Bubble Bath Babes FAQ/Walkthrough(NES) version 1.0.0 by Andrew Schultz schultza@earthlink.net Please do not reproduce this FAQ for profit without my prior consent. However, if you write a polite e-mail to me referring to me(and this FAQ) by name, then I will probably say OK. But if I ignore you that means no--and I am bad about answering e-mail. Sorry. **** AD SPACE: **** My home page: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2762 ================================ OUTLINE 1. INTRODUCTION 2. GAME BASICS 2-1. CONTROLS 2-1-1. THE BASICS 2-1-2. SLIDING A PIECE IN 2-1-3. FUMBLING IN THE DARK 2-2. SHAPES AND THE FIELD 2-3. BONUSES AND WHAT TO DO WITH THEM 2-4. SCORING 2-5. ODDS AND MEANS TO AN END 3. LEVEL OVERVIEWS 4. STRATEGIES 5. THE CUT SCENES 6. VERSIONS 7. CREDITS ================================ 1. INTRODUCTION (copied from my review) Bubble Bath Babes is well-known in hard-core NES gamer circles for featuring frontal nudity. It's a puzzle game featuring a woman at the bottom of the playing field, blocking the next piece you want to place from view, and when you solve enough levels, women perform a three-part strip-tease. It's too easy to take potshots at such a game just due to its general premise. But I decided to look deeper into the matter, and I found reasons to gripe amidst a relatively bland game. Things got tedious in the early scenes when I tried to work through the game in one sitting. Basically, you control bubble tetrads as they float up in an effort to match four or more of the same-colored bubble in a huge continuous lump. When something's above, they stick, and empty transparent bubbles appear in the unfilled space above. They disappear if you uncover the column again by grouping same colored bubbles. There's a possibility of chain reactions and getting as many as ten bubbles in one blow through practical play. The keys to the game are realizing 1) when to finesse a chain of 4 bubbles as often you can switch an obvious move order and pick up another bubble, 2) keeping similar colored bubbles in clumps of 2 or 3 to prepare yourself for a potential combo, 3) sneaking your bubbles in behind ones you've already placed, if a lot of empty space is above, and 4) pushing left/right a lot until you just give up trying to be honest and use the pause key. BBB has two modes, and A is substantially easier than B. A allows you to clear most of the screen if you get a power-up, and you can hold that power- up as well. It's an endurance test more than anything. B forces you to get to the top of the screen and knock off the center bubble, dropping progressively more rows on you to start. There are no power-ups. These games are so unbalanced that, after solving A without using a continue(you get 3,) I had to use major save states for the final levels of B. Each has four levels that get faster and give more polychrome bubble clumps; A has a sixth scene B doesn't, where things are quite fast. Women appear after scenes 2 and 4 to tease you, and winning the final scene is a 'reward.' In fairness, BBB has its moments of inspiration. It feels a bit more inspired than, say, Yoshi or Yoshi's Cookie. The take on Tetris and Puzzle Bobble, two seminal puzzle games, is satisfying at times, and other times you realize you're doing the same thing over and over again. Fortunately, it's not hard to do even at the fast levels. But too much of the time you will set up to hope you get lucky with the right piece, and you won't. With A, you have an escape route of course(just use power-ups) but with B, you are out of luck. And with the bubbles near you on the later levels, you'd better hope things start working your way. When they do, the level can be over disappointingly quickly. But the whole trick of moving back and forth to slow the piece down seems to show how the game madly compensates to make a game harder, easier, etc., and hopes it's close to the target. A's a bit too easy and B's a bit too chancy. This FAQ has some terminology and legends you might want to be aware of. I'll show a bubble clump in lower case, by the letters it comprises: r)ed, b)lue, g)reen, y)ellow. Parts of the structure you created will be in caps. Open spaces are effectively the same as clear bubbles, except for one very special case, so I do not distinguish them. Terminology of pieces: OPEN Y = one center bubble with the three others forming 120 degree angles CLOSED Y = one center bubble collinear with two others and the third one attached to the center bubble and one of the others. It seems to form a 30- 60-90 right triangle P = same shape as the closed Y, but the hypoteneuse is up/down L = 3 collinear bubbles with the other attached to an end bubble and nothing else PARALLELOGRAM: 4 bubbles all touching each other in a 60-120-60-120 