I had to delete Solitaire off of my
Windows PC. I couldn’t get anything done. "One more game," I would tell
myself, and then three hours later I would be wondering where the time had gone. Most
games you beat and then shelve like a buck trophy for everyone to see. But there are a
handful of puzzle games that demand to be played to infinity. Bust A Move Millenium is one
of them. I literally had to ask my wife to hide this game from me this week, because I
just had too many things to do. I freely admit that I lack any type of self-control when
it comes to Tetris, Solitaire, and now Bust-A-Move Millennium. If you value your time, do
not buy this game! It must be the deceptively short gameplay. You know that each mode
won’t last for more than a couple of minutes, but what you don’t admit to
yourself is that you’ll play a level for an hour until you beat it.
If you’ve
never played Bust-A-Move before, the best way to describe it is as a cross between
Breakout and Tetris. You shoot bubbles at a slowly descending mass and try to join three
or more bubbles of the same kind before they overtake you. You can bounce your bubbles off
walls to get them in the right position or shoot them directly at the oncoming pile. It
takes awhile to see the strategic implications of what you’re doing, but when you see
the game as a whole it can be almost overwhelming.
There is
plethora of different modes of play. You have a story mode where you follow one of the
available characters through challenge after challenge to save something or other with
your superior puzzle skills. There is a puzzle mode where you’re confronted with
specific dilemmas that you have to solve. It breaks up the monotony of just getting
through it as quickly as possible. And finally there is an endless mode where you play
until you drop. You can either play against the computer or play on your own. As if the
game wasn’t already endless, there is also a link mode to challenge friends with.
The graphics
work just fine for a game like this. There is a big enough variety in background types and
characters to keep amused. But, for a game like this, graphics always take a back seat to
gameplay. I did find that I had difficulty distinguishing between the blue and green balls
which sometimes messed up my strategies, but for the most part, I was thoroughly taken in
by this game.
I would have liked a little more detail in the instruction manual. This is the first
time that I’ve played a game from this franchise and I wasn’t familiar with all
of the gameplay options. However, you do pick them up quickly enough.
Acclaim is coming out with a new version of Bust A Move for the PS2 which seems like a
waste of processing power if you ask me. The Gameboy Color has everything you need for
this game and then some. I mean really, they’re bubbles! How much rendering power to
you need?
Admittedly
it’s not all that original, but Bust-A-Move Millennium is the perfect Game Boy game.
Like Tetris and Solitaire before for it, it promises to suck precious hours from you life
and leave you wondering, like Ray Milland,"What happened to the weekend." You
will play this until your extremities go numb. Bust-A-Move Millennium proudly stands in
that small group of games that will never be shelved out of boredom or fatigue.
