#puzzle bobble 4

[pjorange]

I put together some Dev and Bub GIFs from Puzzle Bobble 4 / Bust-A-Move 4! Currently feeling the first one lol

[pikogame]

パズルボブルでは4が好きなんですよね

２や３はたまに移植とかあるのにこれだけされない！

[devileaterjaek]

[ken-the-kihoryu]

Some Bubble Derg doodles!

(As well as some bonus doodles!)

[colinthebuizel]

[dandunn]

I wanna make so much develon content people get curious and go dam that guys cool I wanna play the thing he's from.

Unfortunately idk many people who are ride or die for colourful puzzle games involving bubbles.

[koppashiren]

Happy National SuperHero Day! (スーパーヒーローの日おめでとうございます！)

[floatingcatacombs]

UFO 50 Abducted Me For 159.2 Hours

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 4

I love video games...

UFO 50 may love video games more than me, though. It’s a preposterously ambitious compilation of fifty small-to-medium-scale games, developed and published by Mossmouth, which here refers to Spelunky creator Derek Yu and like five of his buddies.

These are retro-styled games, with three or four asterisks apiece on ‘retro’ and ‘styled’. The overall aesthetic approximates the eight-bit period, with a limited color palette and sequenced music, but things get tricky after that. There’s deliberate anachronisms everywhere, with a heavy focus on genres and mechanics popularized far after the NES era. There’s games in this collection that take elements from real-time strategy, 4X, deckbuilders, tower defense, platform fighters, and even immersive sims. The evolutionary lineage of games influencing other games is practically flipped on its head here! The Steam page for UFO 50 describes this as “a familiar 8-bit aesthetic with new ideas and modern game design”, which I think is a frankly bad way to describe the means by which these games constantly astound and surprise by playing with our expectations. It's the kind of collection where you boot up some shit titled "Waldorf's Journey" expecting a dinky little mascot platformer, and after twenty minutes of calibrating walrus trajectories you're forced to contend with the fact that Waldorf's Journey has imprinted itself into your very soul.

Only a few of the games in this collection are straightforward pastiches of popular NES genres – there’s a beat ‘em up, a space shooter, some arcadey sports titles, and a Bubble Bobble, but that’s about it. Everything else is either a novel idea or working within far more advanced genre mishmashes. The panicked unit reorganizing of Attactics, the death-based puzzle platforming of Mortol, the glorious Fire Emblem and Pogs mashup that is Lords of Diskonia - even when liberally borrowing from other games, it’s really creative stuff! I loved all the times when my initial assumptions of how the game would play ended up completely wrong. You may think Rock On! Island is a tower defense game, but there’s a secondary aspect of creating chicken-immolating factories to get more resources that practically supersedes the tower defense aspect in later levels.

Of course, these are the Spelunky guys, so procedural generation and roguelike elements feature heavily in more than a few of these games. That’s the biggest jump in plausibility – more than half of the games in this collection could hypothetically run on the NES with enough tweaks, but anything with enough randomness fundamentally could not. If you hate procgen with a burning passion then a fifth of the collection will probably be out of reach for you, but there’s plenty of bespoke design to go around as well.

UFO 50, as a collection of a defunct fictional company's game catalogue, conjures up the feeling of playing old games without the manual or a copy of Nintendo Power to help you out. For younger players it might invoke the times you tried to emulate NES games to see what all the older gamers were always going on about, devoid of the original context. There’s a real willingness on the part of UFO 50 to just drop you in and have you figure out the controls and strategy yourself. Because of this approach, the first ten minutes of any given game are often the roughest! That’s a wild trust fall on the developer's part, asking someone to stick through the period of confusion and frustration so that they can watch those emotions bloom into understanding, then competency, then joy. These “dude trust me” design moments are everywhere.

It doesn’t always work. Caramel Caramel has a straight-up backwards difficulty curve, Star Waspir has way too much going on on top of demanding shmup literacy in advance, and Porgy plus Divers are both extremely divisive for their slow and punishing starts, which definitely made me lose interest. But sometimes the difficulty and hostility actively draw you in, in a way that easier or more tutorialized games would not have. Rakshasa is a short but extremely difficult platformer inspired by Ghosts N’ Goblins that I just kept chipping away at in between trying out games. Rail Heist seems simple at first but is chock-full of emergent systems that let you truly rip the levels open if you think outside the box, something which is actively encouraged by the optional clear conditions. Onion Delivery is Crazy Taxi with tank controls and random events to make driving even more stressful. It's hell on earth and I love it for that. Mortol 2 also has very open-ended design, with each new run of 99 lives and one-hit deaths forcing you to rethink and optimize your approach until you find a way through its winding map.