parallelogram with vertical sides DIAMOND: 4 bubbles all touching each other, but no vertical or horizontal sides 2. GAME BASICS 2-1. CONTROLS 2-1-1. THE BASICS You can flip your piece vertically with the A button and horizontally with the B button. You can move it from side to side by pushing left and right. This also slows up the piece you need to place. Note that if you hit an edge and push into it, the computer notes you aren't moving, and the piece picks up pace again. So you need to wiggle back and forth on the fast levels until you decide where you can put the block. Fortunately while wiggling it's not too bad to see all your possible formations. Push A, B, A and B to get back where you were. The operations are commutative(for you math people out there) which means that if you push button A and then B, that's the same as pushing B and then A. This cycles through all four possibilities: O=original H=horizontally flipped from original V=vertically flipped O -> V -> HV -> H -> O With some experience, you should be able to judge which position will fit into your current structure the best it can. Use one hand to move the piece back and forth and the other to push A and B--of course you don't have to push all the buttons if you see your piece will fit right in. A word of warning; you'll want to do all this as soon as possible, as if your piece gets in narrow straits, you may not be able to rotate it. This happens particularly with the long L listed below, where what seems to be your major axis actually flips around. You can push up to move your pieces in a bit faster; this gives your score a microscopic boost. But perhaps the best part of all this simple stuff is the pause feature. Push 'start' to pause. Contrary to most block dropping games, you'll still be able to see the board, as well as the next piece, which doesn't change until your current piece goes over the border line. If you can remember what your piece is, you can look to form a combination to knock out a clump or two. Or you can even just plan one move ahead. I've used this as a crutch, but eventually I found it wasn't worthwhile in game A or good enough in game B. The complex stuff involves holding your pad down and pushing A or B. That produces a bubble that says 'magic' and after your next piece lands, magic will happen. Note that you can still lose your game if you wind up in the restricted zone; the NES checks for this before eliminating all the transparent bubbles. Then, after an orgy of bubble-clump zapping, the bubbles all change color randomly, and maybe even more clumps disburse. By the way, sometimes when you get a tetrad with a letter in game A, you can't see the color of the bubble. That means it's red, because the other colors show up much more clearly. You will never be alerted to when a 'plus' piece will appear--this one changes all pieces around it do a random unspecified color. 2-1-2. SLIDING A PIECE IN "Wait! That -is- the basics for stuff people do in the nude! Shouldn't it belong in the previous section...?" Ahem. I mean, this entails getting a piece of bubbles behind the vale, into the space that filled up with transparent bubbles. Yes, you can move through transparent bubbles easily. In fact, the game seemingly bizarrely lets you plow through bubbles you've placed. Learning to slide pieces in got me from ending on level 4 with continues used to...winning without a continue and darned few power ups used to boot. There's a strict criteria for such action, though. You can push a bubble clump sideways through a bubble if the spaces one bubble width up from each clump element are open. I'll give some examples and describe why this is useful--hopefully some of the points aren't too obvious. Case a Case b Case c Y |Y |Y | G | G | G | B . |B Y |B . | . . | . . | . . | B . |B . |B Y | . | . | . | R . |R . |R . | R b . | R b . | R b . | b | b | b | b | b | b | b | b | b | In A, pretty obviously, you can let the blues go up and push them left. In B, you may steer the blue block half-over the right R. That's because the parallelogram above it is unobstructed. If your piece were rotated the other way, this would not be possible. In C, you may not steer the blue block into a position to take out the blues above. R R Y B B R Y . B G . . G . . . Y G . . . Y . . G . . Y . b . r r b Here you can move your current piece right and swerve it back left all the way. The result will be a B/R chain reaction, and you'll pop four bubbles, too. And a final example where you can go around: Y R| . | . R| . | . .| . | Y .