Gubble (PS1, 1996, Mud Duck Productions/Midas Interactive Entertainment)

Where to start with this one.

Well, in Gubble you control a purple alien whose main goal in life seems to be finding new and innovative ways to kill himself using power tools. It's basically Tim Allen's character from Home Improvement, stuck in the body of an alien.

The point of the game is to well.....ride on a bunch of tools, pulling out nails and cutting down wood long enough to then somehow be able to return to your home planet. Don't ask me why.

Gubble rides in his spaceship and can hover over enemies, which is also used to dismount from tools, and when he touches a tool he will mount it and begin using it. The problem is you have no way to attack the enemies so you just have to dodge them. The game does become sort of addicting when you really want to clear out a level as flawlessly as possible, and the music certainly helps you to get in the mood.

However, there are a total of five worlds of this. Which wouldn't be bad except that you only get one life in Gubble and while you have unlimited continues, you cannot save, nor is there a password feature. The PC version of the game had floppy disk icons show up in the overworld for you to use, but either you have to complete a "bonus" to get them or they just aren't here, which amounts to about the same thing.

You see, inside levels you can sometimes find passages to other sub-levels. The S brings you to a secret level. These can sometimes be fun but a lot of the time they are just busy work. Like an entire level where you have to wind your way out of a path that spirals and twists around itself to a maddening decree just to get to the very small handfull of items at the very end....and then you have to make your way back. Through the most annoying enemy in the game, the mini UFO.

All the other enemies in the game are easy enough to dodge, for the most part, having very simple AI, but these guys are a pain in the ass. They come from above and slam ontop of you and the only way to get past them is to trick them to fall and move under them as they ascend afterwards but sometimes the level will simply not give you enough space to do so, especially in the aforementioned Special stage.

The other sub-leve one can enter, via a DNA strand looking thing, is a "Bonus Zymbot". These are a pain and virtually pointless. You go around a small area, continously collectong tools for points. Problem is, you have to keep on collection speed up icons to do it faster, and it seems that you have to get an absolutely flawless run to even collect the coin for these. As a result I never got a single coin throughout the entire game.

As a whole, the game seems really biased against human players. The two difficulties availible are "Novice" and "Expert". And the Novice mode ends after the third world, basically telling you to get your ass in Gear.

Now after you complete a level you can get Bonus points based on if you never got hit in the level and if you beat a certain time limit. Regardless whether on Novice or Expert, I got Best Time maybe three times throughout the game, as it basically requires you to take the absolute shortest way possible and never make a mistake.

Around the second or third world, you will begin to notice how little music there is in the game, the few level tracks get recycled over and over again. Later levels will sometimes be immense, so much so that upon looking at the first level I picked at random in the fourth world, my reaction was "Oh, damn.". Then you run into the levels with the cannons, which fire at you whenever you come near them and which are hard as hell to do because these things never stop firing. And imagine you have to sneak past this thing using a tool and NOT get knocked off. It requires you to press the "levitate" button every half a second !

There are no bosses to spice up the gameplay, and you seemingly have to go through all five worlds in one sitting. By that point the weird, nonsensical noices Gubble makes whenever he does anything will probably annoy you to the point of eating the jewel case.

And that's before you get to the ending.

 

All in all Gubble is an okay game that goes on for a bit too long. You'll probably only play it once, maybe replay the earliest levels but that's about it, there is no need to go back to anything beyond the first world after beating the game once, or hardly a reason to beat it in the first place since your only reward is more levels with horribly precise timing and cannons, until you get a non ending that basically says you suck.

Wibarm (MS DOS, 1989, Arsys Software)

Wibarm is a computer game from the late 80's which origiated on Japanese home computers like the Sharp X1 and the FM 7. It took three years for it to be ported to DOS, the result of which is a game that looks vastly different, however the English version retains the Anime style cutscenes (what few there are) and doesn't thankfully replace them with something more "appealing" towards western tastes like what happened with box art in the 80's. Final Zone II on the Turbo Grafx 16 CD is a perfect example of how western game publishers assumed their customers were mentally retarded monkeys who would be perfectly willing to buy a game with a cover so awful it could be considered an act of war.

Even the cover seems to actually look somewhat like your in game character, though the colors are a bit off.

Wibarm is a Mecha RPG, where you fly around in your Robot suit, and look for enemy encounters. On the overworld this is a singular enemy that is revealed to be multiple enemies when it comes in contact with your sprite and inside buildings it's a magic eye picture that blocks your way. Your robot can change forms, from a standard humanoid form to a plane and then to a ground vehicle type thing, which doesn't really seem to have much use beyond getting through gaps you can't walk or fly through.

You get an overworld to explore, where you fight enemy encounters and look for entrances to buildings. These are where most of the game takes place, as you walk around in a quasi first person view showing your robot from the back. It is inside buildings where you fight most monsters, find energy replenishment and repair item. This is important because your energy goes down every time you attack as well as each time you get hit and you have a seperate dammage meter. If you run out of energy you can still walk around and try to get back to a level base to refuel. But if your dammage meter fills up you die. Worse, if you pass a certain threshold of dammage, your map stops working so you need to use repair systems to make sure that doesn't happen. You also need to find items to improve your weapons and shields.

The weapons consist of a beam which targets a specific monster, a rifle which you have to attempt to aim and a wave attack which attacks everything at once. Now the problem is that you have a limited amount of energy, and you are pretty much constantly picking up upgrades to increase the amount you have, however enemies will simply not take any dammage from any of your weapons until you hit a certain threshold of "ability" points, which you get a certain amount of after most fights.

The biggest issue with the game is that you can't really tell when you will be able to hurt them, as there are no levels or leveling up. You will have to spend time going back and forth from one building to another, popping outside to try and fight stuff in the overworld every now and then, looking for which enemies you can actually dammage, and you'll have to keep at it long enough so that you will become able to kill the enemies you couldn't even scratch before. This gets a bit problematic when levels began to rely increasingly on having hidden walls around. They aren't marked out in any way, and even when you find them, they still show up as just regular walls on the map so you have to remember where they are.

And then you get to the Maze level on the third stage.

Imagine getting through this without a map

It wouldn't even be so bad if the buildings didn't infinitely loop vertically and horizontally, so you can't really map out where you've been. And then it includes maps for other buildings on the same level inside areas of the maze. You can't get to these areas from the maze and they have no relation to stuff going on inside it, however they make it virtually impossible to tell where you've been, as there are no real landmarks inside buildings to help you tell where you are.

There are only four overworlds, however it will take you quite a while to beat. In order to be able to hurt the final enemy blocking the computer you need to get to you need to have almost 27 000 ability points, and most enemies give 100 and less. And unless you defeat pretty much all the enemies in all the overworlds and in all the buildings, you won't have enough. It's a competently made game but the fact that you sometimes just have to hope to run across an invisible wall or ram into every wall in the level sometimes makes progress a thing of luck or extreme tedium.