Bubble Bobble's Game Boy conversion is a small part of Taito's attempt to port the game to every platform imaginable. Here, it's a single player experiences with stages that are too large to display on screen. Either one of those could have been fine on their own. Combining them means that you're dealing with blind spots and there will be nobody to cover them.

Bubble Bobble is a surprisingly intricate game. Players are meticulously tracked in every action they take. The game uses this information to determine how and when certain power ups spawn. If the game detects that you're running around a lot, it'll spawn a pair of shoes that'll make you run faster. Did you pop a lot of water bubbles? An umbrella will spawn that allows you to skip stages.

The main problem with this version are the blind spots I mentioned earlier. It's hard to tell when items spawn and enemies can and will shoot at you from off screen. Moving on from the lack of screen real estate, the core gameplay is somewhat gimped. The controls aren't as smooth as the NES and Arcade versions. The difficulties with navigation both in terms of control and visuals are compounded by the strange hit detection. Not so much with shooting and aiming the bubbles but with popping them. You pop a cluster of trapped monsters and half of them will remain in the bubble no matter how close they were to one another. That's not how it's supposed to work.

Still, it's easy to overlook these problems and enjoy Bubble Bobble on Game Boy for what it is. Especially if you're relatively unfamiliar with other versions of the game. Because it's so zoomed in, the game looks pretty good and the music is a bit tinny but still as catchy as ever. You've got nothing to lose checking out Bubble Bobble on Game Boy. It would be a very, very long time before a truly perfect portable version of Bubble Bobble was released. With that in mind, I appreciate what Taito tried to do here.