Rainbow Islands

Unofficially this game is Bubble Bobble 2, but the only link I can find is all of the fruit, since Bob & Bob As far as I know don’t even make an appearance!  Converting bubbles to Rainbows was a great idea, a much better one than umbrellas from the third game in the series – Parasol Stars, for the Amiga, although not quite to so much critical acclaim.

The weapons in this game are rainbows.  You can throw them, burst them, multiply them, walk on them, stack them, speed them up or cascade them.  In fact one of the coolest features of this game is the versatility of your only weapon.

As you progress vertically through the levels, the water slowly starts to rise.  A nice touch on the time limit.  I think this may have been the first occurrence of the water-as-a-time-limit, but it certainly wasn’t the last (Killing Gameshow anyone?)

The bosses were the stars of this game though, huge colourful cartoon characters, each with their own attack patterns and weaknesses.

As usual for Japanese games, there were lots of hidden extras.  As well as picking up the collectible crystals in colour order, there were heaps of hidden items including a pair of super-fast sneakers.

Andrew Braybrook from British developer Graftgold, crafted one of the finest arcade conversions ever.  Apparently Taito wouldn’t release the full arcade code, so they had to reverse engineer the entire game!  Spot-on sound effects and great graphics made Rainbow Islands a firm favourite with the Amiga platform fraternity.

Lots of tricks buried in there, thanks to Taito, all masterfully converted by Graftgold.