ONM Remembered – #431
“● Surreal levels ● Bizarre heroes ● Tonnes of challenge”
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 69 (June 1998)
B-Daman is one of those long-running toy franchises that’s always been a bit of a curiosity to me – partly because chucking marbles around is a hoot, but mostly because it began life as a by-product between Hudson Soft and Takara, making marble-shooting toys explicitly based off of Bomberman’s design. It’s something I’d love to cover for the Totally Bombastic Bomberman Shrine Place sooner or later, but it’d be a heck of a thing to research. There’s a hundred episodes of anime, a rake of manga, a slew of video games, not to mention an immeasurable number of toys and merch out there!
I think this game is from when the franchise stopped being billed as a Bomberman product, so I probably won’t be writing about it for the Shrine Place… but darn it, it looks like a daft bunch of fun. It’s got modes for every possible activity you can do with spring-propelled marbles! You can shoot your friends with them! You can play pool with them! You can whack moles with them! You can partake in an on-rails shooter with them! You can’t blast apart your own oesophagus with them, but I’m sure you could mod that in if you so desired.
