#187 Bomberman

Posted: 5th July 2013 by Jeroen in Games
Tags: , , ,

252nd played so far

Bomberman (U)_004

Genre: Action
Platform: PC Engine
Year of Release: 1990
Developer: Hudson Soft
Publisher: Hudson Soft

Okay, yes, I’ve played Bomberman games before. But those were later games – in particular the SNES version. I’ve never had a chance to play the original. As that’s the version listed this time, that’s what we’re going to play today. I’m in the same boat I have previously played the version on the Sega Saturn and a group of us on a trip to Italy played the portable version (which lead me to realize how racist a lot of people in my school were).

I’d love to give some sort of preliminary history or interesting factoid, but there’s little to say about the story. You’re a weird-looking dude who destroys aliens by, well, bombing them. No, I don’t know why either.

Our Thoughts

So the concept is simple. You walk around. You lay bombs that destroy bricks and, if you can get them caught in the blast, enemies. Bricks give you upgrades and hide the exit and you have to defeat all enemies within the time limit to be able to use the exit and advance.

It’s a fairly simple concept, making for a solid concept. It’s not as simple as we’ve found in earlier games, the basic, straight forward concepts from Space Invaders or Frogger, with a larger variety in powerups and enemies. The gameplay itself doesn’t vary too much because of it, but it’s different enough to keep the game interesting.

It’s not an easy game – still thrown back to the earlier stages of arcade difficult – but I felt like I made some good progress starting early on. It was a bit of a struggle to get to the second level, but once you get into the swing of things it speeds the game quite a bit.

There’s – as with so many of these games – little to say about the graphics or sound, as they’re just not outstanding. They’ve been done better in later parts, meaning that a slightly messy design now actually looks clearer because I know what it should be.

Apparently part of the excitement was multiplayer, something we couldn’t manage to test ourselves, although we can see where the excitement for it would come from.

Final Thoughts

I’ve been a bit quiet here, but since we are covering another Bomberman game at some point (which is pretty similar) I’ll be saving all comments until then.

  1. […] feels a bit weird how, prior to starting this blog, I had never really come across the Bomberman series. I’d heard of it – may even have seen a bit of it being played – but never […]

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