Bouncing Babies

An ambulance waits on the right and the building's windows burn on the left. In Bouncing Babies you direct two firefighters holding a stretched sheet: their job is to catch the little ones as they fall and give them the bounces needed to reach the vehicle. The next fall can begin before you have finished dealing with the previous one.

Dave Baskin is the author of this 1984 DOS game. The title screen explains the controls over the scene itself: Space starts and keys 1, 2, and 3 place the firefighters in the three available positions. The RetroBat copy keeps the CGA graphics, the PC speaker sound, and the English text.

Three positions and several falls

The sheet does not move freely along the whole street. Each key takes the team to a specific spot: left, center, or right. The challenge is to anticipate where the next fall must be caught and change position before it reaches the ground. A successful bounce can still leave work pending elsewhere on the screen.

The scoreboard counts the rescues and the top of the screen shows the chances remaining. When several trajectories coincide, watching only the one who has just left the window is of little use: it matters more to attend first to the one closest to needing the sheet.

The original and its speed patch

The ZIP contains BBABIES.EXE and a small additional program, BBABIESP.COM. Its documentation identifies the latter as a 1997 speed patch, signed by dOnut. Both are kept in the download, but the player uses the original executable with a fixed DOSBox speed, without applying that patch to the game file.

The cover reproduces its authentic title screen. The screenshots come from a game played on the DOS copy.