The fifty games here are organized in chronological release date, with the “earlier” games being far simpler and often less polished than the later ones, even if their quality usually still shines through with gameplay. This is a bold move on Yu’s part. The first game in the collection, Barbuta, is a cryptic La Mulana-like with cheesy traps, clunky movement, and a truly painful learning curve. It is what the true game design freaks out there refer to as “kino”. I’m not on their level yet, but there is plenty in this collection for me to enjoy. Generally, I’ve found Eirik Suhrke’s contributions to be the most personally compelling to me on a gameplay level. Mooncat is an absolutely sublime platformer that forces you to relearn movement from first principles with controls that cannot possibly be described in text format. Campanella is a delightful little obstacle course of a game, and I had a fun time hunting for secrets in it. Warptank is a solid puzzle platformer, Pingolf is easily my favorite multiplayer game in the collection, and I’ve already praised Onion Delivery and Rakshasa. Surhke has a knack for fiendish little games where the difficulty comes across as more of a punchline than anything else. They’re bursting with character through the gameplay alone. I felt the drive to rise up to almost every one of his contributions, which is similar to how I feel about my favorite indie game developer, sylvie. I hereby award Eirik Surhke the UFO 50 Game Design Pervert Award. Who would’ve known that the Spelunky composer was as good of a designer as the Spelunky guy himself, if not more?

play mooncat. I am not fucking around

UFO 50 also has quite the elaborate metapuzzle, which is only really worth investigating once you’ve become familiar with the whole game library. It’s a good’n, though. The puzzle hunt unlocks a secret 51st game snuck into the collection by a disgruntled employee, chronicling the late days of the company with an atmosphere that feels hollow and downright wrong. The vibe is RPG Maker horror more than anything else, which is a cool and unexpected pull for this kind of compilation. Through Miasma Tower, the small team process that created UFO 50 is mythologized and problematized, with the fictional company UFO Soft undergoing serious financial and cultural problems, as well as implied fraud, cults, and even a missing person investigation. It was an incredible privilege for Derek Yu and company to be able to pour all of their time and skill into creating a game collection of this caliber without the pressure of money or deadlines due to the success of Spelunky, and Miasma Tower is something of a reckoning about that. Very happy it’s here.

UFO 50 isn’t for everyone. You have to be a fan of either retro games or indie games, ideally both. You have to have an open mind for getting your shit kicked in by both mechanical difficulty and initial game obtuseness. You need to be able to look past the deliberate anachronisms and learn to roll with the mechanical surprises that each game has to offer. But if you’re a weirdo like me, then maybe you’ll also sink a hell of a lot of time into superclearing more than two-thirds of the collection. If nothing else, it’s an amazing value proposition!

[6ad6ro]

