BuBu

A moment of silence. Then clarity — they're bubbles. Bubbles you play with, bubbles you command, bubbles whose lives you ruin. BuBu is an arcade puzzle from the mid-nineties where you bounce shot marbles with a paddle and try to destroy all those colorful spheres on screen. Simple as that. Exactly the kind of thing people were coding on their knees back then and distributing on pirate CD-Rs.

It's basically a Breakout variant — you map out the space around your paddle, which you move with the mouse back and forth, to have it out with the bubbles. Every bubble you destroy adds to your score. A new wave, if you manage to knock them all out. This simple loop repeats itself until you remember exactly what's waiting for you in the game. All you need to control it is a mouse and time — and you've got plenty of that, because the marble moves at a leisurely pace and you can think things through at your ease.

The graphics are primitive, no exaggeration. Colors straight out of an old monitor, sounds matching the muscle of a 1995 computer. Actually it kind of works — it's not exhausting, just doesn't scream atmosphere at you. It's like watching a retro game and knowing it's a retro game. Nothing more is expected.

Playability holds up solid for a while, until you realize no new ideas are coming. New levels look like copies of the previous one, just in different colors. After twenty minutes you know what's coming. After forty minutes it genuinely starts to bore you — unless you already bought it back when, in which case you're trying it right now in an emulator.

These days you play it mostly out of nostalgia or when you want something that requires no thinking. It's not bad, but it's not exceptional either. BuBu is an archive record of the era when everyone thought they could make their own puzzle game and everyone wanted to own one. The result was a mass of mediocrity with plenty of clones. This is one of them.