| | r | Being direct fails. So go g | <- left, then back right. r y| Then, in the example below, note you can swerve the yellows into a tetrad. G Y . . . . . Y y y b r Two final example are below. Often, slipping something in may be a matter of refining technique most times, of just lumping stuff together. You can flip the object horizontally and get a yellow tetrad, or you can keep it as is, push the green into the stationary upper yellow, and have a quartet of greens together. So if things look messy even though you have a match with an L, you may want to see about sliding it into a corner. The next best piece for this is the closed Y, but even the open Y can be kept from taking up too much space. R G | . B Y G G| . Y . | B /B\ C D D C ^ ^ | | v v C\ /D D\ /C B B | | A A This next piece is pretty easy to figure out, but you do need to watch out for when it has the left or right side up. I also sometimes lose track of what winds up on top. A\ /A B <-> B C/ \D D/ \C ^ ^ | | v v C\ /D C\ /D B <-> B A/ \A The parallelogram shape shouldn't cause you any headaches with rotations, as if it gets squeezed in you can usually flip it as you want. Nevertheless, here's what happens. /D C\| <-> D\ |/B |/C A B\| A The P shape is similarly well behaved in narrow areas, but it can get stuck in the wrong alignment a bit early if you rotate it too near to your target, and it does lurch around a bit upstairs. D | D /C <=> | A | C\ \B | A (B/A in same place before/after flip) B/ ^ ^ | | v v /B A | B\ \C <=> | A | C/ D | D This last shape is very nasty to deal with and is the worst of the lurchers. The horizontal jolt is particularly nasty with most of the screen filled up. The vertical flip behaves as expected, though. You'd expect this piece to rotate about the long axis. /D A <=> D\ (A/D in same place before/after flip) | A B | | B C | C ^ ^ | | v v C | C B <=> | | B A | \D A D/ Note that they avoided some potentially nasty pieces to place, such as: C-hook: Zig-zag: /B /B A A | \ C C \D D/ ..and the straight line. The C could get hung up many places, and the straight line doesn't lend itself well to rotation. There are also 60- or 120-degree rotations of shapes above that aren't included. 2-3. BONUSES AND WHAT TO DO WITH THEM There are two types of bonus in game A: the flashing plus and the letters. They seem to appear after you've made a particularly long combination. Usually chaining two or more reactions together or sinking eight bubbles in one reaction triggers this. It doesn't seem conclusive, though, so it's entirely possible that letter-bubbles just appear every X bubbles you popped, and it's more likely something will happen after a big combo just because that pops more bubbles and gets you to a threshhold quicker. The flashing plus replaces one bubble and changes all six squares in its radius to different colored bubbles--unless they didn't have a colored bubble. In that case, any transparent bubble will vanish. This is actually a nice break for you, because the next time you zap something on that row, the non- bubble will collapse. So in any case it's best to place the bubble as near to as many other colored bubbles as possible. It can touch six, maximum. If it is touching more than three, you have a match, of course. Sometimes the flashing plus is not all good, because it may upset a combination you wanted to try. But usually it can carve out some sort of hole, and if you have many different color bubbles 2 squares away, you're assured of that much more of a bonus. Note that the bubble it takes over in the clump has no effect on the color it makes itself and its surroundings. So basically, surround the flashing plus with bubbles as much as you can, and leave the rest to luck. The letters are a different matter. They appear in a random order, and when you can spell M-A-G-I-C, you can use the power-up. Now the game doesn't implicitly tell you how much M-A-G-I-C you have. If the letters are: red : 4x powerups left blue: 4x+1 powerups left green: 4x+2 powerups left yellow: 4x+3 powerups left You can usually clock 4-5 letters a level, meaning that you can use one magic per level. It's best to hoard them when you can and not to use them until you are getting too low. Don't wait too long or you'll end your game before it takes effect. The longer you let things build up and the more colored bubbles you have on the field, the more powerful it all is. You can get 40 extra bubbles using a power-up with a full board, which is a big help. Sadly there's no way to figure the exact number you have, but even on the later levels you shouldn't have to use magic more than once and very rarely, except in scene six, more than twice. Maybe you can just have a piece of scratch paper to track how much you actually have. Your letter disappears if it's in your formation and you don't dissolve it after about six more tetrads. But that's ok, because it reappears in the next tetrad, and often you couldn't get to the letter because it was stuck. So