Bubble Bobble Revolution is two games in one. On the one hand you have a straight port of a two decades old arcade game that some remember fondly. On the other you have a “re-imagining” of the game that results in the same kind of mess you get when Hollywood decides it would be a good idea to re-imagine a classic movie. The overall result is half a game that will appeal to Bubble Bobble fans and a whole game that won’t appeal to anyone else.

First let’s look at the original version of the game. Bubble Bobble is a very simplistic platform game in which you control a dinosaur that can blow bubbles to capture the enemies trying to put an end to said dinosaur. The levels are about as basic as you can get, consisting of a few platforms with one or more “holes” at the bottom that will warp you back to the top of the level. The enemies’ attack plan is pretty rudimentary – they simply walk along a platform until they hit a wall and turn around, fall off the end, or run into your dinosaur. To protect yourself from this relentless attack, you must trap each enemy in a bubble and then hop up to pop it, thus dispatching the enemy. Once all of the enemies are popped, the level is cleared and you move on to the next. All of this will either be nostalgic for you or incredibly boring after five minutes, depending on your experience with the original game or lack there of.

Bubble Bobble Revolution also includes an updated version of this game with larger levels, tougher enemies, and a thorough makeover of the graphics. Unfortunately, what little simplistic fun that could be gleaned from the original gameplay has been completely obliterated in the remake. The scale of the new levels is way off, leaving you with what amounts to a zoomed in view of a corner of the level. This makes it very difficult to determine which general direction to head in and makes for a lot of aggravating deaths at the hands of off-screen enemies. Making matters worse is that the difficulty has been cranked way up from the original game. You can be entirely new to Bubble Bobble and play your way through the original game well into the double digit levels on you first try, only to have your lunch handed to you time and again on the first level of the new version. And then your reward for facing all this frustration is a game that’s broken. You’ll skip right through some levels, you’ll never have an opportunity to use the microphone feature with which you’re supposed to blow into the mic to activate fans, and the level thirty boss never appears – and if there’s no boss then you can’t beat him, and if you can’t beat him you can’t advance.

The only people I can recommend this game to are those who love the original Bubble Bobble so much that they want to play it again. The game does a just fine job of porting the original, but unless you already love the game you’re not going to be enamored with its rudimentary play and graphics.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 40%. Bobble this bubble and let it pop.