The idea of Bumble Beams is simple; some robot petpets are lost in the Recycling Centre and you have to bring them to safety before they are destroy err, recycled. You do so by tilting beams that look a bit like seesaws and dropping them into little containers on the conveyer belt below.
The petpets drop from up above onto the beams. Whichever beam they land on you are in control of and handle using the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. You rock the beams back and forth, balancing the little rolly polly robot petpet and moving it from one beam to another until you drop it into one of the little containers in which its carried away to safety. Once its been put it the container – or dropped and lost forever – the next guy will drop in.
There are a certain number of containers in each level; one for every petpet, no more, no less and they move in a cycle. So if you let one container go empty halfway through, at the end you may have to wait a while for it to roll around again. Thats why its ideal to try and fill them consecutively, missing none. This is easiest to do when you follow a certain routine and stick to it. Depending on where the petpets fall, try to have a specific route for them to take.
The longer you keep a petpet on one beam, the harder it gets to keep it there. As you rock the beam back and forth to keep them on, they roll faster and faster and can end up really shooting off. The faster theyre going, the further they fall off the beam, which can mess up your timing. So if most of the containers are full, dont drop the petpet to the lowest beam to wait for an empty one to come by. Instead, try to stay higher up until you see the empty container. That way if you fall off, you have a place to land.
A container will still function and catch petpets even if you cant see the whole of it, or any of it. Dont ignore the containers once theyve hit the edge of the window. I like dropping my petpets on the far left of the window, its faster in some ways because its just one long drop instead of two or three little ones. And youll know if your petpets were caught or not even if you cant see them by the little sounds they make. (A scream if they fall ouch.)
Every level has a certain amount of petpets in it; however, you dont need to rescue all of them. At the beginning of every level itll say how many petpets there are and how many you must save. If you drop too many its game over. To keep track of whats been going on, you have a little device up top. If it looks like this: 5/15 [7] it means youve caught five petpets, are on your seventh one, youve dropped one petpet, and there are fifteen all together in that level. Unfortunately it doesnt tell you the minimum of how many you need to catch to pass the level, or how many youve dropped (you have to do the math yourself for that one).
Now about the special beams. The orange beam is a little tricky and took me a while to understand. If you just fall on it itll immediately tilt; you cant control it like the regular beams. However, if, while the petpet is falling onto it, you hold the left or right arrow key, the petpet will stick on the beam as if glued there and the beam will stay perfectly horizontal. You need to hold the key that is the opposite of which way the beam will tilt. If the petpet falls on the left of the orange beam, hold onto the right arrow key. Once the container is in place below, let go of the key and the beam will tilt. If the petpet falls in the middle of it, you have to take a guess, once it starts tilting, even the smallest bit, it wont stop, so you need to hold onto the key beforehand. The orange is, by far, my favourite beam. You can hold onto those petpets forever waiting for the next container to come by without having to worry about balancing them as they get faster and trickier to hold onto.
The second kind of beam is a bother; theyre the ones with a small blinking light on them. Once you fall on them theyre activated and you have only a few seconds to get back off or they shoot off like a rocket, carrying the poor petpet with it. Occasionally the petpet will simply be carried safely onto a higher beam instead. Since this beam is a particularly hard one, its usually loaded with little bonus stars.
And thats about it!