Bubble Ghost

Looking around the early Game Boy library for a first game to talk,

my first thought was to get one of those Puzzle games that were 

oh so popular in the initial moments of life of the gaming brick.

But checking around my personal favourite early GB games,

there was one little thing that stuck out to me immediately,

a charming, quick and fun tiny arcade-like experience.

While the time for the endless Puzzle games will come,

let's enjoy this first cool little thing named Bubble Ghost.

Developed for the Game Boy by Opera House and published by a slew of companies depending of the region, like Infogrames in Europe, Accolade in the USA, or Pony Canyon in Japan in 1990, Bubble Ghost is a fun Arcade tittle where you put your reflexes and skill to the test in a rather unusual way.

Opera House is, curiously enough, a name used by several Japanese development groups. The one that worked in Bubble Ghost also worked a lot of old games for systems like MSX, MSX2, Mega Drive, PS1 and PS2 among others. One of the most important series they worked on seem to be the Eliminage franchise, which also had games on the Nintendo DS and 3DS. If you're curious about the other Opera Houses out there, one makes Otome games, while another one made adult visual novels.

That said, Bubble Ghost is not a creation of Opera House. Like many, many games on the early Game Boy days, it is a port of a previously existing game, with the original version being on the Atari ST and created by Christopher Andreani to be published by ERE Informatique. Yes, that is a French developer group.

In fact, Bubble Ghost happens to be the first French video game to make it to the Game Boy!

But let's start with the game itself, okay?

What a cute little guy!

Bubble Ghost doesn't really have a story to speak off. You're directly thrown to the game the moment you press Start. But because I like to at least have a reason for what I'm doing in games, I kinda imagined my own interpretation of what could be happening.

You play as a little ghostly creature with limbs and a pretty cute face that lives in an abandoned mansion that's full of all sorts of stuff. Maybe out of boredom, one day decides to transform the mansion into an obstacle race, placing all the objects inside the building in a way to act as the obstacles, while the rooms and halls of the mansion are the racing track itself.

Of course, being a ghost, and thus having the ability to go through objects like nobody's business, all that work was kinda for nothing, there's simply not a challenge. Fortunately, our little protagonist comes up with an idea: Instead of being itself the one to reach the goal, he will have to navigate something that can be interacted both by itself and the obstacles to the end of the mansion, but without touching it to make it harder. And after thinking about it for a moment, a fragile yet easy to manipulate bubble is the perfect thing. Having everything sorted out, it's time for the race to begin!

...There, I feel much better now.

For being a ghost, our protagonist has quite the lungs!

You control, as already mentioned, that cute Ghost, who is able to move in eight directions at a decent pace with the D-Pad, and as I already mentioned can go through everything without being harmed. Besides moving, its other only action is blowing up air at the press of a button, either A or B, which you can use to interact mainly with the other important element, the Bubble. One last important aspect of the Ghost's controls, is that when you're close to the Bubble, your character will look at it automatically, to make it much, much, much easier to manipulate the Bubble and move around at the same time (something important that will come again at the end of this entry).

But going back to the Bubble. This bubble fortunately is not one of those terrible real life bubbles. For starters, it ignores the laws of gravity, and will always float on the exact sport unless something (that includes you) is actively interacting with it. So you don't need to take care of it once is in a safe spot and you need to do something else. Not only that, its momentum can be altered easily.

Let's say that you're blowing air from the right, making the Bubble go to the left in a straight line. If you go over the Bubble then and blow air from above, that left momentum will completely disappear and now the Bubble will go just down. You can override the previous direction with ease, and this makes the manipulation of the Bubble way less cumbersome that it could be with a more free movement range.

And that's the most basic aspect of the gameplay. Now, as I mentioned before, the reason why are you doing this is to get the Bubble to advance through the mansion in order to reach the goal of this little game the Ghost has created. In gameplay terms, your mission is to make the Bubble reach the exit of each room or hall in order to progress.

Oh c'mon, don't look at me, you're the one who put it there!

Of course, it's not going to be as easy as it sounds. There are obstacles everywhere, and of many varieties. some are stationary, others move back and forth, while others need to be interacted with in different ways to let you continue your race. Moving needles, barb-wire, fire, electronic devices and even animals are all awaiting just to burst your Bubble, not to mention that walls can make it explode too!

For example, in the image above, my Bubble exploded because of the heat produced by the candle. Even if you try to pass on a higher level, it will still explode. What you need to do is get close to the candle and blow air to put the fire out! Then you can go beyond the candle and maneuver your way to get to the exit.

Could this mansion be owned by a magician at some point?

Of course, in case that Bubble ends up entering contact with anything (besides you, as you just go through it, fortunately), it will explode, making our little ghost get angry and losing one try, and having to restart the room you were in. While you start the game with 5 tries, they can be lost very, very easily if you're not careful, and it is expected from you to be accurate in your movements and strategies around each screen and its assortment of obstacles to navigate your Bubble to the end.

But that said, you can't rest in your laurels either, as each room has its own time limit, thus meaning you can't just be accurate, but you also need moderately quick in your movements to not get timed out before leaving a screen. It is shown in the lower part of the screen represented as a black bar, and in case it gets emptied, you will lose a try, just like if your Bubble hit something.

