Bubbles (Arcade)

After Pac-Man proved that an unconventional game idea like a yellow ball traveling through a maze eating ghosts could be a smash hit, it seemed like everything and the kitchen sink was thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Appropriately enough, this experimental period of arcade game development had a game based on the kitchen sink crop up, Bubbles directly inspired by Pac-Man but doing away with the maze format. Rather than munching pellets though, Bubbles would be all about its round protagonist cleaning up a progression of unusually dirty sink basins as best it could.

Bubbles has the player viewing a sink from a top-down perspective, the single joystick on the cabinet all you need to play beyond the buttons that confirm if you’re playing single player or alternating with a second player in a high score competition. Your goal in a round of Bubbles is to help your initially featureless bubble named Bubbles grow in size, guiding it around a messy sink and cleaning up different types of detritus to help it grow. Gradually, the bubble will develop eyes and a mouth, its facial features vitally important to making progress. To progress to the next sink you must at least get your bubble to the size where he can quite clearly display his smile, the player automatically getting advanced to the next stage if everything they can possibly clean up is gone. You can also send your bubble into the central drain to speed up the process of getting to the next stage, but that only works if you’re of the right size and the drain is a safe green color when you take the plunge. However, taking that dive early instead of waiting until all the dirt is cleaned up can get you bonus points and skip ahead an extra level if you’re large enough, meaning there is incentive to wrap up a level early.

One of the biggest issues with Bubbles surprisingly comes from that core concept of level advancement. Progress is contingent on the amount of stuff you can clean up in the current level, with three types of detritus existing for your bubble to wipe away. The oddly named crums and greasies are both fairly plain sorts of mess that slowly trend towards the central drain, but the ants that are just as vital to building up your size will crawl around the sink basin and ask you to chase them down. As soon as a level starts everything is in motion, and while your bubble is rather zippy, it’s got more to worry about than just getting to the dirt before it goes down the drain. Brushes and sponges threaten to shrink your bubble on contact until you’re big enough to bully them, and when cockroaches come out of the drain, they rush towards your bubble with deadly intent. You can snag a broom from a strange cleaning lady who can be seen sweeping up the sink interior that you can use to nudge the brushes and sponges around safely or eliminate a roach, but razor blades also occupy sinks and are always deadly to the touch. Getting to a sufficient size involves weaving around all your mobile enemies to snag moving detritus to build yourself up, the player not really having the time to hesitate and often asked by the layout of the enemies and dirt to endanger themselves with risky maneuvers.

If Bubbles was merely hard that wouldn’t be too much of a problem. The risk involved in grabbing the dirt to grow is a reasonable way of challenging the player, but even the early stages are designed to only barely provide enough to clean up to get you up to a good size. You get three lives per quarter and can earn extra soap bubbles by getting points for cleaning sinks, but if you can’t build up your bubble to have its full face, the level will end with your death instead of progress. A death by other means will at least retain your current size when you respawn, but unless you’re immediately able to charge in and catch the crums and greasies that tend to dive into the drain early in a level, you can very easily lose a life too because you were thrown into a new situation with a tight time window to act. Playing back through the game after a loss does mean you can prepare yourself for what you’ll be seeing in the stages, but it hits on that old issue with arcade game progression where conquering a level that killed you last time gets you to the next new level that can defeat you with how it arranges its enemies and goals, meaning you’ll have to play up to that point again to even have a chance of learning how to approach it.

While the sink layout will always be the same blue basin, the different levels do have different concepts for how the dirt is laid out at the start and which foes you must face. A stage might focus heavily on ants for example, making it more like a chase to reach your maximum size, but another might litter the play area with so many sponges, razor blades, and brushes that you really can’t balance the need to be delicate with how little time you have to clean up the disappearing grime. Bubbles becomes frustrating because, in all likelihood, you will lose a life because you weren’t quick enough to plunge into danger, the sink’s harsh punishment for not being full-sized discouraging efforts to try and get high scores. The cockroach that charges out of the drain with decent regularity makes riding the drain to collect the dirt you might lose too risky and the cleaning ladies are in limited supply while cockroaches keep coming, your broom only able to beat one of them before it disappears. None of these systems with the enemies or the grime are really bad on their own, it’s just they all pair rather poorly with the enforced time crunch as you must charge in too recklessly to have a hope of succeeding and can’t focus too much on engaging with them or else the sink will wash away your hopes of continuing to deeper levels.

THE VERDICT: Since the gameplay goal of Bubbles is so simple, it’s hard to get over the issues caused by its insistence on fast efficiency. When the only thing you’re doing is cleaning the sink, having that pressure force you to be swift in arrangements where errors are bound to lead to your bubble popping means enjoyment is only sometimes squeaked out rather than a constant. If the need to reach max size wasn’t emphasized so heavily, zipping around the sink to get as much grime as you can while avoiding danger could be fun, but Bubbles leans on you too hard to try and take away your quarters, the experience turning out to be a wash in the end.

And so, I give Bubbles for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. Toning down the punishment for not reaching the biggest bubble you can get would really help Bubbles make the most of its mechanics. Rather than fearing the sink wiping away faceless suds, if you could focus on doing the task well instead of doing it quickly, Bubbles might be more than a mad dash to actually survive. Brushes, sponges, roaches, and razors are dangerous enough, especially with how easily they can get clustered with the grime you’re going for or how their paths might intersect with the ants as they march around the sink basin. The game could keep its punishment for not having a smile on at the end of a stage if the detritus was slower moving, but asking the player to weave through so much danger to try to even keep playing the game makes it hard to even appreciate the goal of the game. Wiping a sink clean could be a fun little pastime thanks to visible progression and need to chase down the ants, but instead you’re walking a tightrope at full speed because you can see someone at the other end ready to snip the line with a pair of scissors. You might be able to get past the first few sinks without too much fuss, but once you’re past the introduction, Bubbles overwhelms the play field with too much to worry about that you’ll soon reach a game over despite your best attempts to plunge into peril just to snag some greasies before they go down the drain.

Bubbles is intriguing with its strange concept for arcade gameplay, but its approach to difficulty really shows how an arcade game can be let down by its built-in need to get the player to pay more to play more. Bubbles doesn’t even let you continue from where you left off though, the process of playing again and getting better about repeat dives through similar content just so you can potentially get screwed over by whatever new enemy and dirt arrangements await you in the next unfamiliar sink. If you just had a bit more leniency on how fast you needed to be to survive then Bubbles could be serviceable arcade fun, but instead the pressure to succeed swiftly is too great to justify trying to get good at cleaning these virtual sinks.