solid and responsive but take some getting used to.  Your jump works better in the vertical than it does horizontally, making movement across some stages challenging.  This is amplified by the fluidity in which you can enter and exit from walls.  I find the gameplay loop very satisfying.  Though the action stays largely the same, the level layouts do enough to change things up in small ways.  The vast breadth of items you can collect is really fun, and sometimes you get an item you’ve never seen before that has drastic effects on the stage, sometimes outright clearing it for you. Those moments of discovery are pretty cool.  This game is an excellent two-player game that is very beginner friendly.  The game also has depth for the player who wants challenge in seeking out the true ending.  Bubble Bobble is the main reason why I find this weird subgenre of games so enjoyable.

This game is SNOW much fun!

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Beat the game without continuing
What I Did: Completed the game
Played: 9/11/17 – 9/19/17
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
Video: Snow Brothers 1CC Longplay

There are several genres of games that I have had a fondness for from an early age. I cut my teeth on Super Mario Bros. and have always enjoyed platformers of that kind. The SNES affirmed my interest in RPGs, and although for the most part that didn’t carry over beyond that, those RPGs are still among my favorite games. The Adventures of Lolo games, as well as Tetris, paved the way for getting interested in many different types of puzzlers. As an adult, my tastes haven’t changed much, but they did get more refined. I discovered that I really enjoy games like Bubble Bobble, a single-screen arcade style platformer with a focus on clearing out all enemies to proceed to the next room. It’s a specific type of experience, but there are several titles that fit the bill. One of my favorite games in this style is Snow Brothers.

Snow Brothers was originally released in arcades in 1990, developed by Toaplan. It was later ported to the Game Boy, NES, Famicom, and the Mega Drive in Japan only. Each version has slight differences and enhancements. The NES and Famicom versions add story cutscenes at the start of the game. The Game Boy port is single player only, but ten levels were added. The Mega Drive version includes an expanded story and twenty additional levels from the original arcade game. The NES version of Snow Brothers was released in November 1991. It was published by Capcom and appears to be developed by Sol. I could not find much information on the web on Sol, but they are also credited with developing both NES Flintstones titles. Toaplan’s final game was Otenki Paradise in 1994, which was localized in the US as Snow Bros. 2: With New Elves. A third game under this name was created by a company called Syrtex Games in 2002 called Snow Brothers 3: Magical Adventure. It was never officially released and could potentially be a hack of the original arcade game.

The story of Snow Brothers is a basic one. King Scorch cursed brothers Nick and Tom by turning them into snowmen, and he also captured the princesses Teri and Tina because of course he does. It’s up to the brothers do to their thing and defeat the king to save their land. You can play Snow Brothers in single player with the blue-clad Nick, or play simultaneous two-player with the other player using Tom dressed in red. To beat the game and save the day, you must clear all 50 floors.

Snow Brothers is a single-screen arcade platformer. Just like Bubble Bobble, the object of the game is to defeat all enemies on screen so you can proceed up to the next floor. Use the D-pad to move Nick and Tom both left and right. The A button jumps, and the B button throws a handful of snow forward. The idea here is to throw enough snow on an enemy to encase it in a giant snowball. Then, you push the snowball and it rolls to the bottom of the screen and defeats the enemy inside. If the pushed snowball collides with other enemies on the ledges below, they also get defeated and will leave an item behind for you to collect.

The gameplay is both simple and straightforward, but there is some nuance to the mechanics that gives you some surprising versatility. You can jump up through floors allowing you to climb higher more easily. A pushed snowball disappears once it hits a wall on the ground level, and it rebounds off any other wall above. Sometimes you can get a snowball trapped within a ledge off the ground level and it will bounce back and forth a bit before vanishing on its own. You can have the snowball hit you and carry you along with it. While riding, you can either jump out early on your own or let the snowball run its course. Once you finish your ride, you will gain some brief invincibility. You can throw a bit of snow on an enemy to start the process of forming a snowball, briefly stunning the enemy in the process. As partially covered enemies sit there untouched, they slowly melt the snow until they can break out and freely move around again. You can defeat an enemy by running it over with a snowball even if it is partially covered, which is an effective strategy. If two full snowballs collide, they rebound off each other and both start descending which can knock out enemies on both sides of the stage if done right. Some levels have slopes and snowballs can roll up these hills with no problems. You can use a stationary snowball as a platform to reach higher ledges, and you can even lift a snowball by jumping into it from below. All these techniques give you plenty of ways to approach any challenge.