the disappearance really isn't punishment as the new letter is nearer the top. Two suspect finesses near level's end are possible here: one, to avoid using a power-up when things are crowded. You will want to keep track of how far over 200*(scenes cleared) your bubble count at level's start is before doing this. The basic assumption here is that you are eking out one last bubble pair so you don't have to use a power-up. Do this only if you know you have <10 bubbles left and if you're low on magic. The early scenes should let you hoard a power up or two, and I've lost a lot of games with many power-ups in spare. One other thing--if you see a letter and know you're about to clear a board, scrap other pieces to the side and wait for the right colors to come in. Again you don't want to wait too much for this. You'll want a safety valve, of course, and it is very risky. If you are nearing the end of a level and a letter is out there, don't get too greedy--you can't afford to have the playfield fill up--but don't ignore it completely. If the right piece is in the 'next' box but your current piece might knock out a few other bubbles, junk your current piece and ensure your extra letter. This is generally a bad strategy unless you're quite sure, as the cost of messing up can be a continue(and starting over again) or maybe just having to use a magic. How sure? + for success = 1 letter - for failure = 5 letters % chance of winning to break even = 83%(success rate = 5*failure rate) You have the luxury of being able to rely on what the 'next' says here. But don't junk more than 4 pieces before bailing out. 2-4. SCORING You get 2 points for each square you push your block upwards. This seems to decrease on the later scenes, but that's because the square moves fast enough up that you can't get 2 points for each unit length you go up. You get 40*(X-3) points for each clump of X monochrome bubbles popped. If you pop 5 blue and green at the same time, then you get 2*40*2 and not 7*40 as the blues and greens are counted separately. There is no bonus for chain reactions, only the point accumulation as listed above and the satisfaction of a job well done. A brief table to show how much more lucrative greater clumps are: 4 bubbles = 40 points = 10 points/bubble 5 bubbles = 80 points = 16 points/bubble 6 bubbles = 120 points = 20 points/bubble 7 bubbles = 160 points = 22.86 points/bubble 8 bubbles = 200 points = 25 points/bubble 9 bubbles = 240 points = 26.67 points/bubble 10 bubbles = 280 points = 28 points/bubble It levels off, but pretty clearly doing one more than the minimum gets you some good points where you'd have to push each tetrad up three squares to make up for the +6 points for bubble. I can incidentallysee a way to get 19 at once in practical play 10 may be the best you'll do. To wit: Y . . Y Y . Y . Y Y . . * . Y . . Y Y * Y . Y Y . . * . . . * Y . . Y . . . Y . . . There doesn't seem to be any more. On any piece you can only find 5 bordering bubble positions that 1)don't touch and 2)leave a way to get in. Then each border position can be linked to at most 2 other bubbles of the same color, or that clump would already be liquidated. You advance to the next level in mode A by getting 200 bubbles on your current level. As only total bubbles are displayed and not those for a specific level, you may want to consider that Bubbles ~= 203 * Levels passed. This is a rough formula but is based on an average of 5/6 bubbles popped per reaction. You'll expect to go over 200 by an average of half that, or 2.5-3. Here is a list of the default high scores. TOM 1000 20000 JOE 500 10000 TRI 450 9000 H.Y 400 8000 JUN 350 7000 JAG 300 6000 D.H 250 5000 JIN 200 4000 BOB 150 3000 KAT 100 2000 20 points per block is pretty accurate for the first level or so. Then you get diminishing returns to scale, as less time to think about big combinations means fewer and smaller big combinations. You just want to get by zapping 4 or 5 bubbles at a time. 2-5. ODDS AND MEANS TO AN END I believe that, as levels go on, BBB actively looks to give 4-colored pieces. I can't really prove that they give trickier shapes, but the 4- colored pieces are hardest to match. The odds for the various color alignments are as follows: 4 of 1 color = 4 * (1/4)^4 = = 4/256 = .015625 3 of 1 color, 1 of another = 12 * (1/4)^4 (pick any 2 colors) * 4 (single color in any of 4 positions) = 48/256 = .1875 2 of 1 color, 2 of another = 6(4 choose 2--for positions) * 6(4 choose 2--for colors) * (1/4)^4 = 36/256 = .140625 2:1:1 = 12(ways to shuffle positions) * 12(ways to shuffle colors) * (1/4)^4 = 144/256= .6250 1:1:1:1 = 24(ways to position colors) * 1(way to choose color) * (1/4^4) = 24/256 = .09375 It's contrary to received wisdom that you'd see more 3:1 pieces