This week in RetroNuts comes at next to me, you find follow.

Last week we tackled the complex and confusing world of Bubblebubble, which turned out to be

so convoluted and extensive that we ran the entire episode without managing to spend

any time on what is arguably the franchise's most important branch, the puzzle match game

puzzle bubble, or bust a move if you're nasty. Where plenty of game developers imitated the

general Bubblebubble concept and vibe back in the 80s and early 90s, few of those games could

be said to have been full on clones. Plus, for the most part, the bulk of those games came from

Bubblebubble creator Tito anyway. In essence, puzzle bubble strikes me as less an offshoot of

Bubblebubble than it does a case of the company using one of their more popular brands to help

sell a concept they'd been picking away at for a few years. You know, the time honored question

of how to swipe from Tetris. Of course Tetris had hit the games industry with seismic force

and publishers generally responded one of two ways by asking how can we license this or else

asking how can we totally rip this off. Tito was a bit of a small fry compared to second wave

Tetris' licenseers like Nintendo and Sega so they took the latter route. In fact, the company

developed several variants of the block matching puzzle concept in the wake of Tetris' explosive

success. First, there was Flipple, also known as Plotting, which saw players take control of a

squishy little guy who kicked different cubes into a stack in an attempt to create matches.

A year later came Palamedis, which would be shamelessly ripped off in turn by Data East for

a magical drop, a game in which players ran back and forth firing blocks at the top of the screen

to make matches against an advancing wall of puzzle pieces. You could argue that Tito in turn

swiped this concept from Konami's Quarth, but then again, Quarth was basically an attempt to combine

Tetris with Space Invaders and Space Invaders was a game that Tito created, so it seems a fair cop.

...