Bowling over enemies with a snowball will reveal some kind of item once the defeated enemy is removed from play. These stay on screen temporarily, but usually long enough for you to reach them across the stage if you go at them right away. Most of the time you get some sort of money or food item that gives you points, like candy or a slice of cake. What you really want are powerups. The manual for Snow Brothers calls them hot sauce, but they are clearly potions in jars as far as I’m concerned. The red potion gives you speed skates allowing you to move much faster. The blue potion lets you throw larger handfuls of snow so you can cover enemies with fewer shots. The yellow potion increases your throw distance, letting you heave snow over halfway across the screen. All three powerups stack together too, but you lose all of them if you die. Losing a fully powered character is quite a setback, but that’s just the nature of the game.

There are a couple of rare item drops that you should make sure to grab right away if you see one. The first of these is a green potion. Grab it to inflate Nick or Tom like a balloon. You can then fly freely across the level and simply run into enemies to defeat them. You should have plenty of time with this power to clear all enemies on screen. The second rare powerup is a white smiley face. This item changes the color of the background and temporarily replaces the normal enemies with these blue face enemies. Turning the blue enemy into a snowball displays a letter in the word “SNOW” and pushing it lets you acquire the letter. You will see a space at the top of the screen above your score showing which letters you have. Spell out SNOW for an extra life! You can also destroy the special enemies with a snowball for a large 30,000-point bonus.

There are several different enemies in the game. Most of them have some way of climbing around the level. Some enemies will attack you if you come near, a couple breath fire at you, some fly around, and so on. All normal enemies can be covered in snow and must be defeated. One neat thing you can try to do is clear all the enemies by pushing only one snowball. You can do this with a single snowball, or with more than one as long as you set up a chain reaction first. Defeating all the enemies at once causes some paper money to rain down to the bottom of the level. These disappear very quickly, but are worth either 10,000 or 20,000 points each. If you are playing for high score, you want as many of these as possible.

There are two enemies that you cannot cover in snow. There is a sumo enemy appearing in the middle levels that doesn’t need to be killed. He sits at the top of the screen and is tough to reach. If you can pelt him with a little snow, he will go away and leave some paper money behind for big points. The enemy that can show up in any level is Pumpkin Head. This is a “hurry up” enemy that appears when you are spending too much time in a stage. He floats around slowly, but freely, and you can’t hurt him at all. After a little while, he will begin spawning invincible ghosts that home in on you. These spell certain death for Nick and Tom. The idea is to clear levels quickly enough so that you don’t have to deal with Pumpkin Head. The only two ways to get rid of him are to defeat all remaining enemies or let him or one of his ghosts kill you.

Every tenth level is a boss stage, so in this 50-stage game there are five bosses. These are your typical large enemies that take many hits to defeat. All of them generate smaller enemies which you turn into snowballs and send flying into the boss to do damage. You can also throw snow at them directly. I don’t know if that does damage or not, but you can earn a small amount of points for each direct hit. After each boss fight is a slot machine mini-game. There are three reels that each give you a bonus depending on where they stop. The reels contain a big X which gives you nothing, each of the four letters in the word “SNOW,” and a figure of Nick that gives you an extra life. Each letter you collect also nets you 10,000 points, and each extra life adds 50,000 points. It is possible to time the slots for specific outcomes, but it’s tricky to do so and I couldn’t quite get the hang of it. Each reel needs time to slow down to a stop so you need to anticipate your mark early. It is also difficult to make out specific letters while the slots are going, but extra lives stand out more and that’s really what you want anyway.

