Of all the legacy puzzle games that originally emerged to chase after Tetris’ fortune, Bust-A-Move (Puzzle Bobble) was always an easy favorite. Aside from featuring Taito icons Bub and Bob, the series manages to create a more active experience by simply turning the color matching formula upside down and introducing a shooting mechanic – and what goes up must come down.

But is it still fun?

In a legitimate comparison to film, launching a game series into space is usually a decisive means of ending it – rest in peace Dino Crisis. But Space Bust-A-Move reunites players with an addiction no narrative concerns could ever overshadow. The game is simple and timeless, and only a few minutes with the title continues to justify the longevity.

Read on to see how many times I use the word “bubble.”

So Bub and Bob are enjoying a day of dinosaur frolic when an “object” falls from the sky. The voice of a young girl name Snown quickly tasks the pair with seeking out cosmo bubbles across the galaxy in order to stop the evil Devilin, which is enough of a reason for them to rush into space and take us along for the ride.

The actual “story” of the story mode is a scant affair. As with all good puzzle games, the focus is on puzzles, and the setup allows for various worlds of crazed design. Each offers three stages, with each stage composed of five bubble busting challenges. Even for newcomers the objective is immediately apparent, firing colored bubbles up with the intention of connecting three of any color to bust them before they reach the bottom of the screen.

The twist of story mode is the introduction of cosmo bubbles - specially marked bubbles that appear throughout these stages. To collect them players must free them from surrounding bubbles without busting them in the process. It sounds fairly straight-forward, but is incredibly frustrating. Given the immediate concern of clearing the stage, trying to gather cosmo bubbles is enough of an additional challenge at times to justify throwing the DS across the room. Fortunately stages can be completed without collecting these bubbles at all, and any stage can be revisited to give players another opportunity at multi-tasking. And any addition that can be attempted or ignored at the player’s leisure can’t really be all that bad.

Cosmo bubbles aside, the feature that kept me returning to story mode was the boss battles. Each one challenged me to clear bubbles along the bottom DS screen while attempting to angle shots to strike the boss on the top screen – whether by destroying bubbles or matching some combination of color to the corresponding boss. And that proposition makes for some lengthy sessions.

Since each challenge starts the player with a bubble puzzle to solve, the designs range from awe-inspiring to insanely frustrating. Sometimes a few well placed shots can end a stage as quickly as it starts if spotted early enough. At other times there’s a mad rush to stay alive. The game finds a smooth groove with balancing both offerings enough that I pushed on to see what it had in store next.

The game can also be played with stylus controls, poking left and right buttons to aim and tapping the loaded bubble to fire. And while I tried to give that feature a chance, this old dog wasn’t up for learning the new tricks. Falling back to the dpad was still the most sensible way to play the game according to my fingers.

What’s kept the cartridge in my DS at length this week is the amount of bubbles crammed into the package - additional modes including time trial challenges, endless score seeking, and wifi connectivity in addition to the expected download play. Unlockable extras offered up the expected customizable bonuses, with stylized bubbles and launchers. But features like pressure mode, which challenges players to clear the screen with a single shot, and a factory mode that allots a limited number of shots per round are where the money is.

Space Bust-A-Move is not the dramatic redesign that Space Invaders Extreme is, but then again it really doesn’t need to be. There’s nothing outdated or broken about the formula, and there are plenty of bubbles crammed onto the cartridge. From a development standpoint it’s the safe bet, and that’s pretty well the best way I can summarize it for you. I always feel slightly challenged writing up a puzzle game, but I can tell you that both me and my girl have been, and will continue to be playing it for the foreseeable future. It’s still the type of game I can easily return to after I finish all the ones I write more pretty words about but often spend little time with after the review ends.