Nintendo
Bust-A-Move Bash!
By Ryan Newman
May 22, 2007, 10 :04 am

The love I have for linking like bubbles by way of an arrow launcher is nearly on par as the love I have for linking varied shapes into interlocking patterns – and that is saying something. Bust-A-Move Bash!, the Wii iteration in the venerable puzzle series, is my fourth Bust-A-Move title. Having destroyed colored bubbles from the 32-bit generation to the 128-bit, and even the SNK ‘Oh God why can’t SNK just be successful at something, anything’ NeoGeo Pocket Color era, I can say with some authority that there is very little in life as sweet as navigating a small dinosaur into blowing up bubbles. Mmm, yes, shatter like glass.

Bust-A-Move Bash! brings the series into this next-next, 595.6-bit generation with the help of the Wiimote. The basics of the franchise are still the same: you launch a colored bubble up to a slowly descending pattern of obstacles and variously colored bubbles, attempting to cause all of the bubbles to pop by linking three in a row. The strategy comes in just how you achieve this, because the game often gives you the appropriate bubbles to clear the board fairly quickly. Banking shots off the side of the walls is crucial in hitting hard-to-reach areas, such as empty spots in-between bubbles and the higher row of bubbles; clearing a higher row will cause the bubbles attached below it to fall, which can lead to the optimal outcome of a level being cleared in just a few shots.

There are power-up bubbles that float along the board in small UFOs as well. When hit by a bubble, the power-up falls down into the launcher, ready for use. Now, you can either use the power-up then or set it aside for later use, which is possible with regular bubbles as well; you can only have one bubble set aside in reserve, and deciding when to use it often factors into the later, more difficult levels. The special bubbles range from bombs that destroy bubbles and obstacles, metal bubbles that fire a straight line through other bubbles, and slip bubbles that cause subsequent bubbles to slide along until it nears the closest bubble of similar color. There are seven different power-ups in all.

The game consists of several modes – Puzzle, Shooting, Endless, and Versus – with the main portion being the Puzzle Mode. In Puzzle Mode takes place on a floating gameworld that is populated by five themed areas, each consisting of 50 levels. The themes factor into the background images and animations per level; the thematic art is bright, fairly bland, and often distracting. I don’t put too much stock into the artwork, but it can be a bit frustrating when it interferes with gameplay. Once you are done busting bubbles through candy lands and basketball courts, you are treated with … 250 more levels! As you progress through the game there will be special bonus missions that you take part in, these being what the entire Shooting Mode consists of. In a terribly unexciting addition to the series, you guide the remote over balls, locking on up to a set number of them, and firing; the targeting reticule has to match the color of the ball, and this is often made difficult by different colored orbs being on the screen at the same time. Hurriedly clicking right and left, slinging the remote all over, and trying to time it with firing is both frustrating and pointless: the very definition of ‘filler.’

Versus Mode should be where most of the excitement is, but, unfortunately, things didn’t work out well in development. In previous installments each player had their own board, but now the game shoves all players – up to 8 – on the same board. The ensuing chaos – bubbles shooting and bouncing around, power-ups falling, UFOs flirting about, and launcher aiming tracers – isn’t the sort of fun, contained chaos of a Chu Chu Rocket but the kind that makes you put the controller down and walk away.

Then again, Versus Mode is the only way you can play the game with the nunchuk or classic controller, so there’s that. Playing solo relegates you to having to use the remote in one of two ways: gun and baton. The ‘gun’ method has an easy setting and a regular one, the difference being that the easier version also has a targeting reticule that shows where the remote is aiming. The ‘baton’ method treats the remote like an arcade joystick: it’s held vertically and moved left or right. The difference between the ‘gun’ and ‘baton’ method is that the former requires the remote to be pointed at the screen, in what I found to be a position much more congenial to play, and the later requires it to be held straight up. The nunchuk and classic controller can only be used by players 2-8. The problem is that neither single-player method is conducive to lengthy playing sessions, and the trick and hard banking shots that they often require: I had to use my left hand to edge my right hand, the one with the remote, left or right to make sure it was precise. As you might imagine, the classic controller would be an excellent alternative to wrist pains and erratic extreme right and left angle readings. Also, many of the levels, particularly the later levels, feature huge boards that require the camera to be pulled back so much that it can be difficult to distinguish the color of the bubble about to be fired – some sort of zooming option would’ve been appreciated, but that seems to be asking way too much here.

Bust-A-Move is a great game, actively damaging its appeal by arbitrarily removing on-par or superior control schemes speaks either to laziness, the belief that Wii releases need gimmicks, or both.

Overall: 5/10

Bust-A-Move Bash! would have been a great title had the developers followed the basic foundations laid down by its predecessors. Shoving all of the players onto one field would have been fine as an option, but it wasn’t the best decision to make that approach standard. Similarly, stripping the player the choice of using the nunchuk or classic controller in single player was also a mistake. The useless filler of Shooting Mode is forgivable, if only because of the 500 Puzzle Mode levels and Endless Mode, but having something so pointless certainly doesn’t help things. There is some fun here, there is no doubt about that, but the series deserves so much more.