Bubblegum Crash

~ BUBBLEGUM CRASH ~

ARTMIC / Naxat Soft

HuCard

1991

The story here didn't really do much for me. A few girls decide to investigate some mysterious bank robberies, so they go from place to place and person to person, finding clues and unearthing truths that really aren't very fascinating.

Sure, many other comics have the player do the same sort of fetch questing, but the quality CD ones usually have superior eye candy to make the location hopping a little more tolerable, not to mention music that isn't a complete afterthought and at least a few effective attempts at drama. Here, my attention drifted because nothing remotely exciting happened until a brief cinematic sequence that preceded an interactive (but simplistic and unchallenging) bike chase.

But as boring as things had been to that point, the worst was yet to come. The final stretch is a first-person maze sequence, a downer of a gameplay element in almost every comic that employs it. This one is even worse than most, though, because it has you partake in random battles that never end quickly but are practically impossible to lose, which makes them feel extremely tedious, unnecessary, and unrewarding. And you'll have to put up with many of these pointless fights (which always pit you against one of only two enemy types) and search dozens of rooms (almost all of which are "labs" or "warehouses" that contain absolutely nothing) before you'll finally solve the labyrinth and face a wimpy final foe.

It's during this maze trek that the game goes from dull to dreadful, and the short, subpar ending sequence does nothing to redeem the by-then-floundering effort.

Bubblegum Crash

Bubble Gum Crash
NAXAT
HuCard
1991 or something, not like it matters- go look it up, retard.

I played through this game in one sitting, and it was mildly fun-- not the best digital comic I've ever played, but definitely worth playing through for any Turbo fan.

The game plays out like an episode of an anime show-- it starts out with a bank robbery and it's up to your chick (and her friends) to get to the bottom of what's going on. The story is predictable and the digital comic parts really hold your hands, but you can interact enough that it doesn't feel like you're just watching the proceedings. Everything unfolds like a typical game in the genre; you move between locations talking to people and uncovering clues, showing items, solving a few simple puzzles, etc. After an hour or so of that you are treated to a weird motorcycle chase thing where you have to catch up to a mech. The game concludes with the classic Wizardry-style maze (which seems to be standard issue for any digital comic made between 1985 and 1995) where you are attacked by robots as you try to hunt down the last boss. This was really the only annoying part of the game since you can't save in the maze (set aside at least an hour or so to beat it) and you get attacked literally every two fucking seconds sometimes. Fighting is completely pointless too since you can't upgrade any stats so it makes every battle that much more irritating.

Bubblegum Crash conforms to the Digital Comic Act of 1986 whereby tits & ass shots were made mandatory...

The graphics are decent enough for a HuCard, although it does have that NES look to some of the backgrounds (I assume they were saving memory for the bike chase part and the fight scenes later on). One thing that the game could have used is some more art of the main girls or at least bigger portraits, I felt like I barely saw them by the time I had finished. The maze part has the nicest graphics in the game and actually looks pretty cool, although it could have used more than 2 different robot types to fight and maybe a palette swap or something on the different floors.

...along with first-person dungeons as the final part of the game.

I also feel like I should mention that the music is pretty bland. Not a single song stuck out, they were all very generic and sounded like they came as examples with the PCE dev kit sound library or something. They weren't offensive or anything, just forgettable.

You'll do this about 1000+ times before finding the right path.

Genesis game that is better than this game rating- Spellcaster on Master System literally uses a bow and hand socket to treat this game like a rubbing stick and smoke it, Boyscout-style.