''Super Buster Bros.'', released as outside of North America, is a cooperative two-player shooting puzzle arcade video game developed by Mitchell and released in the United States in 1990 by

Capcom is a Japanese video game company. It has created a number of critically acclaimed and List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises, with its most commercially successful being ''Resident Evil'', ''Monster ...

. It is the second game in the '' Pang'' series and was ported to the

Super Nintendo Entertainment System The Super Nintendo Entertainment System, commonly shortened to Super Nintendo, Super NES or SNES, is a Fourth generation of video game consoles, 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan, 1991 in No ...

in 1992. It is also featured in the compilations ''

Buster Bros. Collection ''Buster Bros. Collection'' is a video game developed by Mitchell Corporation and published by Capcom for the PlayStation. Gameplay ''Buster Bros. Collection'' is a compilation of '' Buster Bros.'' (1989), '' Super Buster Bros.'' (1990), and '' B ...

'' for the original

PlayStation is a video gaming brand owned and produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), a division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. Its flagship products consists of a series of home video game consoles produced under the brand; it also consists ...

and ''

Capcom Puzzle World ''Capcom Puzzle World'' is a 2007 video game compilation developed by Sensory Sweep Studios and published by Capcom for the PlayStation Portable. It contains five puzzle games: * ''Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo ''Super Puzzle Fighter II Tur ...

'' for

PlayStation Portable The PlayStation Portable (PSP) is a handheld game console developed and marketed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on December 12, 2004, in North America on March 24, 2005, and in PA ...

. It was the tenth game released for the

CP System The , also known as Capcom Play System, CPS for short, and retroactively as CPS-1, is an arcade system board developed by Capcom that ran game software stored on removable daughterboards. More than two dozen arcade titles were released for CPS- ...

hardware.

Gameplay

The object of the game is to take the role as ''Buster'' (P1) or ''Kutch'' (P2) to use their guns to pop

bubble Bubble, Bubbles or The Bubble may refer to: Common uses * Bubble (physics), a globule of one substance in another, usually gas in a liquid ** Soap bubble * Economic bubble, a situation where asset prices are much higher than underlying fundame ...

s that bounce around the screen. There are two different modes: Panic mode and Arcade mode. Similarly to ''

Asteroids An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...

'', when a player pops a bubble, it splits into two smaller bubbles. Sufficiently small bubbles simply vaporize when popped. Occasionally, monsters walk or fly on to the screen. When the player character touches the bubble or the timer reaches zero, they die. Monsters can also pop bubbles. Although the arcade game and the PlayStation version included in ''

'' allow two players to play simultaneously, the Super NES version only has one player mode. Powerups are found by popping certain bubbles, shooting boxes, or shooting certain unmarked spots in the level. The gun power-ups cannot be used in conjunction with each other.

Panic mode

In this mode, the player faces a rain of bubbles. The default weapon is the bubble shot and cannot be changed at any time. Every time a bubble is popped, a rainbow bar at the bottom is slowly filled. Filling the bar all the way causes the player to advance to the next level. As more bubbles are popped, the remaining and incoming bubbles move faster. There is also one special type of bubble that appears rarely. The bubble can appear at any random time, and has a clock image engraved. Whenever the bubble bounces, the engraving changes to a star, and when the bubble bounces again, the engraving changes back to a clock. Popping the bubble when the clock engraving is present causes all bubbles to stop movement completely for 9 seconds, while popping the bubble when the star engraving is present causes all bubbles to be popped and the game screen gets cleared, filling the rainbow bar with every pop made from the bubbles that are being destroyed. Panic mode is beaten when the player reaches level 99, fills the rainbow bar and destroys any remaining bubbles on the screen (after the bar is filled and level 99 is reached, no new bubbles appear). The ending of the game is different in panic mode than in Arcade mode.

Arcade mode

In this mode, each of the stages has a set layout, consisting of walls, destructible glass walls, invisible walls, ladders and ice. There are items such as candy and

1-up In video games, a life is a play-turn that a player character has, defined as the period between start and end of play. Lives refer to a finite number of tries before the game ends with a game over. Sometimes the euphemisms chance, try, rest and ...

s. In the SNES version, there are four difficulty levels in the arcade mode: easy, normal, hard and expert. Each difficulty has their own stage layouts, some remaining the same, some varying slightly and some changed completely. The amount of continues and general speed of bubbles is also affected by the difficulty level chosen.

Reception

In Japan, ''Game Machine'' listed ''Super Buster Bros.'' on their January 1, 1991 issue as being the eight most-successful table arcade unit of the month, outperforming titles such as ''

Carrier Air Wing A carrier air wing (abbreviated CVW) is an operational naval aviation organization composed of several aircraft squadron (aviation), squadrons and detachments of various types of fixed-wing aircraft, fixed-wing and rotorcraft, rotary-wing a ...

'' and ''

Columns A column or pillar in architecture and structural engineering is a structural element that transmits, through compression, the weight of the structure above to other structural elements below. In other words, a column is a compression member ...

''. In 1995,

Total! ''Total!'' was a video game magazine published in the United Kingdom by Future plc. It was published monthly for 58 issues, beginning in December 1991 (cover-dated January 1992), with the last issue bearing the cover-date October 1996. A "1993 ...

ranked Super Buster Bros. 83rd on their Top 100 SNES Games writing: "Otherwise known as Super Pang this is an unusual game in which you break up bouncing bubbles."

Notes

References

External links