Puzzle Bobble Mini

Puzzle Bobble Mini, released in Europe under the name Bust-A-Move Pocket, is one of those cases where the game concept and hardware fit together perfectly. The rules are known even to people who've never held a controller: you shoot colored bubbles from the bottom of the screen into a cluster above, and once three or more of the same color come together, they disappear. The magic lies in the fact that everything hanging beneath them falls too, so a single well-aimed shot can clear half the screen. Meanwhile the player is under constant pressure, since the ceiling keeps slowly lowering.

Controls on the Neo Geo Pocket Color benefit from the microswitch controller, which clicks into eight directions and allows aiming with pleasant precision. The key skill remains bouncing bubbles off the walls, which lets you reach seemingly inaccessible spots behind overhangs, and planning ahead based on which color comes next. The game offers a progressing campaign with dozens of layouts, an arcade mode for a quick round, and above all two-player combat over the link cable, where cleared bubbles get sent into the opponent's field. It's precisely this versus mode that made the series a classic in arcades, and it works just as well on the handheld.

Visually it's clean, vividly colorful work, where individual bubbles are perfectly distinguishable even on the small screen, an absolute requirement for this kind of game. It's accompanied by cheerful, catchy melodies that build on the series' musical motifs. At the time, it was received as one of the best puzzle games on the handheld-console market and as an ideal title for short moments of play. Today, practically nothing about it has aged, since its rules need no modernizing, and together with a handful of other puzzle games it's part of the reason the console is so often described as a great travel companion. The best part is realizing that one round never stays just one: you always feel the next shot will be the right one, and half an hour slips by in the meantime. That's exactly why the game keeps showing up in every list of the platform's best.