Bomberman Retro Review: Explosives Were Spherical Once

Written by Aurabolt | December 9, 2009

Man, has “Bomberman” taken a pretty big turn in the years since its original Japanese release way back in 1983. From furry animals to cutsey 3D, then crappy, gritty 3D, and then back to its roots; “Bomberman” has been lauded by many as the beginning of some of the most important mechanics in gaming. One of which was the inclusion of the Super Nintendo’s multi-controller feature, which allowed four players to play at once for a truly-epic multiplayer experience at the time. It was born in an age of simplicity, where, to win, all you had to do was turn the other players into blasted masses with bombs. Since games had yet to see the invention of sticky bombs, all us “old fogies” remember the good-old days when we used the Kick Power, a 5 Column Bomb, and a Detonator to take out our opponents. Ah, those were some good times.

Heading back into the 80s, Hudson Soft was just starting out as a developing company working mainly with Japanese vertical scrolling shooters like like “Challenger” and “Star Force”. It would be another few years year before they would show their identity within the industry; for both having excellent material (”Adventure Island”), and stuff one would throw in a landfill (”Milon’s Secret Castle”) in the same year. That cycle somehow continues even to the present day. However, “Bomberman” is one of the few fanchises that started way back when, and has endured all these years, mostly unchanged.

Bomberman

What one has to remember from “Bomberman” was that the game itself was (and still is) very quirky. The game’s storyline within the instruction booklet extolls of a robot named “Bomberman” who makes bombs, and he wants to head to the surface to gain a wish based on a legend he heard where he can make himself, and all other bombermen, human. He has to defeat the security robots on each of the fifty stages to do so, which leads to another interesting factoid about older games; adding more levels was a staple that originally became a fad for designers. The longer the game was with bigger but somewhat similar levels, the belief was that more enjoyment was assumed. It was a strategy that worked for RPGs for years to come, but not for other genres like action and puzzle-platformers. While it didn’t work all the time, and games did get boring the longer they seemed to go on, it was actually a sound argument for this game; many people I know played for hours trying to reach level 50, but failed and had to start over due to not remembering to write their secret code down. (Not to mention that putting in the code took forever.) Still, the game was fun and replayable; you wanted to find the powerups and destroy those wall-walking coins and colorful enemy robots.

The players uses bombs in order to defeat the robots, but they only start out with the ability to carry one bomb with a one-tile explosion radius. This was easily rectified by collecting flames for extra reach and bombs for additional placement, but there were even better abilities like Wallpass which was self-explanatory, and Detonator which allowed you to explode walls and targets by pressing the B button at your pace. After defeating the enemies, the player’s white-and-blue robot had to blast the remaining walls and find the exit to the level. The controls are simple, and easy to use – you walked in four directions, A plants the bomb that exploded in 3-4 seconds, and B detonates when you have detonation- so pretty much anybody could jump in and play.

Bomberman

That’s right, this first game was only a single-player. It wasn’t until the MSX/Fanicom game “Dynablaster” or “Bomberman II” for us Americans that more than one player could play. In fact, “Bomberman II” took advantage of the NES Four Score, allowing up to four people to play at once, which was actually a big deal back in the 8-bit days. At the time, it was likely that you’d just play “Super Mario Bros” with two people, and while you could have been very high-tech using the wireless Nintendo Satellite accessory in 1989, wireless wasn’t that well-designed back then.

The original’s graphics were below par for the processing power for the system, but this was pretty early proof that games didn’t need to reach the maximum graphical specs, and still be a good game. The player was easily defined, and enemies and items were easy to distinguish, as were the flames that emanated from the bomb’s explosion. A player could easily get bored of the puke green background, but it was balanced out by the sound, which was actually quite good. In fact, I don’t know a single person in my circle of friends who can’t get that infectious “Boop” music out of their head.

“Bomberman” may not have been as graphically optimized as it could have been at the time, but it was still fun. Collecting power-ups had its charm and most people knew it as a simple game that kept on giving back if you could win. Just be prepared for a long haul. Hudson Soft would continue that line of high-level games for a long time, and within the “Bomberman” series, which continues to this day.

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“Bomberman” was originally released for the NES in 1987 in the United States.