Half of the time you want to move but fire a rainbow off by accident, causing you to die. The other half of the time you want to fire a rainbow off, but move your character instead. This gets even more annoying when you get a star power up and every time your stylus hits the screen it fires itself off, wasting a valuable item when you just intended to move your guy around. The control not only is a pain in the backside, it makes completing levels laughably easy, not to mention the boss battles. In the original game, boss battles required precision timing as well as tactical rainbow placing, now all you have to do is wiggle the stylus over the boss until it keels over and dies. Whose stupid idea was this? Did the guy who thought Wii was the best name to call Nintendo’s new machine design the control mechanic for this game as well?
I thought I could live with it, even though I was unhappy at the change, and carried on playing. I thought jokingly “Well, at least they kept it a vertical scrolling game and not tried to make it a standard left to right affair. Heh Heh” Oh how wrong I was. The first areas are vertically scrolling, then the game just goes into left to right scrolling from the Combat Island onwards a la every damn platformer known to man.
So that’s two out of three things that made Rainbow Islands a totally unique and fun experience absolutely butchered, and as an added bonus it verges on uncontrollable in some points, frickin’ great.
Surely though the actual concept behind the name of the game, the whole mechanic that the game is designed around, is still there, right? Surely the enemies drop the jewels in the colours of the rainbow that have to be collected in order, right?
HELL NO! They’ve buggered that up as well! The jewels no longer appear like they used to (i.e. with player skill being necessary when killing enemies to get them to land in the required quadrants of the screen), they now just appear at random, and don’t have to be collected in order to get to the bonus rooms.
Article comments
1 - adrian
sooo disappointed in this game. i was hoping it would at least have the original NES/arcade version on it, but we don't even get that. wtf. bubble bobble for the ds has it. out of the two, i'd say go with bubble bobble. although the "revolution" version of that also Sucks.