One of my all time favourite arcade platform games is Rainbow Islands, the sequel to the equally classic Bubble Bobble, and I’m quite looking forward to the prospect of the updates on their way from Rising Star Games.

Rainbow Islands Revolution for the Nintendo DS uses both of the screens of the DS to provide a tall vertical scrolling view of the world. The heroes, Bub and Bob, are trapped inside bubbles, which you can move around by holding the stylus over them and dragging it around on the bottom screen.

In the original, you could fire rainbows across the screen in order to trap and destroy enemies, and also aid your progress up the screen. This feature is retained in the update but now you can draw rainbows wherever you like using the stylus, so long as you have enough rainbow energy that is. The length of the rainbows you can draw can also be extended by collecting magic red pots left behind when you destroy enemies, just like in the original.

What remains to be seen is if the huge wealth of secret stuff that the original had will be retained. In the original destroying enemies by hitting them with the rainbow would produce a normal item, like a piece of fruit, but causing a rainbow to drop on them would create a gem. In turn the colour of these gems depended on where across the screen width the destroyed enemy landed. If you were to then collect the gems in the correct rainbow coloured order, you could open a secret room allowing you to bypass the end of world monster (if you were quick enough!). I hope the developers have the time to put a similar wealth of hidden stuff for the player to discover.

Rising Star have also recently released Bubble Bobble Revolution on the DS as well, and PSP updates are also in the works, only these will be entitled Evolution and will be similarly enhanced new versions that play to the strengths of the PSP.

As this screenshot from the original version shows they haven’t made an awful lot of changes in the graphical area, things are a bit crisper and there’s some better shading on the characters but there’s definitely a sense of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” in this area. If you fancy giving the original a whirl, why not look out for Taito Legends, a collection of old Taito arcade games which also includes Bubble Bobble, Space Invaders, New Zealand Story, Operation Wolf and a whole host of other highly memorable games from yesteryear.

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