The FM Towns conversion of Bubble Bobble is another perfect Japanese port of the arcade game. It was developed by Taito themselves and released on CD-ROM by Ving in 1990.

It plays fast and smooth and is pretty much the arcade game in its entirety. There’s little to fault about it. In the configuration screen the language can even be set to English, and various settings can also be tweaked.

The only real downside is that it’s not the easiest game to get up and running in an emulator; there aren’t many emulators around that can play it, and those that do exist crash quite a lot because they’re old, incomplete, and twitchy. It would be nice to see a more complete FM Towns emulator made available because it was quite a powerful machine with a decent library of games. We live in hope…

Note: the FM Towns version features a unique set of graphics if the code “ILOVEYOU” is entered. Bub and Bob’s spikes are altered to look like bows on their heads, and all the enemies are changed.

See also: 10 Best Bubble Bobble Conversions

More: Bubble Bobble on Wikipedia