Bubble Bath Babes FAQ/Walkthrough(NES)
version 1.0.0
by Andrew Schultz [email protected]

Please do not reproduce this FAQ for profit without my prior consent. However,
if you write a polite e-mail to me referring to me(and this FAQ) by name,
then I will probably say OK. But if I ignore you that means no--and I am bad
about answering e-mail. Sorry.

**** AD SPACE: ****
My home page: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2762

================================

           OUTLINE

 1. INTRODUCTION

 2. GAME BASICS

   2-1. CONTROLS

     2-1-1. THE BASICS

     2-1-2. SLIDING A PIECE IN

     2-1-3. FUMBLING IN THE DARK

   2-2. SHAPES AND THE FIELD

   2-3. BONUSES AND WHAT TO DO WITH THEM

   2-4. SCORING

   2-5. ODDS AND MEANS TO AN END

 3. LEVEL OVERVIEWS

 4. STRATEGIES

 5. THE CUT SCENES

 6. VERSIONS

 7. CREDITS

================================

 1. INTRODUCTION

(copied from my review)

  Bubble Bath Babes is well-known in hard-core NES gamer circles for
featuring frontal nudity. It's a puzzle game featuring a woman at the bottom
of the playing field, blocking the next piece you want to place from view,
and when you solve enough levels, women perform a three-part strip-tease.
It's too easy to take potshots at such a game just due to its general premise.
But I decided to look deeper into the matter, and I found reasons to gripe
amidst a relatively bland game. Things got tedious in the early scenes when I
tried to work through the game in one sitting.

 Basically, you control bubble tetrads as they float up in an effort to
match four or more of the same-colored bubble in a huge continuous lump. When
something's above, they stick, and empty transparent bubbles appear in the
unfilled space above. They disappear if you uncover the column again by
grouping same colored bubbles. There's a possibility of chain reactions and
getting as many as ten bubbles in one blow through practical play. The keys
to the game are realizing 1) when to finesse a chain of 4 bubbles as often
you can switch an obvious move order and pick up another bubble, 2) keeping
similar colored bubbles in clumps of 2 or 3 to prepare yourself for a
potential combo, 3) sneaking your bubbles in behind ones you've already
placed, if a lot of empty space is above, and 4) pushing left/right a lot
until you just give up trying to be honest and use the pause key.

 BBB has two modes, and A is substantially easier than B. A allows you to
clear most of the screen if you get a power-up, and you can hold that power-
up as well. It's an endurance test more than anything. B forces you to get to
the top of the screen and knock off the center bubble, dropping progressively
more rows on you to start. There are no power-ups. These games are so
unbalanced that, after solving A without using a continue(you get 3,) I had
to use major save states for the final levels of B. Each has four levels that
get faster and give more polychrome bubble clumps; A has a sixth scene B
doesn't, where things are quite fast. Women appear after scenes 2 and 4 to
tease you, and winning the final scene is a 'reward.'

 In fairness, BBB has its moments of inspiration. It feels a bit more
inspired than, say, Yoshi or Yoshi's Cookie. The take on Tetris and Puzzle
Bobble, two seminal puzzle games, is satisfying at times, and other times you
realize you're doing the same thing over and over again. Fortunately, it's
not hard to do even at the fast levels. But too much of the time you will set
up to hope you get lucky with the right piece, and you won't. With A, you
have an escape route of course(just use power-ups) but with B, you are out of
luck. And with the bubbles near you on the later levels, you'd better hope
things start working your way. When they do, the level can be over
disappointingly quickly. But the whole trick of moving back and forth to slow
the piece down seems to show how the game madly compensates to make a game
harder, easier, etc., and hopes it's close to the target. A's a bit too easy
and B's a bit too chancy.

 This FAQ has some terminology and legends you might want to be aware of.
I'll show a bubble clump in lower case, by the letters it comprises: r)ed,
b)lue, g)reen, y)ellow. Parts of the structure you created will be in caps.
Open spaces are effectively the same as clear bubbles, except for one very
special case, so I do not distinguish them.

