Bomberman

Images from everywhere.

Instead of individual pages, I'm covering all the Bomberman games here, because usually they only have very minor changes.

Bomberman 64

Four months before it's Japanese release date, some screenshots popped up, naturally. They're all pretty low quality, but they happen to show the same thing.

The HUD is different.

Namely, it shows the lives, with a Bomberman head different to the one on the pause screen. The timer has a different icon, as well as the gems, and it's a different font. But otherwise, the games looks to be the same. Notably, there was only one screenshot of the ice world, and none of the starting world (except for the dragon boss). Peculiar.

In comparison, here's the final version of the game, with only the timer and gems, with your lives designated to the pause screen.

Bomberman Fantasy Race

The little starting grid guy has this awful sprite that isn't used, and I have no idea what they were doing with it.

And the item carriers have these unused sprites of them lacking bodies, being squashed with only one arm raised, and having 1 appear on their chests for no reason. Which is peculiar, as the game's artwork shows them with numbers on them and different colours, but that there is the only sprite that has the number.

Bomberman Tournament

These are unused heads for when your Bomberman kicks the bucket in battle mode. While usually in the games when you knock on heaven's door your icon changes to indicate you've sold the farm, pushing up the daisies in Tournament changes nothing.

There are creepy cloud enemies that split in two when bombed. Looks they would've split a second time, until they decided that was just too jerkish.

Saturn Bomberman Fight!!

These pictures all came from this place, where they all seem to be taken with a crappy camera, so I'll combat that with a screenshot taken with SSF, a SEGA Saturn emulator that actually works, and works damn good.

What we see here is the character select screen. Differences include Black Bomberman's head looking to the right instead of left, the Hige Hige Bandit looking a touch different, and thanks to low quality, them all simply looking ever so slightly different.

The HUD and the graphics are all the same, but that stage just isn't in the game. Probably for the best. Too much jumping.

Again, everything is the same, except for the fact this stage isn't in the final. Judging from the lack of blocks and textures, it's likely a test stage.

Sadly, I haven't been able to find these stages via value changing, but I have found three different test stages!

The first test stage is like the inverse of the first stage above; instead of being a pyramid, it's like a pit, with seven floors and lots of jumping involved to get up them. Too cumbersome to work well, in my view, but blasting a ton of people with a super bomb in the middle is bound to be hilarious.

I'd like to note that the treasure chests and the textures are used in no other stage, and all of them use the same backdrop as the character select screen.

The second stage reminds me a lot of the western-themed stage that Honey is mostly seen in, but that's probably just the craziness talking.

And this is just four slopes leading to the bottom, with no blocks at all. Also features a really screwed-up level select preview and has little splotches in a diagonal path near player 1's starting point.

To access these test stages, change the stage value to 10, 11 or 12, respectively.

Sadly, my attempt at finding unused characters (seriously, that empty space next to the ninja is highly suspicious) was foiled by the game crashing and the Dural look-alike changing from her regular pose to this.