Taito's hit puzzle platformer Bubble Bobble got a sequel back in 1990 that to this day is one of most addictive arcade platformers you could hope to play.

Another platformer, Rainbow Islands is a marvel of games design and pacing. Starring Bub and Bob (formerly dinosaurs in Bubble Bobble, but young boys in Rainbow Islands), the player had to negotiate their way around ever-increasingly difficult levels of platform action, replete with cute baddies and shopping baskets of fruit to collect. As well as the normal run and jump actions, Bub and Bob could also fire a series of small rainbows that could be used as both platforms and weapons - get a baddie below you, jump on the rainbow and it would fall down and kill the baddie below.

The game found huge favour on 16bit machines and was equally well converted to the 8bit machines of the day but it very nearly never happened at all. The game's original publishers, British Telecom, decided to pull out of publishing as the game was being finished and were sold to Microprose. Taito duly informed Microprose that they hadn't sold the licence to publish the game to Microprose themselves and so they couldn't publish it. After a lot of round the houses chit-chat, the licence was eventually picked up by Ocean (who were to be swallowed by Infogrames years later) who published the game. Thank goodness.