Terminology of pieces:

OPEN Y = one center bubble with the three others forming 120 degree angles
CLOSED Y = one center bubble collinear with two others and the third one
attached to the center bubble and one of the others. It seems to form a 30-
60-90 right triangle
P = same shape as the closed Y, but the hypoteneuse is up/down
L = 3 collinear  bubbles with the other attached to an end bubble and nothing
else
PARALLELOGRAM: 4 bubbles all touching each other in a 60-120-60-120
parallelogram with vertical sides
DIAMOND: 4 bubbles all touching each other, but no vertical or horizontal
sides

 2. GAME BASICS

   2-1. CONTROLS

     2-1-1. THE BASICS

 You can flip your piece vertically with the A button and horizontally with
the B button. You can move it from side to side by pushing left and right.
This also slows up the piece you need to place. Note that if you hit an edge
and push into it, the computer notes you aren't moving, and the piece picks
up pace again. So you need to wiggle back and forth on the fast levels until
you decide where you can put the block.

 Fortunately while wiggling it's not too bad to see all your possible
formations. Push A, B, A and B to get back where you were. The operations are
commutative(for you math people out there) which means that if you push
button A and then B, that's the same as pushing B and then A. This cycles
through all four possibilities:

O=original
H=horizontally flipped from original
V=vertically flipped

O -> V -> HV -> H -> O

 With some experience, you should be able to judge which position will fit
into your current structure the best it can. Use one hand to move the piece
back and forth and the other to push A and B--of course you don't have to
push all the buttons if you see your piece will fit right in.

 A word of warning; you'll want to do all this as soon as possible, as if
your piece gets in narrow straits, you may not be able to rotate it. This
happens particularly with the long L listed below, where what seems to be
your major axis actually flips around.

 You can push up to move your pieces in a bit faster; this gives your score
a microscopic boost.

 But perhaps the best part of all this simple stuff is the pause feature.
Push 'start' to pause. Contrary to most block dropping games, you'll still be
able to see the board, as well as the next piece, which doesn't change until
your current piece goes over the border line. If you can remember what your
piece is, you can look to form a combination to knock out a clump or two. Or
you can even just plan one move ahead. I've used this as a crutch, but
eventually I found it wasn't worthwhile in game A or good enough in game B.

 The complex stuff involves holding your pad down and pushing A or B. That
produces a bubble that says 'magic' and after your next piece lands, magic
will happen. Note that you can still lose your game if you wind up in the
restricted zone; the NES checks for this before eliminating all the
transparent bubbles. Then, after an orgy of bubble-clump zapping, the bubbles
all change color randomly, and maybe even more clumps disburse.

 By the way, sometimes when you get a tetrad with a letter in game A, you
can't see the color of the bubble. That means it's red, because the other
colors show up much more clearly. You will never be alerted to when a 'plus'
piece will appear--this one changes all pieces around it do a random
unspecified color.

     2-1-2. SLIDING A PIECE IN

 "Wait! That -is- the basics for stuff people do in the nude! Shouldn't it
belong in the previous section...?"

 Ahem.

 I mean, this entails getting a piece of bubbles behind the vale, into the
space that filled up with transparent bubbles. Yes, you can move through
transparent bubbles easily. In fact, the game seemingly bizarrely lets you
plow through bubbles you've placed. Learning to slide pieces in got me from
ending on level 4 with continues used to...winning without a continue and
darned few power ups used to boot. There's a strict criteria for such action,
though.

 You can push a bubble clump sideways through a bubble if the spaces one
bubble width up from each clump element are open. I'll give some examples and
describe why this is useful--hopefully some of the points aren't too obvious.

 Case a  Case b   Case c
Y       |Y       |Y       |
 G     |  G     |  G     |
B   .   |B   Y   |B   .   |
 .   . |  .   . |  .   . |
B   .   |B   .   |B   Y   |
 .     |  .     |  .     |
R   .   |R   .   |R   .   |
 R b . |  R b . |  R b . |
     b |      b |      b |
   b   |    b   |    b   |
     b |      b |      b |

 In A, pretty obviously, you can let the blues go up and push them left.

 In B, you may steer the blue block half-over the right R. That's because
the parallelogram above it is unobstructed. If your piece were rotated the
other way, this would not be possible.

 In C, you may not steer the blue block into a position to take out the
blues above.

