In addition to this, the bubbles slowly move down screen towards you, and if a single bubble crosses the line at the bottom of the screen, you lose the game - it's simple, but strangely addictive. Why? Well for a start, the bubbles you fire are of different colours and so you may end up needing a red bubble to dispose of the clusters at the top of the screen, but instead end up having to find a space to squeeze a yellow bubble you didn't want into. You then repeat this until all the bubbles are gone - it sounds simple, but believe me, it isn't. The bubbles stick to each other and should you manage to connect a group of at least three bubbles of the same type, there's a pop and all the bubbles disappear. You go about disposing of the offending evil bubbles of doom by firing other bubbles at them from the bottom of the screen. It's never explained quite why you're doing this - there is a story mode, but it's not exactly what you call comprehensible - still, Tetris didn't need a storyline and neither does this title.
Playing as Bob, a cutesy dinosaur, or one of several other characters, you are given the task of disposing of screen upon screen of increasingly trickily arranged bubbles. The basic premise behind Bust a Move 4 is virtually the same as in the original game. It's not quite as bad a case of sequelitis as the whole Tetris thing, but it just goes to prove that there's no place for original thought in the games industry. But just what does this have to do with Bust a Move 4, the third sequel to the original and highly entertaining bubble bursting game Bust a Move, also known as Puzzle Bobble? Quite a bit as it happens, because Taito, the makers of this title, converted from its arcade format by Agetec have, like the makers of The Next Tetris actually managed to dilute the solid gameplay of the original by adding a bunch of unnecessary extra features. Adding 'extra features' to the game just served to over-complicate things and make the game less fun to play.
The trouble is that one of the key reasons the original Tetris was so good is that is was essentially a simplistic game - you just had to place coloured blocks on top of each other, trying to make solid lines. Take Tetris, for example - it has spawned bucketloads of unofficial clones and been subject to a variety of semi-official follow-ups, most recently a title called The Next Tetris. Sequels, that is, which will inevitably turn out to be no better or perhaps worse than the original. The games industry is nothing if predictable - at any one time you can guarantee that at least six different development teams are working hard on taking an original and popular game of their own design and seeing just how they can milk it for another five or six sequels.
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