Video games have come a long way since Bubble Bobble
Thinking back to playing Nier Gestalt + Automata, I think the thing I respond to most about those game’s gameplay was that the enemies shoot big bubbles at you, making a 3D third person action game feel Space Harrieresque.
A huge part of my enjoyment of Foamstars was the specific joy of controlling Soa (and fighting other Soa players) as she shot big bubbles of foam in these slow-moving predictable patterns.
This seems to be a big thing with other games that have defined this generation, like Stranger of Paradise and Forspoken which also heavily feature enemies who do this and it being a viable combat option.
The first thing that comes to mind is Bubble Trouble, a flash game where you both shoot and dodge bubbles. Your projectile is a slow-moving harpoon, which made for some interesting timing, and hitting a bubble would split it into two smaller bubbles that would also bounce lower, making them harder to dodge. Quite an interesting mechanic. Makes me wonder if they borrowed it from somewhere or if it was a Flash original.
@wickedcestusHad to look this up and start playing it. It’s tough but fair…,. I think there’s something about the way that bubbles are modeled in games typically feels more fair than other projectiles. They’re typically big, slow, and predictable enough that when you get hit, it feels like your own fault.
@Tradegood Try getting into Pang and a few levels in it’s far from slow. Those tiny bubbles are ruthless killers that want nothing more than to hurt you. And their only predictably is they’re unpredictable!
@Tradegood Pang is just the non-American name for Buster Bros. so they’re all the same group and Snow Bros. is just Bubble Bobble with snow (great game though).
I’m sure Pang isn’t the first like it, but it may be. It’s just the first I played aged maybe 11 or so in the arcade so as @wickedcestus said with the game they played, I think it’s the first you remember that is always the first you think of.
Fun game though, I always loved double harpooning. Which is not a sentence you can say often!
@Tom I had a feeling! Most of the games I played in the computer lab at elementary school turned out to be clones of arcade classics. I hadn’t thought of this one in quite some time; I’m surprised I even remembered the name.
@wickedcestus You should try and check out some of the others it was based on. I’m sure they’re almost identical, but if it was your first it was your first and not a bad thing at all!
Pang’s based on a Hudson game called Cannonball, which was produced for Japanese computers in 1983, and there’s some ambiguity about how developer Mitchell was able to basically co-opt it into their own series—neither party has been willing to really comment on it, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s because they have some sort of behind-closed-doors/handshake arrangement they don’t want to talk about or just because Mitchell jacked it outright.
There was an officially-licensed Pang sequel from a European studio a while back (I was gonna say “recently” but it came out in 2016!), and I still see indie clones pop up every now and then.
On the wider topic of using bubbles in an interesting way in video games, there was also Soul Bubbles from France (2008). The game’s lead programmer and lead artist would start Lizardcube (Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, Streets of Rage IV) together a decade later.
Mario likes bubbles as well. There are bubbles used in different ways in Super Mario Galaxy (2007)…
… New Super Mario Bros. Wii (2009)…
… New Super Mario Bros. U (2012)…
… and Super Mario Bros. Wonder (2023), for example.
Shovel Knight (2014) is also notoriously bubble-friendly in its first, tutorial-in-disguise stage.