 R   R   Y
B   B   R   Y
 .   B   G
  .   G   .
 .   .   Y
G   .   .   .
 Y   .   .
   G   .   .
     Y   .
       b   .
     r   r
       b

 Here you can move your current piece right and swerve it back left all the
way. The result will be a B/R chain reaction, and you'll pop four bubbles,
too. And a final example where you can go around:

Y   R|
 .  |
  R|
 .  |
  .|
 .  |
Y   .|
    |
r    |    Being direct fails. So go
 g  | <- left, then back right.
r   y|

 Then, in the example below, note you can swerve the yellows into a tetrad.

G   Y
 .
  .
 .
  Y


 y
y

b

r

 Two final example are below. Often, slipping something in may be a matter
of refining technique most times, of just lumping stuff together. You can
flip the object horizontally and get a yellow tetrad, or you can keep it as
is, push the green into the stationary upper yellow, and have a quartet of
greens together. So if things look messy even though you have a match with an
L, you may want to see about sliding it into a corner. The next best piece
for this is the closed Y, but even the open Y can be kept from taking up too
much space.

 R   G  |   .   B
Y   G   G|     .
 Y   .  |   B    <r\ /g
  .   .|           b
 .   .  |           |
  Y   .|           y

/g
y
|
b
|
r

 In general, there is very little downside to placing a piece judiciously
into clear bubbles as long as you create some pairs and threesomes to make
for easier later groups. However, there is a big penalty for messing up. But
there's also a big penalty for not rotating the perfect piece into place in
time, or for being off one square to the left/right. When in doubt, shuffle
back and forth and buy time. When in pain from pushing left/right, hit pause.
Your current piece may disappear, but you should be able to remember four
simple colors.

     2-1-3. FUMBLING IN THE DARK

 Occasionally you won't be able to see when you are rotating a piece, or if
it actually rotates. You will note that a piece appears in 'next' until it is
over the 'game over' line. This will give you an idea of what you need to
rotate, and you can work from that. However, a bigger problems is that some
pieces don't want to rotate. The L, for instance. Even when you can see it,
it's not moveable yet. Basically you can tell which end is up when you see
just over half of the first bubble. If nothing accompanies it, the base is on
the other side. You can also tell it the L points left or right by trying to
run into walls.

 But just in case your initial rotations don't matter, you can always plan
how to futz with the shape while it's still in 'next.'

   2-2. SHAPES AND THE FIELD

 The field doesn't look totally level. You have holes and pits, but the game
considers a row to be:
[ .   .   .   . ]
[   .   .   .   ]

  .   .   .
 .   .   .
  .   .   .
 .   .   .
  .   .   .
 .   .   .
  .   .   .
 .   .   .
  .   .   .
 .   .   .
  .   .   .
 .   .   .
  .   .   .
 .   .   .
  .   .   .
 .   .   .
  .   .   .
 .   .   .
  .   .   .
 .   .   .
  .   .   .
--.---.---.-- < below here, you lose. Note the perforations
  .   .   .   allow half-bubbles below the line.
 .   .   .
  .   .   . (can't see shape but
 .   .   .   you can rotate it. Sometimes.)
  .   .   .
 .   .   .

 Your shapes, when you rotate them, don't behave as you would expect. The
more asymmetrical they are, the worse it is. The game has the ability to
shuffle them around so they rotate about a center that would keep them level
and make it easy for the player to reason out the rotations, but it doesn't.
Early on I found I'd say 'Oh, rotate horizontally and drop' and...oops, I was
one square off. I've categorized the rotations below so that you know which
ones are particularly nasty.

 The Y-shaped piece below, although tough to place, doesn't have too many
tricks in how to rotate it.

 A         A
 |         |
/B\  <=>  /B\
C   D     D   C
 ^         ^
 |         |
 v         v
C\ /D     D\ /C
 B         B
 |         |
 A         A

 This next piece is pretty easy to figure out, but you do need to watch out
for when it has the left or right side up. I also sometimes lose track of
what winds up on top.

A\           /A
 B   <->   B
C/ \D     D/ \C
 ^         ^
 |         |
 v         v
C\ /D     C\ /D
 B   <->   B
A/           \A

 The parallelogram shape shouldn't cause you any headaches with rotations,
as if it gets squeezed in you can usually flip it as you want. Nevertheless,
here's what happens.

/D
C\| <->  D\
|/B      |/C
A        B\|
          A

 The P shape is similarly well behaved in narrow areas, but it can get stuck
in the wrong alignment a bit early if you rotate it too near to your target,
and it does lurch around a bit upstairs.

