Is This Brand New Spectrum Game Bursting With Excitement? Dave Clarke’s Impossabubble Reviewed!

In the history of all of mankind’s worst conflicts, none was as fiercely fought as the Great Playground Computer War (1982 to 1992, depending on how long you were willing to hold a grudge). On one side, you had the might of Sir Clive’s Sinclair army, brandishing the mighty ZX Spectrum, on the other, the Jack Tramiel’s troops, a bunch of posh kids who clearly thought that their import from the USA was clearly the superior machine. It was a battle that, on occasion, would push the boundaries of friendship to it’s very limits.

Back then, I was a Commodore boy, waving my bread-bin with all the strength I could muster, spitting in the eye of any Spectrum-owner foolish to cross my path and chortling at the garish, colour-clashing graphics with disdain!

However, as the old saying goes, with age comes wisdom (although they conveniently forgot to mention the part about wrinkles) and time can heal any rift. So it was that, when I was offered the chance to review a brand new game for the ZX Spectrum, I accepted graciously, with nary a hint of a derisive snort (at least not one that was audible). Was this the moment where I would betray my Commodore roots and finally succumb to the dark side?

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The game in question is Impossabubble, an all-new arcade platformer that was developed and released in February 2018 by Dave Clark and programmed quite magnificently using Jonathan Caudwell’s Arcade Game Designer studio.

The game comes in 48K and 128K versions, both in the form of ‘.tap’ files (digital representation of a Spectrum tape file), which can be used with any Spectrum emulator (I used Spectaculator for the purpose of this review), although the purists amongst you could record the file onto an actual cassette tape and play it on real hardware should you feel so inclined. In keeping with the retro theme, the cost of the game is a remarkably budget-friendly $1.49, a mere token for the creator’s time and effort.

Title screen with awesome music for 128K owners!

The back story for the plot hints that there has been some kind of evil shenanigans taking place involving bubble-mix (that stuff can be really messy) in an attempt to create levitating assassins. Fortunately, your quick thinking manages to avert a global crisis, but now you’ve been transmogrified into a giant bubble and must save 21 of your friends who have been similarly reduced to bottles of frothing, foamy bubble mixture!

Firing the game up, the first thing you’re greeted with is a loading image to keep you occupied whilst the game is loading, although emulator users can just use the warp feature to get to the good stuff.

Once loaded, you’re presented with a nicely presented title screen that showcases some of the in-game sprites. 128K owners are in for a real treat, however, as there’s some truly excellent music (David Saphier) playing throughout; whilst I love the C64 SID sound, I’m also quite partial to a bit of AY-3-8912 goodness, and this is some really funky stuff (I’m still listening to it whilst writing the review!)

Once you begin the game proper, you’ll find yourself deposited into the middle of a series of interconnected screens (28 in total) that you must navigate in an effort to locate your soapy chums. Each of these zones is full of platforms, obstacles and traps to overcome, not to mention various creepy-crawlies that are looking to spoil your fun.

The game map has also been design in such a way that you can’t simply plot a logical course through each of the screens to victory, at least not without some backtracking. A couple of screens contain waterfalls that allow you to travel vertically only, so you’ll have to find your way back if you get swept along by the current. Fortunately, there are a couple of special ‘warp’ pipes that can teleport your bubble to other parts of the map, provided you spot them; learning how the pipes are connected can certainly save you some time.

That’s a lot of spikes…

Then there’s the fact that, as a bubble, you’re not quite as mobile you used to be. Moving left and right and right on the joystick makes your bubble bounce, with a suitably squidgy animation, in the corresponding direction. Pressing the fire button will cause the bubble to perform a larger bounce that propels it higher into the air, allowing you to reach higher platforms, cross gaps and avoid traps.

The first few rooms are relatively straightforward, but some of the later chambers are incredibly devious, featuring multiple layers of spikes and high-velocity spears that make crossing the room extremely difficult. There’s usually a pattern to watch for in these situations and that you should only commit to moving once you’ve planned accordingly, although I lost more lives than I’d care to admit through getting impatient, or just messing up the timing. Make no mistake, much like the 8-bit games of old, this game can be a serious challenge when it wants to be, and, with only 5 lives available, you’ll be seeing that ‘Game Over’ screen rather a lot.

There were a couple of screens in the game that I found to be more frustrating than they needed to be, thanks to some overly aggressive enemy placement. There’s one screen in particular, where, if you enter from the right, you’ll be killed almost instantly by one of the blue darts since it also spawns right next to your entry point – the only way to prevent this is to know that it’s there beforehand and to take your hands off the controls as the screen transitions.

Another element that I had to be careful of was the point at which the game registers when the bubble has left one screen and transitions to another. Exits on the left and right of the screen appear as though you can land on the yellow block on the far edge, which I’d intended to balance on for a few moments before proceeding to the next screen. Unfortunately, I kept getting caught out by the fact that the transition point is actually somewhere just before the yellow corner block, so I’d be trying to land on the edge, only to find the screen would flip and I’d plunge into the next screen. This isn’t so much a problem in itself, except when there happens to be a set of spikes planted right underneath the entrance point. With a little bit of “brain recalibration” you can train yourself to stop making these mistakes, but it can be a little irritating until you reach the point where you stop doing it.

They all float down here…

In terms of presentation, I was really impressed with what was on display here. The game features some very nicely drawn character sprites, especially the main bubble with the way that it visibly squishes as it bounces up and down. Colour clash is practically non-existent here, thanks to clever use of colours and backgrounds that prevent it from ever making itself apparent; you might atch the merest of glimpses when the bubble gets too close to of the enemies (like the spider), but that’s only because I was looking especially closely to try and spot it!

As I mentioned earlier, the 128K version features some brilliant music which, like the main character, is suitably bouncy and bubbly. 48K owners will have to make do with effects only, which were never a strong suit of the Spectrum, but I have to admit that it can at least make a suitably wet popping sound whenever the bubble bounces!

With regards to overall gameplay, despite the aforementioned niggles, I was actually very impressed with the game. The approach I’ve always tried to take when reviewing retro games is to take the limitations of the host platform into consideration, as well as to consider how I feel the game would have been received if it had come out during a given machine’s commercial lifespan. In the case of Impossabubble, it’s actually a great little title (minor niggles aside) and Dave Clarke has clearly spent a lot of time and effort on the game. It might be as tough as old boots in places, but that’s to be expected from a game like this – you wouldn’t want it to be a cakewalk, would you?

Would I say, then, that I was a Spectrum convert following my dalliance with Impossabubble? Old habits die hard and I’m still a sucker for the old bread-bin, but efforts like this from Dave Clarke and other indie developers with the passion to help keep the scene alive mean that it’s only a matter of time before I cross the veil to the dark side.

Author: Alec
PC gamer, C64 fan, Amiga advocate, creator of longplay retrogaming videos on YouTube, occasional wordsmith - follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/Al82_Retro

1 thought on “Is This Brand New Spectrum Game Bursting With Excitement? Dave Clarke’s Impossabubble Reviewed!

  1. Thanks for the review. With the enemy placement it was deliberate so you would have to learn how the enemies were placed so you couldn’t just breeze through the game. The way screens transition is a feature of AGD itself, but you can land on the yellow bricks if you’re careful :)

    Glad you enjoyed the game and I hope I’ve converted you :)

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