You begin the game with only two extra lives. These can go by quickly when you are just starting out. The good news is that you get many continues. The manual states you get four continues, but you actually get nine. Upon losing your last life, the life counter at the top will blink and instead display the number of continues remaining. You resume play with three new lives exactly where you left off. In a two-player game the continues are shared, so lives are more precious here than in single-player.

I have a little history with Snow Brothers, and actually I give the game some credit for getting me back into game collecting. I first played the NES game as a rental at a babysitter’s house, so I probably played it soon after release. I enjoyed playing it, but that was the extent of my experience for many years. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but in 2013 we bought a house and I could display all my NES games properly for the first time. As I was getting everything set up at home, I got the urge to expand my collection. I owned around 250 NES games then, so there were plenty of fun individual games left to start looking for. My memories started to stir and the first game that came to mind was Snow Brothers. Unfortunately, this was also the exact moment I realized this collecting journey was not going to be cheap. You see, Snow Brothers is among the most expensive NES carts.

The cost of some individual games like Snow Brothers caused me to divert my attention toward buying games in bulk. I focused heavily on games that fell in the $15-$30 price range. I could make consistent progress through the deep middle ground in the NES set and often found these titles bundled with cheaper games to fill that part of the collection at the same time. That strategy paid off immensely because many of the $20 carts I bought soon became $50 titles or higher. I would eventually need a plan to buy all these high-end titles at the end.

I had nearly doubled my NES loose cart collection in what seemed like such a short time. I was doing a good job at tracking my total and noticed I was sitting on 499 total games. Lacking many of the most expensive carts, this was the perfect time to take a bulk-buying break and acquire something special for Game #500. The choice was easy; this was the time I would finally purchase Snow Brothers. My wife gave her blessing, and so I started searching. I am very price conscious and all I found were high-priced copies and sellers that wouldn’t budge. It seemed like a long time, but it only took a couple of weeks to find my mark. A new eBay listing for Snow Brothers showed up at $130 with best offer, and I worked the price down to $117.50 shipped. That was essentially market price at the time and I was glad to pay it. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but this was also the time I first purchased a screwdriver bit to open and clean cartridges. Better late than never! Snow Brothers was either the first or second cartridge I opened to clean those pins nice and shiny. I played through the game three or four times in my first week of ownership and then mostly left it on the shelf until now.

I have owned Snow Brothers for three years now, and I had no trouble beating the game again. The entire game takes around 30 minutes to beat. I needed only two continues and so I punched in an easy victory. Because I enjoy this game so much, I set out to beat the game using no continues simply as a fun challenge. This took a bit more effort but I didn’t find it all that difficult. I needed around five attempts and the failed ones all ended within the last 15 levels or so. The only reason it took me so long to finish the game between my first and last attempts was because it took me a week to make time for my next NES session.

To my surprise, Snow Brothers has an extended ending sequence if you clear the game on a single credit. I haven’t seen this distinction called out anywhere specifically, and I only found out about it once I beat the game this way on my own. I always shoot for the best ending on games like this, but I didn’t even know it applied to Snow Brothers until I saw it for myself. I’m sure I will find more secrets like this as I continue my deep dive into the library.

Snow Brothers is one of my favorite NES games, and it’s a shame is so expensive. Games of this nature can get repetitive, but Snow Brothers lasts just long enough to avoid mid-game burnout. The boss fights are fun and a nice change of pace, and the difficulty curve is even and fair. The graphics are clean and the music is good, although some of the tracks are repeated within the different groups of ten floors. The two-player mode is a blast to go through with a friend. It’s a great game for high score challenges too. I don’t like that it’s so expensive to buy, but it does make sense. The game is a true uncommon title that probably had a low print run, it was a later run NES game, and the game is fun. It fits the profile of an expensive game, as I like to say. Definitely check this one out even if you have to emulate it.