 D
 |     D
/C <=> |
A |     C\
\B     | A (B/A in same place before/after flip)
       B/

^      ^
|      |
v      v

/B
A |     B\
\C <=> | A
 |     C/
 D     |
       D

 This last shape is very nasty to deal with and is the worst of the lurchers.
The horizontal jolt is particularly nasty with most of the screen filled up.
The vertical flip behaves as expected, though. You'd expect this piece to
rotate about the long axis.

/D
A  <=> D\  (A/D in same place before/after flip)
|        A
B        |
|        B
C        |
        C
 ^     ^
 |     |
 v     v

C
|        C
B   <=>  |
|        B
A        |
\D      A
      D/

 Note that they avoided some potentially nasty pieces to place, such as:

C-hook: Zig-zag:

/B       /B
A        A
|         \
C          C
\D      D/

 ..and the straight line. The C could get hung up many places, and the
straight line doesn't lend itself well to rotation. There are also 60- or
120-degree rotations of shapes above that aren't included.

   2-3. BONUSES AND WHAT TO DO WITH THEM

 There are two types of bonus in game A: the flashing plus and the letters.
They seem to appear after you've made a particularly long combination.
Usually chaining two or more reactions together or sinking eight bubbles in
one reaction triggers this. It doesn't seem conclusive, though, so it's
entirely possible that letter-bubbles just appear every X bubbles you popped,
and it's more likely something will happen after a big combo just because
that pops more bubbles and gets you to a threshhold quicker.

 The flashing plus replaces one bubble and changes all six squares in its
radius to different colored bubbles--unless they didn't have a colored bubble.
In that case, any transparent bubble will vanish. This is actually a nice
break for you, because the next time you zap something on that row, the non-
bubble will collapse. So in any case it's best to place the bubble as near to
as many other colored bubbles as possible. It can touch six, maximum. If it
is touching more than three, you have a match, of course. Sometimes the
flashing plus is not all good, because it may upset a combination you wanted
to try. But usually it can carve out some sort of hole, and if you have many
different color bubbles 2 squares away, you're assured of that much more of a
bonus. Note that the bubble it takes over in the clump has no effect on the
color it makes itself and its surroundings.

 So basically, surround the flashing plus with bubbles as much as you can,
and leave the rest to luck.

 The letters are a different matter. They appear in a random order, and when
you can spell M-A-G-I-C, you can use the power-up. Now the game doesn't
implicitly tell you how much M-A-G-I-C you have. If the letters are:

red : 4x powerups left
blue: 4x+1 powerups left
green: 4x+2 powerups left
yellow: 4x+3 powerups left

 You can usually clock 4-5 letters a level, meaning that you can use one
magic per level. It's best to hoard them when you can and not to use them
until you are getting too low. Don't wait too long or you'll end your game
before it takes effect. The longer you let things build up and the more
colored bubbles you have on the field, the more powerful it all is. You can
get 40 extra bubbles using a power-up with a full board, which is a big help.

 Sadly there's no way to figure the exact number you have, but even on the
later levels you shouldn't have to use magic more than once and very rarely,
except in scene six, more than twice. Maybe you can just have a piece of
scratch paper to track how much you actually have.

 Your letter disappears if it's in your formation and you don't dissolve it
after about six more tetrads. But that's ok, because it reappears in the next
tetrad, and often you couldn't get to the letter because it was stuck. So the
disappearance really isn't punishment as the new letter is nearer the top.

 Two suspect finesses near level's end are possible here: one, to avoid
using a power-up when things are crowded. You will want to keep track of how
far over 200*(scenes cleared) your bubble count at level's start is before
doing this. The basic assumption here is that you are eking out one last
bubble pair so you don't have to use a power-up. Do this only if you know you
have <10 bubbles left and if you're low on magic. The early scenes should let
you hoard a power up or two, and I've lost a lot of games with many power-ups
in spare.

 One other thing--if you see a letter and know you're about to clear a board,
scrap other pieces to the side and wait for the right colors to come in.
Again you don't want to wait too much for this. You'll want a safety valve,
of course, and it is very risky.

