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.
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