The vicious Bomber Quintet!
The Bomberman shrine updated for the first time in a bit, with some translations I churned out a year or two ago, and also putting the NES Bomberman page to rest by documenting it in as much depth as I could muster (the mobile phone and Palm OS versions will have to wait ’til another day!).
There’s also some sprites (Big Action Mega Fight,Bomberman ’94, Bomberman Special, Bomberman Story DS Brute Force, Bugs Bunny Rabbit Rampage, Cave Story Secret Santa, Double Dragon Gaiden, Dynamite Dux, Golden Axe, King of the Monsters 2, Ninja Senki DX, Pipi’s & Bibi’s, Princess Crown, Snow Bros., Transformers Beast Wars 2, Wonder Boy in Monster Land), but it’s not a conversation piece. Not this time anyway.
One of the idle notions I’ve had for the Shrine Place is to have more ‘introductory’ articles — teaching people how the games work, a rundown of the series history, and maybe even suggested games to start with, ala Mandi Paugh’s Top Mega Man Games.
The problem is, if someone were to ask where’s the best place to officially play any of these old games, I’d have to say “there isn’t one!”
The last time a game was reissued was Bomberman 64 on — get this — the Wii U Virtual Console. A week after the Switch and Super Bomberman R launched, even!
Since then, Nintendo’s old eShop platforms have all since shuttered, the PS3 and Xbox 360 digital libraries relegated to increasingly obtuse means of access, while the bloody Windows Store with its lonely copy of Bomberman ’94 sits there, taunting us.
Pair that with the recent addition of the Virtual Boy to the Nintendo Classics library on NSO, but with Panic Bomber mysteriously absent, you can’t blame me for thinking Konami were adamantly against making the older games available. I was convinced they were dedicated to sunk cost fallacy, holding out for people to plonk $50 or more on Super Bomberman R 2 if they wanted a whiff of that gameplay on modern consoles, no matter how stinky and feature-poor it is. (i finally sampled 40 minutes of SBR2 recently, and pals ShaolinTurtle and ThatOneKaiju were not kidding, it is a shockingly bad and depressing product)
So that’s why I was bowled over when Super Bomberman Collection was announced on a Nintendo Direct I didn’t watch. It’s the five 2D games people talk about in one package! And also the two NES games! Each regional ROM is included, even newly translating the previously Japan-only instalments, with a quick cheat sheet for items and what’s unique in each instalment on the menu screen.
On top of that, it’s got full “3D” scans of each version’s cartridge, box and manual, allowing you to flip through them or rotate them to admire from every angle, and a big swish art gallery with some previously-unseen art. For only $20! I still look at its icon on my Switch home screen sometimes and think I’m dreaming.
I don’t keep up with modern retro compilations, but gameplay-wise it’s about what I’d expect, with save states, rewind, and a somewhat subpar CRT filter. The Boss Rush is an unexpected bonus, an appreciated attempt at a single-player time attack mode, though its difficulty settings (starting you with more or less power-ups) are undone by the fact all but one of the games spawn items in the boss arenas.
The art gallery is scanned from the original materials, showing the ends of the brush strokes or the paper edges where they’ve made a collage. It’s a little disappointing there’s no text accompaniment, if just to explain some of the more obtuse picks; the strangely coloured Dastardly Bombers in Super Bomberman 2‘s gallery are from the naming competition run before the game’s release in Shogakukan magazines, don’t you know!
This offers sumptuous scans of the mysterious model sheets that were unearthed a few years back, and while some sleuthing has narrowed down where they were used, it’d be nice to hear the full story behind them. The lack of context is understandable, seeing how concept artist Shoji Mizuno passed away several years ago, and most other Hudson Soft employees are scattered to the winds. Former staffer @fukumenz on Twitter shared documents on occasion, and it’d be nice to see those get a proper home instead of on an increasingly ephemeral social media site.
The in-game translations are 4 and 5 are very artfully done, with great fonts and choice of words — a far cry from the olde ROM hacks we had to settle with decades ago. As a researcher and an obnoxious pedant, it is a little vexing that the manuals go totally untranslated, meaning we still don’t have official English names for any of the Louies or bosses in Super Bomberman 5…! (the filenames for the boss rush assets do have names… but it’s the same ones that’ve proliferated in the fandom for the better part of two decades. I am not settling for Bomber Woof!!)
The game has no built-in online functionality; Game Share is billed as the key feature for the Switch 2 edition, and it took them a week to enable Remote Play in the Steam version. Again, I’m not clued up on what’s the norm for retro releases, but I feel we’re made more and more aware of the technology required for decent online play these days, to acknowledge the effort and resources involved than just cry “why isn’t there netplay?”, so I can sympathise! It does feel like a compromise for the sake of Super Bomberman R, though, to not push it completely out of the picture. “If you’re so desperate to play online with your friends, why don’t you buy this new game? It’ll only cost $60 each…!”