than 1:1:1:1 pieces, or that 2:1:1 would have such a clear majority, but I'm not sure if the odds for pieces are equally allotted as they should be. At the start they sure aren't. Every 8th piece seems to be monochrome. But by the end you seem to get 4-colored ones pretty regularly. The point remains, though, that you can usually expect a color-pair at any time, meaning that a lump of 2 of each color is good enough to keep things as they are. 3. LEVEL OVERVIEWS In game A: Level 1 starts off easy. You have a lot of monochrome tetrads which automatically lead to bubbles popped. It seems too easy. By level 1-5 you will start to encounter tetrads with all four colors, and as the levels continue the colors will seem to get more varied inside any one tetrad. Getting 3 or 4 of a kind gets very rare. But other than that there's no increase in the level difficulty. The main thing that will trip you up is speed; level X-1 is very slow, but by level X-5 you will be moving left/right some to get a piece in where you want it and look at it, and by level X-6 it's totally necessary. If you're using an emulator/keyboard be sure to pause frequently or use different fingers for the arrow key, or you will get nasty cramp quickly. You need 200 bubbles to clear a level. The score counter isn't helpful in this as it only shows the cumulative. You can still provide estimates as to how much is left--assume 202 per level, plus a bit. Note that each new level starts with no bubbles around. The later levels don't seem faster than the earlier ones, but they do seem to give more challenging pieces. In game B: See game A for the shape selection. You are faced with three rows of bubbles in scene one, adding one row for each scene up until level 5. You get cut scenes after scenes 2, 4 and 5. You can take as long as you need, and with no time bonus you can get more points for piddling around on 1-1. If you actually care about that. B can go quicker than A even when you're winning--a few good pieces and you can cut through the center of the formation and win handily. 4. STRATEGIES I suppose the first weird emulator strategy I'll mention is that the next piece seems to be based on how much you wiggled the previous piece. Working from save states, I've had different patterns of pieces come up consistently. You can also pause after every piece is placed to see what to do next. It may take a while, but it lets you do a good deal of slow thinking. **** First of all, remember that there are only four alignments for any piece. Play with the shapes to rotate them in each direction--B, A, B, A should do this and bring you back to the original--and decide which looks best. Change it, and move it into the place. Only rarely will you rotate before making the final drop. Moving left and right is a bit of a pain at first, but you should soon be able to figure it out. Y R Y R Y . Let's say you have a... R R Y Y How do you place it? The answer is that the given orientation works well. If you try to clear the yellows first, then the upper right yellow doesn't get cleared. If you try to clear the reds first, with the top R at the dot, the red get cleared, and then five yelows get cleared in the chain reaction. This is a simple concept but one the game keeps coming back to. Remember that zapping four blocks only keeps you running in place, and when things get tough you have to sneak in and take more than four. Also, when in doubt, try to keep center lanes cleared. This allows you to sneak a shape off to the side, into an unfilled bubble, or to knock out bubbles way in the back. Having alternate lanes cleared doesn't leave a lot of room for new tetrads to drop in. **** There are some general intuitive bits of advice, such as being sure to keep your piece formation relatively compact. You'll want to have as few one-wide lanes as possible, because the only thing you can do with one of those is to dump L's in it. Whenever you can create a pair of adjacent bubbles without eating up too much space, do so. Also, your best bet is to keep the center clear. Then you can use the side of a shape to match up with the colored bubbles on the side. Also, you should have the time to rotate enough before you are in close quarters and you can't. Another intuitive thing to note is that certain formations can bridge two isolated colors. This isn't always perfectly effective--for instance, in the case below, the blue may block things out later. But you will either knock out an isolated square or a bunch of bubbles. R b R r r r **** You want to have a depository for the wide Y's at all times. They are really nasty pieces. This doesn't mean you have to have a 3-wide gulch, although a 2-wide is quite handy. The method of slipping the Y in works really well i.e. R . . . B