 If you are nearing the end of a level and a letter is out there, don't get
too greedy--you can't afford to have the playfield fill up--but don't ignore
it completely. If the right piece is in the 'next' box but your current piece
might knock out a few other bubbles, junk your current piece and ensure your
extra letter. This is generally a bad strategy unless you're quite sure, as
the cost of messing up can be a continue(and starting over again) or maybe
just having to use a magic. How sure?

+ for success = 1 letter
- for failure = 5 letters
% chance of winning to break even = 83%(success rate = 5*failure rate)

 You have the luxury of being able to rely on what the 'next' says here. But
don't junk more than 4 pieces before bailing out.

   2-4. SCORING

 You get 2 points for each square you push your block upwards. This seems to
decrease on the later scenes, but that's because the square moves fast enough
up that you can't get 2 points for each unit length you go up.

 You get 40*(X-3) points for each clump of X monochrome bubbles popped. If
you pop 5 blue and green at the same time, then you get 2*40*2 and not 7*40
as the blues and greens are counted separately. There is no bonus for chain
reactions, only the point accumulation as listed above and the satisfaction
of a job well done.

A brief table to show how much more lucrative greater clumps are:

4 bubbles = 40 points = 10 points/bubble
5 bubbles = 80 points = 16 points/bubble
6 bubbles = 120 points = 20 points/bubble
7 bubbles = 160 points = 22.86 points/bubble
8 bubbles = 200 points = 25 points/bubble
9 bubbles = 240 points = 26.67 points/bubble
10 bubbles = 280 points = 28 points/bubble

 It levels off, but pretty clearly doing one more than the minimum gets you
some good points where you'd have to push each tetrad up three squares to
make up for the +6 points for bubble.

 I can incidentallysee a way to get 19 at once in practical play 10 may be
the best you'll do. To wit:

Y   .   .   Y
 Y   .   Y
  Y   Y   .
 .   *   .
Y   .   .   Y
 Y   *   Y
  Y   Y   .
 .   *   .
  .   *   Y
 .   .   Y
  .   .   Y
 .   .   .

 There doesn't seem to be any more. On any piece you can only find 5
bordering bubble positions that 1)don't touch and 2)leave a way to get in.
Then each border position can be linked to at most 2 other bubbles of the
same color, or that clump would already be liquidated.

 You advance to the next level in mode A by getting 200 bubbles on your
current level. As only total bubbles are displayed and not those for a
specific level, you may want to consider that

Bubbles ~= 203 * Levels passed. This is a rough formula but is based on an
average of 5/6 bubbles popped per reaction. You'll expect to go over 200 by
an average of half that, or 2.5-3.

 Here is a list of the default high scores.

TOM 1000 20000
JOE  500 10000
TRI  450  9000
H.Y  400  8000
JUN  350  7000
JAG  300  6000
D.H  250  5000
JIN  200  4000
BOB  150  3000
KAT  100  2000

20 points per block is pretty accurate for the first level or so. Then you
get diminishing returns to scale, as less time to think about big
combinations means fewer and smaller big combinations. You just want to get
by zapping 4 or 5 bubbles at a time.

   2-5. ODDS AND MEANS TO AN END

 I believe that, as levels go on, BBB actively looks to give 4-colored
pieces. I can't really prove that they give trickier shapes, but the 4-
colored pieces are hardest to match. The odds for the various color
alignments are as follows:

4 of 1 color = 4 * (1/4)^4 =
 =  4/256 = .015625
3 of 1 color, 1 of another = 12 * (1/4)^4 (pick any 2 colors) * 4 (single
color in any of 4 positions)
 = 48/256 = .1875
2 of 1 color, 2 of another = 6(4 choose 2--for positions) * 6(4 choose 2--for
colors) * (1/4)^4
 = 36/256 = .140625
2:1:1 = 12(ways to shuffle positions) * 12(ways to shuffle colors) * (1/4)^4
 = 144/256= .6250
1:1:1:1 = 24(ways to position colors) * 1(way to choose color) * (1/4^4)
 = 24/256 = .09375

 It's contrary to received wisdom that you'd see more 3:1 pieces than
1:1:1:1 pieces, or that 2:1:1 would have such a clear majority, but I'm not
sure if the odds for pieces are equally allotted as they should be. At the
start they sure aren't. Every 8th piece seems to be monochrome. But by the
end you seem to get 4-colored ones pretty regularly. The point remains,
though, that you can usually expect a color-pair at any time, meaning that a
lump of 2 of each color is good enough to keep things as they are.

