Maybe it’s a bit too Western in taste, more, say, Bitmap Brothers than Taito. The little sprout has been stolen from Rainbow Islands, while the watering can was designed from scratch and it’s my little masterpiece. In the end, I think his pixeled statue works, even if it’s more a symbolic portrait than a realistic one. That’s why I gave access to his secret round from the one titled “At the end of the rainbow” one! In his forties, MTJ looked thinner, he wore glasses. When he was young he looked like Bubby in Rainbow Islands, complete with red-ish reflexes in the hair.

To create the MTJ statue, first of all I found some pics and a video of him. You can’t decypher the message? Aw, come on! If you’re reading here you CAN find the key to read it! Feel free to post the solution in the comments! And the message below is a wonderful quoting from the man himself (albeit a little bit shrinked for space constraints) which makes perfectly sense, especially when you think that he stopped directly designing games to found a game design school. Yep, that guy with the watering can is my bubblebobbled version of the late MTJ, created especially for Lost Cave. For me it was the most important level of the whole game, because it was going to be a direct hommage to Fukio Mitsuji, the designer of the original Bubble Bobble coin-op. I have fond memories of the days spent over this first secret level. And you get a custom rendition of the original NES graphic tiles. Well, it was of course feasible with some Aladar magic, but we thought it was not a very stylish feature, after all. It would have been really complex to simulate it on the arcade engine, which lacks this feature originally. That 2×2 block on the NES is actually a fake one – you fall thru it. One last thing: can you spot the difference between the Lost Cave edit and the NES edit? Sure you can.

And I’m not that good at giving directions in Italian either, so… As you surely understood, English is not my native language.

Just jump up in the area where the two enemies are. The solution is to reach the top of the level, move on the side where the odd couple is, pop some bubbles, bounce beyond the ceiling and reappear on the screen from below! Now you don’t need to try a risky leap of faith to kill them. If you play alone, you’ll have some trouble in popping the Monsta-Pulpul couples in the middle belt, opposite side of the room. I love this level because the best strategy to clear it involves a rarely necessary technique on the original coin-op. Or Famicom Disk System, if you used to play in Japan. SOURCE: NES RND27 Total NES satisfaction on this one.

Bubble bobble gameboy