Puzzle Bobble (Arcade)

Puzzle Bobble is a cutesy arcade puzzle game, starring Bub and Bob from Bubble Bobble.

It offers either one or two-player competitive play, in which the aim is to clear each play area of the colored bubbles clustered in the upper half of the screen.

Six months later, SNK struck a deal with Taito to port the game on the Neo Geo as Bust-A-Move.

Prototype Info

Oddities#

Watch on YouTube

The B-System version of Puzzle Bobble uses the OPNB-B chip, which gives the game six FM channels, allowing for a richer and smoother soundtrack. While most of the soundtrack (e.g., Title Theme, Name Entry, and Ending Theme) can be heard as intended, the in-game themes (“Let's Go to Pao Pao Island!” and “April Forest”) cannot. This is because, when you pop three (or more) bubbles, two FM channels are muted until the song loops. The same behavior is present in the Neo Geo port, but in that case, it is due to the OPNB chip only having four FM channels, rather than a programming mistake.

The same thing happens with Bubble Buster.