But do not fret, the time is really not that bad and in fact there's a good reason is called Bonus on the HUD of the game. You see, a big part of Bubble Ghost is getting High Scores, which getting quick to the exit provides. The sooner you reach the end of a room the bigger is the Bonus is, and the more points you amass, the more tries you get and that's always sweet. But its not the only way to get score, as interacting with certain objects sprinkled throughout the mansion can award you extra points. You get another try each 40.000 points!

You can choose to go through the needle-ridden path up or charm your way down.

But the fastest way to solve a room can be very often the most risky way too; thus you first and foremost must use your head and try to preserve your tries for the later harder places; and let the score grow to get a few more while losing as few as possible. Unless you feel daring, though.

The rooms in this mansion start rather simple, with not so many obstacles and bigger spaces to let the Bubble move around and you to learn the ropes of the game's mechanics. Knowing how the boundaries (or hit boxes) of the Bubble and the different obstacles work can be crucial to succeed in Bubble Ghost, specially since the difficulty rises a with each new room, and quickly becoming rather challenging.

Is that a horse toy... Thing? This ghost really used everything in the house. 

In case the worst happens and you lose all your tries, thankfully, you're gifted with 3 Continues, and you come back to the same room you were, which is very merciful, even if you lose your Score. And you will probably need those Continues because like I said, the game gets hard. The number of spikes grows fast and their placement becomes trickier and trickier, asking for way more risky maneuvers and better timing while the clock is still ticking.

But don't get me wrong, while the game can get a bit tense (specially when you lose a lot of tries in rapid succession), the game keeps being fun and entertaining all the way through. And with a total of 35 rooms before you reach the goal, the game is a rather sweet and short experience, with a duration that float around the twenty minute mark in your first tries.

Yet replaying it to get better times and High Score is also addictive by itself, specially once you get all the tricks for each room. You can then even attempt to use the shortcuts that appear from time to time, that involve maneuvers very hard to pull off and make you feel like a champion for a few seconds.

That took way more tries that I care to tell you.

And really, that's Bubble Ghost for the most part. It is a very simplistic, yet mechanically sound and solid and becoming a challenging and fun short game, which makes it all the more fitting for the Game Boy back then, and with its arcade-y and fast pace the game stood out between the slower Puzzle games released before.

In fact the teeny tiny Game Boy version has become the most memorable and probably well liked version of this game because how well it works. Let me take a few paragraphs to talk about the other versions very quick!



















On the left you have a screenshot of the Atari ST version of the game, while on the right you have the Game Boy version. After seeing its "big brothers" I find the GB version to be more impressive than I thought it was.

As you can see, the small resolution of the GB didn't really put a dent into the game's level design, which says something very nice about Opera House, because as I mentioned in the Game Boy introduction, it was very easy for some developers to try and cram original graphics and call it a day, resulting in disappointing ports that didn't have in mind the GB resolution and capabilities. But Bubble Ghost on GB follows very closely the level design of the PC versions and even features every level in those games, so you don't lose a bit of content.

Another easy to notice change was that the game got a new visual style, being a bit more cute, with a complete redesign of the Ghost to look way more cutesy in a Japanese cartoon way (which I'm quite fond of), but also certain elements of the stages were changed to fit this new look. For example, in the PC games, you could find busts with pulsating heads or bright eyes and pictures of fire extinguishers (for some reason), now there are top hats with bunnies in them and other toys around the mansion.

Other gigantic change is how much better the game plays on the GB compared to the PC games. I mentioned way earlier that the Ghost automatically looks at the Bubble when it is near it, and that's something it doesn't do on the other versions, but it also happens that the Ghost doesn't even look at the directions you're moving and needs to rotate separately too. That makes the game way more slow and clunky to play, I find.

Finally, the sound department also got changed. Here's a gameplay video of the Commodore 64 version. While it has a neat little intro theme, the rest of the game has what I would call rather annoying sound design. With screeches, sirens, and other tiring sound effects that never stop, except between room and room.

With just one more try, but I made it, yes!

Now compare that to the Game Boy version. This one does away with most background sound effects and replaces them with a very catchy and fun music track composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto. It is a memorable and lovable tune that goes really well with the more cartoony and cheery vibes of the Game Boy version of the game.

You can hear this tiny soundtrack by clicking here!

Hitoshi is one heck of a composer, with a veeery long list of credits, with quite a few important games in his resume, like Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen, Final Fantasy Tactics, Gradius V, Dragon's Crown, Valkyria Chronicles or Muramasa: The Demon Blade among many others; and it is very fortunate to have him give a bit more soul to Bubble Ghost, and it's also worth to mention this is one of his first video game works too.

While Bubble Ghost is for most a little diversion, and to be frank it is what it was designed to be; I find to be a quite warm feeling to see how neat this GB version really is, sporting so much more charm without losing anything important in the transition yet also improving how it plays tremendously, and having it portable feels so much better than playing this on a computer.

And that's all, really. Give Bubble Ghost a try, you might like it!