Pang Returns

In real life, there are few things more pathetic than a bubble. To keep one of them from bursting, you have to tease it through its little plastic eyelet with an almost erotically gentle stream of breath. Only about half survive their tenuous births, wobbling out like obese ice-skaters, slick with filmy sweat. Then, all you can do is watch as these faltering, untouchable orbs drift into something tougher than dust and pop, or simply pop under the strain of being alive.

As such, it's odd that bubbles hold such menace in the world of fiction. In cult paranoia drama The Prisoner, one bounced ferociously towards protagonist Number 5 every time he tried to escape. In Yoshi's Island, meanwhile, bubbles are the means by which the Baby Marios are abducted, and, of course, in Capcom's classic Pang they're a teeming threat, as deadly as bullets.

We like Pang. The original followed the exploits of the pith-helmeted Buster Brothers as they travelled around the world fending off an army of bubbles, which, by slowly falling, were threatening the destruction of several global landmarks.

Pang Returns is a faithful update, starring a youthful red-haired sprite, sans cooperative partner, but otherwise almost exactly the same as the arcade original. The gameplay involves running back and forth along the bottom of the screen, climbing ladders, sheltering beneath platforms, and shooting bubbles, first with a harpoon and then with a variety of other weapons.

Each level begins in suspended animation, with you and a couple of large bubbles poised and waiting to fall. Every time you shoot one with '5' it divides, creating two smaller bubbles that fall away in opposing directions, bouncing at a steady height. After another division they're as small as they get, and so the next time you shoot them they pop out of existence entirely.

By default, you fire harpoons, complete with trailing rope. Although a harpoon gun may not seem the most effective weapon in this age of mechanised warfare, particularly because you can't have two projectiles on the screen at once without getting a power-up, its value is that the harpoon ropes creates a brief barrier, popping or dividing any bubble that blunders into it.

An aforementioned power-up allows you to have two harpoons on the screen at a time, while another embeds itself in the level's ceiling, leaving a more lasting barrier. It's also possible to obtain a straightforward pistol, which fires bullets out in all directions, far more devastatingly than in the original game.

What else? Well, a clock power-up freezes the bubbles in mid-air for a few seconds, enabling you to pick them off at your leisure, while an hourglass merely slows them down, giving you more time to manoeuvre for shelter. This is particularly valuable if you have the dubious good fortune of picking up a dynamite power-up, which splits every bubble down to its smallest component, creating a sudden swarm.

A 90-second countdown timer adds urgency to proceedings, coming into play during later levels as it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate the levels' activity park-arrays of platforms and ladders without succumbing to the brute force of a drifting bubble. For that reason, Pang Returns requires deft movement and boldness.

But it's not like any action game you'll ever play, and for the most part it feels more like puzzle, or at least a peculiar outpost situated somewhere between the two genres.

At 50 levels, the Adventure mode will keep you occupied for a couple of hours, and after that the Panic alternative, in which the bubbles keep falling until you can't fend them off any more, is always a decent way to kill a few minutes.

Ultimately, it's disappointing that Pang Returns is literally just that: a return, without any real embellishment on the original formula. Being a more or less unique series, the game only really has to compete with its own kin, but it still would have been nice to see it put up more of a fight. Nevertheless, this latest outing for the deadly bubbles is as playable as ever, and well worth picking up.