So we jumped the gun a little on our last story, but to be fair we weren’t the only ones who thought the teaser images that showed up on the Taito Facebook page were for Bubble Bobble. Turns out, it’s actually Bust-a-Move (aka Puzzle Bobble), the few people in the comments who noticed the launcher in the screenshot of sprites were right.
So here are the two images again, the first one shows Bub and an Apple “together at last":
The second image posted to the Facebook page was a much more revealing screenshot of several of the Bust-a-Move sprites:
Bust-a-Move, also known as Puzzle Bobble outside of North America and some European countries, is an arcade puzzle game originally released in 1994. Like Bubble Bobble, Bust-a-Move has had its fair share of ports and sequels, with over 23 different titles in the series ranging from the original arcade release, to the XBOX Live Arcade and now the iPhone. The game is a match-3 variant:
At the start of each round, the rectangular playing arena contains a prearranged pattern of coloured “bubbles". At the bottom of the screen, the player controls a device called a “pointer", which aims and fires bubbles up the screen. The fired bubbles travel in straight lines (possibly bouncing off the side walls of the arena), stopping when they touch other bubbles or reach the top of the arena. The objective of the game is to clear all the bubbles from the arena without dying.
Here is a gameplay video from the 1994 version of the game:
It’s unclear right now whether Taito is going to give the same treatment to Bust-a-Move as they did to Space Invaders with Space Invaders Infinity Gene [App Store] or if it is going to be a faithful remake of the original. Regardless, if the quality of the game is in line with Infinity Gene, it’s going to be very hard to pass up.
