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**JamesS** · 12-01-2006, 00:07

New Rainbow Islands

Got this yesterday and played it for a few hours now. I'm really not sure what I think of it so far. It's a very strange mix of ideas that I'm not sure really gel into a good game.

The fairly drab cover. At least it's better than Bubble Bobble Revolution:

First up, unlike the DS Bubble Bobble, New Rainbow Islands doesn't include an arcade port, which is a bit of a shame given how different the new game is to the original. This game is to Rainbow Islands what Catch Touch Yoshi was to Yoshi's Island, which is to say it takes ideas and the look and feel from the original, but builds an entirely new game and control system around them.

The basic structure of the game is the same as the original. You've got seven islands each broken up into a number of stages with a boss fight at the end. The islands appear to be the same themes as the original game, but the level layouts are new. Instead of running and jumping, however, Bubby and Bobby are trapped inside bubbles and float around the level. You can move the character either with the dpad or by dragging him around with the stylus, and you can pretty much just go where you want as long as you avoid enemies and spikes. To get rid of the enemies you have to hit them with rainbows, as with the original, but in this version they aren't fired out by the main character, instead you just draw them anywhere you want on the screen with the stylus. Which does make it a bit easy to kill things, as you just need to draw a line through them and they die. It's a bit strange the way the character and the rainbows effectively don't have anything to do with each other. You don't even need to hit them with the character to make them fall (as you did in the original); you just tap them with the stylus. To stop you just spamming the screen with rainbows, you have a limited supply of, erm, paint or whatever it is which slowly refils over time but you can still draw quite a few before running out.

In addition to the normal rainbows, you can also do some special attacks. By holding down L or R when you draw, you can draw specially shaped rainbows that have different effects. If you draw a circle around an enemy, you can trap it and flick it at other enemies to kill them (enemies killed this way release one of the seven coloured gems that presumably give you the good ending or something). If you draw a triangle, you create a rainbow that sucks in nearby enemies in so you can kill them more easily. Finally, once you've filled up a bar at the bottom of the screen by collecting fruit, you can draw a star that acts like a smart bomb. At least, that's the theory. In practice, I find that drawing a circle mostly works, drawing a triangle either won't work or will be interpreted as a circle about half the time, and you're lucky if you can get it to recognise the star before the bar runs out. Maybe I'm missing something or doing it wrong, but the shape recognition really doesn't seem to work very well. It's nowhere near as good as Pac Pix, and there're a lot less shapes in Rainbow Islands.

Visually, the game is okay. The backgrounds are cleaner than Bubble Bobble DS and the game generally looks brighter. It does seem a touch jerky at times, though, which is odd given that it's quite a simple 2D game. The sound does a good job of recreating the feel of the original game, and the music is presumably about as close to Somewhere Over the Rainbow as they could legally get (it's probably closer than the PS1 port, and miles better than the butchered Taito Legends version).

I do kind of feel that they didn't really know what to do with the game beyond the initial "you can draw rainbows with the stylus" idea, so they just took stuff from the DS Yoshi and Kirby games and Pac Pix and rammed them together in the hope of making something that worked. It could possibly have worked better if there was more of a score element to the game, to encourage you to use the other attacks and to kill groups of enemies rather than just scratching them out one at a time but, although the game shows you your score, it doesn't record it anywhere. There is a mode called "infinity mode" which saves your top score but it only gives you a tiny level and uses an odd definition of "infinity" that means "exactly 100 seconds", so it's over before it really gets started.

I'm going to keep playing it to see if it clicks a bit more, as it is quite fun at times despite being a bit of a confusing jumble of features.

**importaku** · 12-01-2006, 16:52

Hmm interesting, after you impressions im not too sure now weither to risk it. Does this new version have a crazy amount of powerups like the original did?

Thats what made the original great, there were so many powerups & secrets that it kept you going forever to find them.

**Mr_Flamey** · 12-01-2006, 23:28

Shame to hear it doesn't include an arcade port. I really loved the original game, and the Amiga port was really good.

Funny to hear about the shape recognition being poor. The character recognition in Brain Training is generally awesome (you can write complex kanji, and it gets it right most of the time) although writing the number 7 often trips it up, which is really odd. I guess you just have to write it as if it has a serif on the top part. Perhaps you have to draw the shapes in Rainbow Islands in a particular way.

Anyway, if I see Rainbow islands going cheap, I might pick it up, but from what people have said about how different it is, and the lack of a straight port included, I don't think it's worth full price

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