First Contact

Bubble Bobble was bought by my mother from an electronics store at Southern Boulevard in the Bronx. She explains that whenever she visited a friend of hers (whose son was one of my closest friends when I was little), she would sometimes go to that store to get an NES game. I can only remember bits and pieces of that store.

Memorable Moments

The difficulty curve of Bubble Bobble can be best summed up as “steady, with moments of weird spikes.” Things were going fine, and thankfully you have unlimited continues and a shorts passwords for when you came back for another session. But holy hell who thought up Round 57!? This is the kind of level that you’d see later on this this 100+ level gauntlet. What’s it doing near the halfway point is beyond me. Look at the image above. As a kid, I scratched my head trying to figure out how to get up to the top. You’d think “oh, you have to spit bubbles on the side to climb higher.” You can. But the bubbles descend instead of ascend. And those asshole Invaders rain spiky death from above, so climbing from the side brings with it some challenges. The center is no better as bubbles just get stuck there, never really rising. Today I have an idea of what to do. But back then I just banked on one of those items that cleared the stage of enemies, put me in a bonus stage, or skipped the stage entirely.

Super Drunk was the final (and only) boss of the game. You grabbed the bottle at the top and it gave you the ability to blow spark bubbles to damage the Super Drunk. Looking back, it probably wasn’t rocket science to figure out how to beat him. But for some odd reason I just ran around blowing bolt bubbles and setting ’em off in random places. We literally called someone who previously borrowed the game to ask them how they beat him. They said “oh, just shoot a bunch of them at the wall and pop them when he’s low enough.” And yeah, the plan worked. I finally beat the ga… Bad End? What the hell is this!?

Yep, this was one of those games that had multiple endings depending on what you did. It was one of the earlier known ones too. We (meaning the family) tried to figure out how to get the good end. When playing a few of the stages before the boss, we noticed a weird crystal ball at Round 99. We’ve never seen this kind of item anywhere else in the game. Upon getting it (which is really hard to do if you’re alone by the way), a door appeared in the small hole in the lower left side (pictured above First Contact). We had a feeling this was the secret we had to find. But the door stays up just as long as an item (meaning not that long). Upon entering it, we entered Round A0. And so we progressed through the stages and made it to Super Drunk again. Since we were just trading turns and not doing co-op, we beat him alone. Again, we got a bad end. Apparently we had to beat Super Drunk with player two out as well. So we cheated the system and used a life to bring out Player 2 just as Super Drunk was put in a bubble. He was beaten and we finally got a happy ending… And then the game gave us the Ghosts N Goblins treatment of doing the game over in a harder difficulty and we were like “f that” and declared the game complete. I would be the hard mode years later.