 3. LEVEL OVERVIEWS

 In game A:

 Level 1 starts off easy. You have a lot of monochrome tetrads which
automatically lead to bubbles popped. It seems too easy. By level 1-5 you
will start to encounter tetrads with all four colors, and as the levels
continue the colors will seem to get more varied inside any one tetrad.
Getting 3 or 4 of a kind gets very rare. But other than that there's no
increase in the level difficulty. The main thing that will trip you up is
speed; level X-1 is very slow, but by level X-5 you will be moving left/right
some to get a piece in where you want it and look at it, and by level X-6
it's totally necessary. If you're using an emulator/keyboard be sure to pause
frequently or use different fingers for the arrow key, or you will get nasty
cramp quickly.

 You need 200 bubbles to clear a level. The score counter isn't helpful in
this as it only shows the cumulative. You can still provide estimates as to
how much is left--assume 202 per level, plus a bit. Note that each new level
starts with no bubbles around. The later levels don't seem faster than the
earlier ones, but they do seem to give more challenging pieces.

 In game B:

 See game A for the shape selection. You are faced with three rows of
bubbles in scene one, adding one row for each scene up until level 5. You get
cut scenes after scenes 2, 4 and 5. You can take as long as you need, and
with no time bonus you can get more points for piddling around on 1-1. If you
actually care about that. B can go quicker than A even when you're winning--a
few good pieces and you can cut through the center of the formation and win
handily.

 4. STRATEGIES

 I suppose the first weird emulator strategy I'll mention is that the next
piece seems to be based on how much you wiggled the previous piece. Working
from save states, I've had different patterns of pieces come up consistently.
You can also pause after every piece is placed to see what to do next. It may
take a while, but it lets you do a good deal of slow thinking.

****

 First of all, remember that there are only four alignments for any piece.
Play with the shapes to rotate them in each direction--B, A, B, A should do
this and bring you back to the original--and decide which looks best. Change
it, and move it into the place. Only rarely will you rotate before making the
final drop. Moving left and right is a bit of a pain at first, but you should
soon be able to figure it out.

     Y
   R
 Y   R
Y   .

 Let's say you have a...
R
 R
Y
 Y

 How do you place it?

 The answer is that the given orientation works well. If you try to clear
the yellows first, then the upper right yellow doesn't get cleared. If you
try to clear the reds first, with the top R at the dot, the red get cleared,
and then five yelows get cleared in the chain reaction. This is a simple
concept but one the game keeps coming back to. Remember that zapping four
blocks only keeps you running in place, and when things get tough you have to
sneak in and take more than four.

 Also, when in doubt, try to keep center lanes cleared. This allows you to
sneak a shape off to the side, into an unfilled bubble, or to knock out
bubbles way in the back. Having alternate lanes cleared doesn't leave a lot
of room for new tetrads to drop in.

****

 There are some general intuitive bits of advice, such as being sure to keep
your piece formation relatively compact. You'll want to have as few one-wide
lanes as possible, because the only thing you can do with one of those is to
dump L's in it. Whenever you can create a pair of adjacent bubbles without
eating up too much space, do so. Also, your best bet is to keep the center
clear. Then you can use the side of a shape to match up with the colored
bubbles on the side. Also, you should have the time to rotate enough before
you are in close quarters and you can't.

 Another intuitive thing to note is that certain formations can bridge two
isolated colors. This isn't always perfectly effective--for instance, in the
case below, the blue may block things out later. But you will either knock
out an isolated square or a bunch of bubbles.

R   b   R
 r   r
   r

****

 You want to have a depository for the wide Y's at all times. They are
really nasty pieces. This doesn't mean you have to have a 3-wide gulch,
although a 2-wide is quite handy. The method of slipping the Y in works
really well i.e.

 R
  .
 .
B  <y   g
  <  r
  <
  <  b

 Anticipate Y's and make this sort of room where they can slide in from the
side. Moving them straight up and down eats up space very quickly.

