Space Bust-A-Move provides opportunities for you to play alone or against up to four players with a single game cartridge. If you're like me, then the first thing you're going to try is the Single Player Story Mode. Here you play as Bub and Bob. They have received a strange message from a person called Snown. She tells them that they must help her and collect the Cosmo Bubbles before the evil Devilin can get them and use them to rule the cosmos. They can't let an evil guy rule the cosmos, so Bub and Bob set off to the first planet. To collect the Cosmo Bubbles, you have to cause them to fall by destroying the other bubbles holding them up. If you destroy the Cosmo Bubble, you'll have to retry until you get it. You can go on without them, but you won't be able to take on the boss. Each planet has 3 stages and each stage has 5 rounds. There will be a Cosmo Bubble in one of the 5 rounds. If you miss it and have to retry, you have to start the whole stage over, not just that round, so try your best to get them the first time around. After you've completed all 3 stages and collected the bubbles, you will have a boss battle. Once you beat the boss, it's off to a new planet. You'll initially be told to collect 21 Cosmo Bubbles, which means you'll have to visit 7 planets. You will meet a new and very interesting character on each planet. After you have beaten all 7 bosses, you'll find out that the game isn't quite over yet. I'm not going to spoil it for you though, so you'll just have to get there yourself.
Another way you can play in Single Player is Versus. Here you choose one of the 8 characters to play as, some of which include Iru & Ira, Rabbitman, and Cowboy. You will then have to beat all the other characters. Each time you beat one, you will earn more points than you did for the last one. You earn points in every mode that you play in, but I think that you can get the most points quickly in Versus mode. For each character that you play against, it is the best two out of three, so don't worry if you lose one. Once you beat them all, you are the winner. If you do lose to one, you can choose to replay that one over again, so you don't have to start back at the beginning. Each character has its own attack pattern, so some of them are quite a bit more difficult than others. You'll get used to them all eventually though.
There are several more Modes that you can play alone. In Endless Mode, you just keep busting bubbles until you die, exactly as the name suggests. In Challenge Mode, you choose a certain amount of time (3 or 5 minutes) and try and get the highest possible score that you can in that time. Then there are the modes that you can buy in the shop with the points that you have earned by playing. These modes are Pressure Mode, Puzzle Mode, and Factory Mode. In a way, I don't like that all the modes aren't unlocked from the start, but honestly they're not that many points to buy and you'll earn those quickly. I think it's a good balance of locked and unlocked modes at the beginning.
As I said before, you can play with up to four players on a single game card. I really do love this feature since you can just play with your friends without having them find their copy of the game. Bust-a-Move was always the most fun with multiplayer and Space Bust-a-Move is no exception. In addition to the normal attacks you can throw, there are additional attacks that you can earn to throw at your opponent. These are awesome and sometimes very hard to work around. You'll have fun experimenting with all the various attacks you earn.