I’ve admittedly played these games to death already, but I’m glad the collection exists. After years of hearing casual friends and acquaintances bemoan how ‘off’ and unsatisfying Super Bomberman R feels, it’s nice to finally be able to point them to a classic game that’s accessible and good value!
As is always the case, gamers are never satisfied, barely savouring what they’re offered before asking for the next thing, and are already clamouring for what the next Bomberman collection will be. Before this, folks on the Power Bomberman Discord had argued over what they would put in a series compilation.
This was the sort of guff I remember people discussing on Neoseeker forums decades ago in the wake of Sonic Mega Collection, and you better believe I just wanted to see the most obscure nonsense put on there. I still think a touchscreen like on the DS could’ve been ideal for the trackball-driven SegaSonic Arcade…!
Some people had real out-there choices, with a shocking number of them adamant that the Bomberman Land series of “theme park RPG meets mini-game collection” get some representation… and I get it, there’s more to Bomberman than just the bomb-blasting stuff! If you were to introduce people to your favourite series, you’d want them to see it in its best and broadest light.
But knowing how niche the series is, and also how Konami are so sketchy about rereleasing anything that isn’t 8- or 16-bit, the Super Bomberman series is the most convenient and hassle-free package we could’ve asked for, and a good demonstration of the kind of game design evolution that can occur over five years.
If they do make another collection, they gotta make their next picks count, otherwise the understandable response will be, “this is just more of the same!” The PC Engine games are interesting, but there’s only one of them I’d save in a fire. Which is why I think capitalising on interest for the Nintendo 64 games is key.
Something you have to be aware of is how Bomberman fandom is less like a cohesive mass, and more a bunch of feral tribes. They are islands unto themselves, laser-focused on their one particular niche. Hat Loving Gamer did an unofficial “Bomberman Direct” a while back which demonstrated it perfectly, showing how people who grew up with Bomberman 64 or Bomberman Hero… their attachment begins and ends with those games, in a sense.
Everything they associate with the brand is tethered to the specific aesthetics and motifs established in the one game they bonded with. Those games aren’t regarded as weird offshoots in a broader franchise, but just part of the adoptive family of weird N64 mascots, alongside Goemon and Marina Liteyears and Buck Bumble. (Smash Remix also embodies that “N64 family” vibe, most evident in it favouring funny scrimblo bimblos above all else)
It’s interesting to me, because if you skim magazines of the era, you’ll find countless reviewers grousing, “this isn’t my Bomberman!” This isn’t the tense, skilful conduct of Super Bomberman 2, but dumb and chaotic party game nonsense, is the sentiment.
A generation later, it seems this is the Bomberman people have the richest memories of — the Nintendo 64 was the party game platform (and also the dodgy 3D platformer platform, and the “where are the RPGs” platform), so it’s no wonder 64, Hero, and The Second Attack imprinted on kids. Having a tiny library of shitty games will do that to people, I guess. (I jest!)
To westerners, Bomberman on N64 was the series at its most striking and innovative, offering something truly different in every release, a welcome contrast to struggling to identify what sets each instalment apart. Pocket and Fantasy Race were the closest we got to that sensation on PlayStation and Game Boy, genre-shifts truly out of left field, likely because those consoles were populated enough they didn’t need to swing their weight around; Bomberman could stay comfortably in its lane.
I do think such a collection would be pretty uneven (I don’t think Bomberman Hero or The Second Attack are all that great, sorry!), but I’d take a compilation of varied games over something that’s just ten different versions of the same product. I have perhaps unqualified opinions on those Bubsy and Mortal Kombat collections, but that’s a tangent for another post.
I’ve said before how I considered Super Bomberman R a good gesture, a sign they wanted to earnestly win people back… they just kind of fucked up on the follow-through. The Super Bomberman Collection feels a bit like them resigning to the crowd screaming, “just play the hits!”, but I can’t be bad to the results. It must be a little defeating to have their new, allegedly innovative efforts reacted to with the enthusiasm of a wet fart, if even acknowledged at all. It’s shocking the amount of people I’ve heard pining for a Super Bomberman R 2, completely oblivious that the game even came out…!
Some people are already speculating if they’ll reboot Bomberman again, seeing how SBR has soured its goodwill. Seeing how it took them six years to make a shockingly shitty sequel, I wouldn’t expect anything in a hurry, but I think reigning in expectations is key.
I personally believe if they want to make a classic grid-based game, it’s best put in the hands of a studio like M2, who clearly know their stuff when making new instalments in classic 2D instalments, as seen in Haunted Castle Revisited and their Rebirth line on WiiWare. I appreciate the intent behind the innovations in Super Bomberman R, but I’d struggle to say any of them add anything meaningful to the game design, and feel like failed experiments on a formula that’s already solved.
I would love to see the series take a fresh stab at 3D, to present something new and invigorating without fear of audiences pooh-poohing any drastic changes, though I don’t expect such a thing to happen under this management. It’s almost like when you allow people to buy your old good games at a reasonable price, it’s not so bad if the new game sucks ass!