****

 Some overall simple arithmetic is needed here. First, realize any bubble
bursting eliminates four bubbles, which is what you put on the map with each
tetrad. So you are treading water if you just burst stuff. You gain space if
you open up a row below & it becomes more valuable if the space is connected.
You also don't lose four bubbles of remaining space to drop things in if you
position a tetrad so you go through some transparent bubbles. And if you pop
more than four bubbles, you have made progress. Unless you leave something
sticking out. It's tough to evaluate when you should leave something sticking
out when you can cover it later, but often I like to think that wide clumps
are better to work with than tall ones. You can put the final bubble color at
an end, and maybe have a couple columns stacked and the rest vanish. If you
make a quick check to make sure the 'next' piece isn't better than the one
you have, it's about all the planning you can do.

 Of course a chain reaction has benefits beyond just getting you closer to
your goal. On the sixth scene, pieces will be going very fast. If you don't
get a match, then the next piece is spit out right away. If pieces are piled
near the top, you'll want to anticipate this and start moving left/right when
your piece is locked in. Move away from anything piled up, but if things get
too uncomfortable just use the magic you should have hoarded.

****

 Remember that covering a triad of joined bubbles is not bad if you can
quickly wipe out the lump above it.

****

 There are many ghosts you need to avoid and many you should seek to
overcome. One of the most common ghosts, for me, is leaving a bubble to
create a tetrad when that bubble will immediately disappear. For instance, in
the following situation

 Y
  G
 G
  G

 ^
 y
g   g
 g

 It may actually be advisable to flip vertically and go one square right.
Your piece overhangs before it disappears, but so what? For instance, if the
yellow square is too pointy out of the edge of the alignment. On the other
hand, if there is a corridor to the right, you might want to keep things as
they are.

 Another example of this:

 B
R   R
 Y
B   B
 Y
G   G
 Y
G

 ^^^
 y
   y
 g

 g

 It seems horizontally flipping it packs things in more, but no flips here
nets a chain reaction.

 5. THE CUT SCENES

1-2 BUBBLING BUNNY WANTS YOU TO POP MY BUBBLE NOW! I BET I CAN MAKE YOUR'S
BURST!
(sitting, stripey tube top 2 pc bathing suit, brunette)

1-4 WAY TO GO HOT SHOT! CARE TO LATHER ME UP?
(purple 2 piece suit, bending over a bit, cat-tail plants)

1-6 YOU'RE THE LUCKIEST MAN IN THE WORLD. NOW YOU GET TO SOAK IN MY SUDS....
(standing, hand over genitals, dorky smile)

2-2 I'M SUDSY SUZY AND YOU CAN BLOW MY BUBBLES AND GET ME RED HOT!
(Brunette w/shoulder length hair, purple top, purple knee skirt. Flowers
around.)

2-4 YOU'RE MAKING ME SLIP AND SLIDE OUT OF MY BIKINI!
(Hair is longer, pink bathing suit. Different flowers.)

2-6 OOOH, I FEEL SO GOOD! I'M DRIPPING ALL OVER!
(Sitting back, nude)

3-2 HOT TUB TINA THINKS YOU'RE FANTASTIC! AND SOOOO STRONG!
(Brown hair. Sitting with blue skirt and armless narrow-neck brown top. More
flowers and ****)

3-4 OH, LOOK AT THE FOAM RUNNING DOWN MY CHEST! QUIT STARING SO MUCH!
(Looking down, blue 2 piece bathing suit)

3-6 WELL, YOU DID IT! WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS! i'M DROPPING THE SOAP NOW.
(Nude, crawling position, flowers have fuzz blown all around)

4-2 HI, I'M CHAMPAGNE CHARLENE AND I'D LIKE TO POP YOUR CORK!
(purple short sleeve dress you can look under, weird white vest, viney
flowers. Blue hair.)

4-4 NOT BAD FELLA, BUT LOTS OF GUYS HAVE SEEN THESE! YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHING
YET!
(Purple bustier & panties)

4-6  CHEERS, YOU WIN! YOU'VE POPPED MY CORK! NOW, LET'S CELEBRATE
(girl naked & prone, elbows/lower legs on ground)
(Reprise of all previous)

End of FAQ proper

================================

 6. VERSIONS

1.0.0: 6/10/2004 sent to GameFAQs, basically done.

 7. CREDITS

Thanks to the usual GameFAQs gang. They know who they are, and you should,
too, because they get some SERIOUS writing done. Good people too--bloomer,
daremo, falsehead, RetroFreak, Snow Dragon/Brui5ed Ego, ZoopSoul, and others
I forgot.

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