Neo Geo Pocket Color

[A Black Falcon]

Here's a longer review of Puzzle Bobble Mini.

Puzzle Bobble Mini / Bust-A-Move Pocket - This essentially is a port of the first Bust-A-Move game, years after its sequels had released on other platforms. In that respect, I find this disappointing -- of the BAM games I own, the closest comparison for this one is the Game Gear version of BAM1. There are small differences, like that the NGPC version has on-cart saving while the GG version doesn't, but the basic features are quite similar. Like that version, the central mode is a puzzle mode where you play 99 puzzles, one after another. There is no grid where you choose a path, no variety, nothing, just 99 puzzles. It doesn't even require you to play them in order -- all 99 are unlocked from the beginning, and you can play them in any order. At least on the GG version you have to play them in order, and it uses passwords to save your progress! However, the NGPC version does save your top times for each stage, which is nice. Obviously, on the GG, or SNES, the game won't do that as those versions don't have oncart saving. My copy is broken however, so it won't even do that, it won't save times in puzzle mode. Bah, I might need another copy... though I'm not sure, this isn't one of my favorite versions of BAM, for sure.

Apart from the link-up versus mode, the other two modes are a Vs. CPU mode and an Endless mode. Endless mode was what I play the most in the GG game, and it's just as good here, except it saves your best scores, which is great (and this does actually save on my copy, so the save chip isn't completely shot, just partially corrupted or something). Vs. CPU mode is a bit different though -- here you choose which enemy you want to face next, so you can fight the eight enemies in any order, while on the GG you fight them in a preset order. Otherwise it's pretty much the same.

Apart from features and modes, the other obvious question is, how well does it play? Controls are identical to the GG version -- the dpad moves, one button shoots bubbles, and the other button slows down movement so you can get pixel-perfect accuracy. However, one thing isn't similar -- screen size, and thus the size of the graphics. The NGPC, like the Game Boy, has a small, nearly square screen. The bubbles, while clear and well drawn, are tiny on the screen. It's hard to tell some of the colors apart, too; indeed, the pink bubbles are particularly tough to tell apart from some of the others. However, the Game Gear version has a larger screen, and larger graphics. It does have a fairly significant amount of slowdown, while the NGPC version has one, but still, the bigger, easier to see graphics make that version more fun to play, in my opinion.

Or, of course, you could play one of the GBA, DS, etc. versions of Bust-A-Move, many of which have much better visibility than the NGPC or Game Boy versions of the game (the GB and GBC versions have that same "tiny little bubbles" issue that the NGPC has), and have lots more features and content too, in many cases.

So yeah, Puzzle Bobble Mini is okay, but flawed. I know there's nothing they could do about the size of the screen, but it is too bad that they chose to base it off of the first Bust-A-Move. It's too bad that this wasn't a conversion of Bust-A-Move 3 for instance, that game has a crazy number of modes and options, and the N64 and PSX versions of BAM3 were released in the US in 1999, the same year as this one (the Saturn version had released a year or two earlier here). BAM4 was out by that point too. I guess SNK was using the original as the basis because the original was the version that had been released on the Neo-Geo, and not the sequels (the original BAM arcade game, and the BAM Again version, are Neo-Geo, but not BAM2, BAM3, etc.), but it results in a somewhat feature-lacking version of the game. And my copy is kind of broken, too.