Not aware of how Bust-A-Move 4 plays? It's a simple concept: At the bottom of the screen is a little arrow that you maneuver from left to right. Attached to the arrow is a colored bubble, which can be shot upwards towards the top of the playfield. You basically have to try and make it so three bubbles are touching each other. When three are touching, they will disappear from the game board. The ultimate objective is to make it so that all the bubbles disappear. Other than the normal colored bubbles, sometimes the game will mix things up a bit by inserting special bubbles that will perform certain actions when they are popped.

The previous Bust-A-Moves have stayed within the second dimension, and Bust-A-Move 4 does the same. It would be nice to see the series take a leap into 3D to spice things up a bit (since there is not a whole lot that can be changed to the current gameplay), but we'll simply have to deal with what we have been given this time. The game is still looking pretty sharp thanks to a resolution upgrade and decent amount of animation to the on-screen characters and objects.

There are actually quite a few modes that have been packed in to this Dreamcast GD-ROM, including Puzzle, Versus the computer, Versus another human player, Challenge and Edit. Puzzle has some of the most replay value; you start at the bottom of this enormous alphabetical chain, and you can choose between two different levels after you complete a stage (which usually consists of five puzzles or so). Each time you have two new paths to take, leading to literally hundreds of untried puzzles that you can go back to later. Versus the CPU and against a human are standard fair – except you can unfortunately only play up to a two player versus; it does not support four. Challenge is rather interesting; the player has to go through five stages, labeled one to five, consisting of usually five puzzles, but even if you don't solve the puzzle, you still continue to the next one. It challenges you to work fast, earn points and do the best you can each time. And finally, Edit will be entertaining to the player who enjoys creating their own puzzles and then having their friends attempt to solve them. It's a shame that Acclaim didn't attempt to start an online community for users to share their creations.

Bust-A-Move 4 isn't much of a departure from the rest of the series, but it does have some new additions and features that would warrant a purchase to those who haven't tried Bust-A-Move before, or are rabid fans of it. An online match up feature would have been nice, but at least we might see it in the next version of Bust-A-Move on the Dreamcast. Otherwise, the only nit picky problem I had with the game was the lack of a four player mode, and that sometimes the character you choose, is at times, so tall that they overlap a portion of the actual game screen.