The Perfect Action Puzzle Game
If you love action puzzle games that you can pick up anytime for a quick, but fiendishly addictive session, then you should definitely check out bubble shooters.
The Origin Story of Bubble Shooters
The 1990s was a golden age for arcade games. You could do things on cabinet machines that you just couldn’t do on a home console. Arcade games had all kinds of weird and specialized control systems, from full-size guns to motorcycle controls. They also had a lot of graphical horsepower, showing off effects and levels of detail that seemed like something straight out of the future. There were fast-paced fighting games and true-3D racers, all running at silky-smooth frame rates that couldn’t be beaten elsewhere.
A Stone-Cold Arcade Classic
Bubble Bobble by Taito was one of the biggest games you could have played in that era. It was aimed at cooperative play and had been designed to appeal to women, who were mostly under-served by arcade games. It was a platformer that featured two cute dinosaurs who fought enemies by trapping them in bubbles, which they then popped. The game played beautifully and is widely regarded as one of the greatest games of all time. It was also, surprisingly one of the first games to have different endings, depending on how well players did, and whether or not they were playing with a friend.
Bubble Bobble made Taito a heavyweight player in the arcade market and was adapted to countless other platforms and versions. If you were an arcade gamer back then, the chances are you put a lot of coins into a Bubble Bobble cabinet over the years.
Puzzle Bobble
Bubble Bobble also paved the way for the release of Puzzle Bobble in 1994. Puzzle Bobble took the bubble-popping satisfaction of Bubble Bobble but brought it into a new format—rather than being a side-scrolling platformer, this was an action puzzler. It kept the cute, Japanese animation look and even many of the characters of the original game, but stripped the game-play down to a few simple but compelling elements.
Puzzle Bobble, like its big brother, offered single player and cooperative play, across a series of well-designed levels of increasing difficulty.
Just like Bubble Bobble, it was a great success for Taito, both in the arcade and on the rapidly-expanding home console market. The game was ported to SNK’s Neo Geo six months after its release, with the US version being called Bust-a-Move, and it was under this name that it reached a host of other games consoles. Like all of the best puzzlers, Puzzle Bobble featured incredibly simple mechanics that have remained in place to this day.
From a Game to a Genre
Like all great, simple ideas, Puzzle Bobble has inspired its own genre. Today, bubble shooters come in a million different forms and flavors and are enjoyed across the world on any device you can think of. You can understand why, too—bubble shooters offer quick, easy-to-understand gameplay which offers an addictive and satisfying challenge. Like all great games, to win, you need a lot of skill… and a little luck!
How to Play
You can’t ask for much simpler gameplay than you find in a bubble shooter;
- You control a “pointer” at the bottom of the screen which shoots our randomly-colored bubbles.
- More bubbles come from the top of the screen
- Your aim is to keep the bubbles from falling to the bottom of the screen
- You match three or more bubbles of the same color to make those bubbles burst, clearing them and any bubbles attached to them
- The higher the level you reach, the faster the bubbles will fall. The super-hard versions will come at you really quickly!
That’s it! It’s a really straightforward idea, but don’t let the simplicity of the idea trick you into thinking bubble shooters are easy to beat.
Bubble Shooter Games on GameShred
We have every kind of bubble shooter game you could possible want here on GameShred. All of them are completely free and playable on any device that has a web browser, including this one.
All of our browser bubble shooters work without any downloads or installations and they never need to be updated. You can play them on your phone, your home computer, your tablet, your laptop, or pretty much anything else you can think of!
Among many other online bubble shooter games on offer here for free we have;
- Space-themed bubble shooters like Bubble Shooter Galaxy Defense
- Sports-themed bubble shooters, such as Bubble Shooter World Cup
- Seasonal bubble shooters, with Halloween and Christmas graphics
- Cute bubble shooters featuring cuddly animals and monsters
… and many, many more!
Some variants of this game come with interesting power-ups which clear the board faster, while others come with a more relaxed time limit that turns the experience from a fast-paced arcade game to a gentler one.
Whatever type you want to play, you’re guaranteed a lot of fun, as bubble shooters are the perfect browser game to play online, with their immersive gameplay and lush visuals. So what are you waiting for? Choose one, ready your pointer and get playing!
FAQs
Are bubble shooter games free?
All of the bubble shooter games here on GameShred are totally free, yes. We have a monster selection of browser bubble shooter games here for you to enjoy and none of them will cost you a dime.
What is a bubble shooter game?
Bubble shooter games are a sub-category of tile-matching games, where you use a pointer at the bottom of the screen to shoot “bubbles” of different colors at other bubbles that are falling from the top. The aim of the game type is to stop any bubbles from falling to the bottom of the screen.