Jul 1995
Puzzle Bobble 2 is a tile-matching video game by Taito. The first sequel to Puzzle Bobble, it was titled in Europe and North America as Bust-A-Move Again on the arcade and Bust-A-Move 2 Arcade Edition on the home consoles. The game builds on the original by adding a tournament style variation on the two player game for play against the computer and by adding a branching map to the one player game, allowing the player to periodically select one of two groups of five levels to play next, leading to different game endings. Some of the contestants in the new tournament mode are based on characters from Bubble Bobble, including variations on a Monsta and a Mighta. Completion of the single player game gives the player a code which can be entered to unlock 'Another World' for the single player game, which features subtle changes to the existing levels to increase their difficulty and changes to all backdrops to resemble levels from Bubble Bobble. The various enemies from Bubble Bobble also make an appearance in the background of the credits sequence. The North American version of the original arcade release is much different than the other versions. One of the most major changes in this version is that Bub and Bob were removed from the game and replaced with a pair of disembodied hands. Also, the characters that were in the Vs. CPU mode were removed and replaced with a generic computer. The backgrounds from the original version were also removed and replaced with 15 new backgrounds, but this also means that the backgrounds get looped in the Puzzle mode, which is 30 stages long. The audio was also changed, and the voices in the game were removed, even though they were in English anyway. These changes were only made for the Taito F3 System version, since the Neo Geo and console releases are based on the original Japanese version.
