Back in the day (the mid-1980s), Bubble Bobble was considered a good and addictive platform puzzler. Gameplay basically sees you moving your little Bubble Dragon around the screens, firing bubbles at enemies to capture them – some of a certain colour have to be captured by a bubble of that colour, so you change between Bub, Bob and Bubu (green, blue and red) just by pressing the L or R buttons. Once you’ve captured an enemy in a bubble, you can pop it by jumping up through it, as Bubble Dragons pop the bubbles with the spines on their backs. Once the bubbles are popped, they drop fruit as well which can be collected for points bonuses.

This is all fine and dandy except that when capturing the "colour" enemies that are supposedly of a certain colour, they could be a purple or white blob, with a tiny green star rotating around it, which means it’s a green one... While this feels like a very faithful conversion and this sort of thing would work fine on an arcade screen or the main TV in your living room, on the DS the graphics are so small. This is a particular problem when you’re the green Bubble Dragon on a level with a grassy backdrop - it’s very difficult to pick out where you are at times. The maze patterns change and so do the backdrops, but BBDS ain't gonna blow anyone away visually, although colourful, it's too samey. There are too many instant deaths caused by enemies simply touching you, it doesn’t matter if you drop on them or they drop on you, until they’re encased in a bubble, contact kills you, not them.

The problems arise when enemies pass between the two screens, it just doesn’t work because, although the two screens are interconnected, they do have a big black line between them (the DS’s hinge) and this leaves you at a huge disadvantage. Most deaths occur either because you got dropped on without warning, or simply because you didn’t change colour quickly enough. Either type of death is just annoying.

It’s also quite tough at the start and you’ve almost immediately got to get the hang of changing colours in order to capture the various enemies. You don’t have unlimited lives like most modern games (only the 3 initially) so if you screw up its ‘game over’, although you do have a selection of mini-games which give you the chance to continue. However, as with many DS games, you find yourself playing the whole game with the D pad and buttons and then you have to whip the stylus out to play the (brief) game-saving minigames, which is always a daft idea.

I just think there’s too much competition around for Bubble Bobble these days, its gameplay is too repetitive and not terribly well suited to the DS. But the game plays reasonably well, response times are ok but everything’s just too darned small. Nevertheless if you’re a retroholic or were a huge fan of the original I can see you getting some enjoyment out of it. If the graphics had been scaled up a bit and the screen scrolled around the levels it might have worked better. Overall, it’s just too fiddly to control, there are too many quick deaths and the basic game mechanic is just too fussy for graphics of this size. Bubble Bobble Double Shot is undeniably cute and colourful, but too small, and hasn’t aged well, a bit like me.