BABLE BABLE

Main review

I don’t know about anyone else, but I find myself pondering some potentially unanswerable questions from time to time; do female game characters not get cold in those skimpy costumes, how much would Mario or Luigi charge me to unblock a toilet and what exactly are the two dinosaurs in Bubble Bobble doing to produce all those bubbles? The chances are there’ll never be answers to some of those questions but one possible suggestion for the third has at least been offered up by Bable Bable on the C64 because the game’s author The Swedish Chef reckons that they’re constantly burping!

Although it borrows the sprites and background graphics from Firebird’s C64 conversion of Bubble Bobble, the player is handed control of a pink dinosaur which, rather than spewing forth a stream of bubbles, will instead stand before its enemies and attack them by disgorging gas in their general direction; this spasmodic ejection disorients any nasty in range, causing them to leg it in the opposite direction (presumably in search of an air freshener or at the very least a gas mask) and, if they sustain enough gas attacks, they’ll be rendered unconscious and plummet out of the play area. Once everything else has been burped away in this manner, the level is complete and Beb (well, he’s the wrong colour to be Bub or Bob) can move on to the next.

I’M FOREVER BELCHING BUBBLES

Despite its less than serious air, this game has actually been put together rather well; a decent in-game soundtrack is overlaid by a sampled burp that can be varied in length depending on how long the fire button is held down (this doesn’t affect the power of the attack, the feature seems to be there purely so that players can amuse themselves by doing short and long belches at will) and those lifted graphics might not offer a lot of variety but they’re still solid.

In fact the only real issue is that Bable Bable can’t really provide a lot of long-term playability since it only offers up a finite number of stages to work through, only has the one attacker throughout the entire game and doesn’t have any scoring or bonus items to collect. It really wouldn’t have taken much in the way of expansion to turn this into a much more substantial game, but what’s there does at least offer a little short term entertainment for just about anyone who is amused by burping or at least the idea of dinosaurs doing it – show it to your kids once you’ve stopped laughing, they’ll probably love it.