Bubble Bobble also featuring Rainbow Islands

When the nineties brought a double dose of classics on a single floppy disk, nostalgia won out over common sense. Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands — two completely different games squeezed into one DOS title that aspired to be something like a collector's piece. Reality was less celebrated.

Everyone knew Bubble Bobble. Two dinosaurs blow bubbles and trap enemies inside them, which then pop. On one hand, it sounds dumb. On the other hand, those twelve minutes of gameplay were worth it — there was precise mechanics, difficulty scaling, and with four eyes on one keyboard, some hilarious chaos too. Rainbow Islands took the same setting and gave it a new coat of paint: jumps, a colorful world, mystery, and an attempt to make it more dramatic. The result was sometimes just too syrupy for my taste buds.

The DOS version offers graphics that tried to be more faithful to the original arcade machines than the game itself could manage. Animations ran smoothly, and sounds crackled from the Sound Blaster quite decently. The problem was that both titles had their time — arcade halls in the seventies and eighties. On the computer it felt off in controls and pacing; everything ran like a weird hybrid between what memory recalled and what DOS could deliver.

Today it's more of a museum piece. Bubble Bobble on its own deserves respect — it was an icon that grandmothers and computer guys alike knew. But this package looked in the mirror and subconsciously knew the times had changed. It inspired no one. People mainly felt nostalgia toward it and skepticism toward Rainbow Islands.

Playing it today in a browser only makes sense if you want to recall what nineties attempts to revive famous franchises looked like. It's not a bad game — it's more like a corpse trying to be alive. If you love the original Bubble Bobble, you already know what's missing here: simplicity and timelessness. Rainbow Islands tried too hard.