Genre: Arcade
Publisher: Taito
Total time played: 5 hours over 8 months
Short review: A very simple arcade style game that gets progressively harder as the music drives you completely insane. At first it is fun and cut and by the end you are ready to go on a murderous rampage.
Interesting links related to Bubble Bobble
One of my good friends in middle school gave me his NES collection and when his older brother’s girlfriend found out that I liked Nintendo she gave me the only game she owned, Bubble Bobble. I remembered playing it as a kid and really liking it but for some reason I never really played the game after she gave it to me.
In college I used to receive emails from gamers from across the globe from my website “Hoz’s 8-bit Nintendo Page” (RIP). I got an email one day asking if I would sell Bubble Bobble for $35. At that time that amount of money for an NES game was unheard of to me. I agreed and a few days later received a money order and sent off the game.
As luck would have it I ran across another copy just a couple of weeks later. At that time I decided to give the game another go and invited my friend Jon over to play with me. We sat on my couch in a trance for 3 hours as we plowed through the game and eventually beat it. By the end we were both cross eyed and humming the short annoying game music. I didn’t play the game again for 10 years.
When I started my quest to beat all the NES games I remembered beating this one and made my wife play with me. We got to level 58 and she gave up, this was in April of 2013. She was driven mad by the difficulty and annoying music (sure, we could have turned the music off but we didn’t). A few months later I convinced her to play again and we got to the final boss where we spent at least an hour trying unsuccessfully to defeat him. Again, we gave up.
On New Years Eve 2013 we had no plans so decided to put on onesies my mother in law got us for Christmas and drink a little patron (that was in our fridge from my wife’s birthday) and beat Bubble Bobble. After another 45 minutes of frustration we defeated the final boss and got the “bad ending”. At that point we didn’t care about trying for a better ending because the game was driving us crazy.
My wife is not in the picture below because she felt she didn’t contribute enough to us beating the game. I disagree, without her help I couldn’t have done it.
Hoz's 8-bit NES Quest 
Screw that game, lulz.