my review of each game in UFO 50: BARBUTA - intentionally "hard and obtuse to reflect the era", but imo it works. haven't gotten far but i really appreciate it. BUG HUNTER - kinda hated it at first, but wound up really liking it once i understood the basics. NINPEK - controls great. appreciate the mr goemon inspiration. but sadly way too hard. PAINT CHASE - a fine game. sorta like pacman. MAGIC GARDEN - a really cool take on snake. took a minute to warm up to it tho. give it a chance. MORTOL - what a cool idea! lemmings combined with a platformer. gets hard fast but fine. VELGRESS - inverted downwell? it's neat. super hard but i'm just bad at it lol. PLANET ZOLDATH - an awesome bitesized roguelike. this game is sick, don't skip it. ATTACTICS - i'm too stupid to play this. but also i don't really want to learn. just okay. DEVILITION - seems more interesting than attactics, but i want to play it even less. KICK CLUB - bubble bobble clone, seems amazing at first. but all too quickly turns into tedious bullethell drop puzzles. after world 2 you'll wanna stop playing. too bad. AVIANOS - hard but kickass strategy game. has game customization and difficulty settings! MOONCAT - a big reason to buy ufo 50. weird and great! BUSHIDO BALL - do you like windjammers? this game kicks ass. gets real hard tho. BLOCK KOALA - i've never liked sokoban and i never will. seems fine if you do. CAMOUFLAGE - didn't wanna give it a chance at first, but it seems alright. lil stealth game. CAMPANELLA - it's probably a fine game but i hate playing it. maybe if it had a healthbar? GOLFARIA - amazing idea executed poorly. i wish i liked this more, but it's annoying to play. THE BIG BELL RACE - campanella combined with super off road (or sprint). better than campanella, but that "touch the walls and die" shit makes it way worse than it's inspirations. WARPTANK - seems cool. i def need to spend more time with it. WALDORF'S JOURNEY - good, cute game. hard but small scale, making it very fun. PORGY - an even bigger reason to buy ufo 50. small scale metroidvania. cherried it. ONION DELIVERY - god, what were they thinking? has so much potential but wayyy too hard. CARAMEL CARAMEL - such a good game ruined by a two-hit gameover. booooooo. PARTY HOUSE - this game is just really really good. hard to explain, just try it. HOT FOOT - imagine if super dodgeball had shit controls. why does my player autoswitch? i may never give it another chance… DIVERS - weird swimming rpg. i need to give it more time, but seems ok so far. (skipped over next 5) FIST HELL - a final fight clone? hell yes! but then i realized it was more like playing final fight on hardest setting with a single credit. aka "not fun". another example of a good game mossmouth ruined by making it too hard. (skipped over next 10) PILOT QUEST - tied with porgy for being my fav so far. zelda 1 combined with crafting. but you gain resources even when playing other games. kicks ass, PLAY THIS FIRST. cherried. (skipped mini and max) COMBATANTS - tbh i heard it sucked so i jumped ahead to it. they were right… (yet to play final 4) ??? - awesome but can't talk about it.

i'll update with the rest of the games once i try em.

[thescaryjokes]

highly invested in puzzle bobble 4 rn. i love this clown thing

[tamara-kama]

Puzzle Bobble, Arcade, Taito

Recalbox, RetroArch, MAME

800x600, bicubic upscaling

19" Toshiba 19A26 CRT TV

8bitdo Neo Geo CD Joypad

Raspberry Pi 4

HDMI to AV adapter

[pjorange]

Develon takes the two orange and colgate challenge in the middle!!! Zomg!!!!

This meme has been going around, and like… I’ve been looking to insert Develon into memes. My username is PJORANGE. It was meant to be. Rip bat incarnate king

[kiophen]

extremely desperate here, I've gone through 4 years of liked post history to try finding this video. it's a ytpmv of the pao pao island song from puzzle bobble/bust a move. it starts with Eminem doing the "it's fun for me just to grab a boob" freestyle, then he gets scared aed starts breathing hard as the music pauses and then a guy says PSYCHE! and music resumes. at one point it samples synecdoche New York where Caden says "SHE'S A FUCKING FOUR YEAR OLD!"

I've literally been looking for days. does anyone have this video

[devileaterjaek]

[micescrisis]

Develon from Puzzle Bobble 4.

[archoneddzs15]

SNK Neo Geo CD - Puzzle Bobble

Title: Puzzle Bobble / パズルボブル

Developer/Publisher: SNK / Taito

Release date: 2 May 1995

Catalogue No.: NGCD - 083

Genre: Bubble Match Puzzle

Bub and Bob make their first debut puzzle game on the Neo Geo in the name of Puzzle Bobble (Bust-a-Move for its western title). It was also released on the Neo Geo, this Neo Geo CD version, the Super Famicom, Game Gear and 3DO, and as you know all versions are basically the same apart from a few little twists in, say, the audio and graphical department. The Game Gear version is a great version to play on the go, the Super Famicom version is pretty good, the 3DO is basically the Super Famicom game but with CD music, and this Neo Geo CD version is basically the Neo Geo AES game on a CD. Still, a great puzzle game that’s well worth getting if you don’t own Puzzle Bobble 2X, Puzzle Bobble 3 or Puzzle Bobble 4.