Bust-A-Move Millennium

Bust-A-Move Millennium brought to the Game Boy Advance the proven formula of the Bust-A-Move series, derived from Taito's arcade classic Puzzle Bobble. The player controls a cannon at the bottom of the screen and fires colored bubbles upward, aiming to connect at least three bubbles of the same color and clear them before the growing mass touches the ground and ends the game. The principle is simple to grasp within seconds, but it demands precise judgment of the bounce angle off the walls and strategic planning several moves ahead, making it a puzzle with surprisingly great depth despite its ostensibly childish look. Special bubbles with bonus effects gradually appear as well, and the player needs to learn to recognize and make good use of them.

As one of the GBA's launch titles, it offered a game that made excellent use of the small display and the short play sessions typical of a handheld — individual rounds last on the order of minutes, so they easily fit into a break. The graphics follow on from the cute style of Bub and Bob, the dinosaurs from Bubble Bobble; the colors are vivid and easy to read even on the non-backlit screens of the console's first models. The game features an extensive puzzle mode with dozens of pre-built levels of graduated difficulty, as well as a versus mode for head-to-head duels over the link cable, where surplus bubbles could be dumped onto the opponent's field to force them into a mistake. The music is light and cheerful, tuned to the same relaxed, arcade-flavored mood as the whole Bubble Bobble series from which Bust-A-Move descends.

Reception at the time was positive, mainly thanks to its addictiveness and practically zero barrier to entry — Bust-A-Move Millennium was the ideal "five-minute" game that nonetheless managed to keep players at the screen far longer than they originally expected. Within the bubble-shooter puzzle genre it ranks among the sturdiest portable entries of the entire series, and it still works today as a reliable demonstration of why this type of puzzle was so immensely popular in arcades and at home throughout the nineties and 2000s, and why game developers kept returning to this principle in countless variations for many years afterward.