Bubble Bobble Revolution Resolved
The whole Bubble Bobble Revolution fiasco has finally come to an end. Unable to part with the defective copy I bought last fall, I bit the bullet and bought a second copy of the game last month. In spite of all the months that had passed, this second copy turned out to be a defective one as well, so I took Codemasters up on their replacement offer and sent that copy off to them, keeping the first copy I had bought.
Yesterday a generic courier guy came to my front door and delivered a FedEx package containing a new copy of Bubble Bobble Revolution and a copy of Rainbow Islands Revolution, also for my DS. Immediately I checked for the three main problems that I had noticed with the defective version of Bubble Bobble Revolution, and I was relieved to see that all three, as well as a fourth, had been fixed:
1. The dangerous Willy Whistle monsters that show up in the early levels of the defective version have been replaced with the much more common Bubble Buster monsters (Willy Whistle did not appear until stage 50 of the original 80s arcade game, whereas Bubble Busters are the traditional early stage enemies).
2. Every stage now has enemies in them, so there’s no arriving at a stage and then being whisked to the next one simply because the programmers forgot to put any monsters in the area.
3. There is a boss in stage 30 now, so it is actually possible to beat the level and see the rest of the game.
4. The stage 10 boss no longer shoots bottles at you, making it about 50 times easier to beat than in the defective version (I’m guessing that the bottle-shooting version of that boss shows up much later in the actual game).
So even though it has less than 29 rounds, the defective version is almost like an ultra-high difficulty demo version of the actual game. The corrections they made to the game play makes it a lot more friendly to people not familiar with the series and the difficulty level gradually increases throughout the game instead of going through extreme ups and downs in every stage.
But because Codemasters made no mention of this problem on their website and did not make a formal recall of the game, there’s still probably thousands of defective copies of Bubble Bobble Revolution on store shelves in the USA and Canada. Honestly, the way they handled this whole fiasco was appalling and undoubtedly caused a lot of trouble for gamers all across the continent. However, I’m quite pleased with the new game and the way it embraces the classic game with modern graphics and sound. I just hope other people that get a defective copy will look into taking Codemasters up on the replacement offer. The fixed version is more than worth it, and I still haven't even looked at Rainbow Islands yet. But that's for another day. :)
-Dan Raccoon
Yesterday a generic courier guy came to my front door and delivered a FedEx package containing a new copy of Bubble Bobble Revolution and a copy of Rainbow Islands Revolution, also for my DS. Immediately I checked for the three main problems that I had noticed with the defective version of Bubble Bobble Revolution, and I was relieved to see that all three, as well as a fourth, had been fixed:
1. The dangerous Willy Whistle monsters that show up in the early levels of the defective version have been replaced with the much more common Bubble Buster monsters (Willy Whistle did not appear until stage 50 of the original 80s arcade game, whereas Bubble Busters are the traditional early stage enemies).
2. Every stage now has enemies in them, so there’s no arriving at a stage and then being whisked to the next one simply because the programmers forgot to put any monsters in the area.
3. There is a boss in stage 30 now, so it is actually possible to beat the level and see the rest of the game.
4. The stage 10 boss no longer shoots bottles at you, making it about 50 times easier to beat than in the defective version (I’m guessing that the bottle-shooting version of that boss shows up much later in the actual game).
So even though it has less than 29 rounds, the defective version is almost like an ultra-high difficulty demo version of the actual game. The corrections they made to the game play makes it a lot more friendly to people not familiar with the series and the difficulty level gradually increases throughout the game instead of going through extreme ups and downs in every stage.
But because Codemasters made no mention of this problem on their website and did not make a formal recall of the game, there’s still probably thousands of defective copies of Bubble Bobble Revolution on store shelves in the USA and Canada. Honestly, the way they handled this whole fiasco was appalling and undoubtedly caused a lot of trouble for gamers all across the continent. However, I’m quite pleased with the new game and the way it embraces the classic game with modern graphics and sound. I just hope other people that get a defective copy will look into taking Codemasters up on the replacement offer. The fixed version is more than worth it, and I still haven't even looked at Rainbow Islands yet. But that's for another day. :)
-Dan Raccoon