Bomberman Generation
Nov. 16th, 2013 10:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA freighter containing the legendary Bomb Elements was destroyed en route to Planet Bomber, and the Elements were lost on planet Tentacalls, where the Crush Bombers and the Hige Hige Bandits are after them. Bomberman! You have to stop them!
This is a game with two very distinct parts: There’s a single player quest mode that’s vaguely action-puzzler and revolves around the plot—such as it is—summarized above. You roam a 3-D area dropping, kicking and throwing bombs at roaming enemies and using both bombs and handy stage elements to solve puzzles. Along the way, you collect power-ups that grant you more bombs, bigger explosions, greater speed, and special abilities. You can recruit/collect “Charaboms” that give you special powers and can be used to duel other Charaboms in an absurdly complicated rock-paper-scissors battle. And there are some irritatingly hard minigames that unlock special bomb fusion powers.
It’s okay. The controls aren’t great, the puzzles don’t really call out to me, the action (at least early on) isn’t particularly hard but isn’t boringly easy either. (Which bodes poorly for my performance on later levels—I suspect it’s supposed to be childishly easy.)
The reason I bought this was for the second mode, the multiplayer mode. Four-player Bomberman was one of my favorite group activities back on the SNES, and one of the reasons I bought a Playstation multitap. Given that the Gamecube is designed for four player multiplayer, this seemed like an obvious choice.
There are half a dozen of the standard four-player 2D grids where you lay cross-shaped bombs, snag powerups and try to kill the other players. (Including the “revenge” shooters after you die, which I think originated in the PS1 version.) There are also a bunch of alternate multiplayer battle modes: Reversi, where you try to bomb squares on the map to flip them, and whoever has the most squares of their color wins. Coin mode, where bombing blocks releases coins that you need to collect (or steal from other players) to win. Survival, where bombs fall from the sky (you can’t drop them) and you need to dodge them longer than the other players. Revenge, where you start in the revenger shooters and score points by playing whack-a-mole (and a penalty is being revived on the battlefield). As with all other incarnations of this game, it often serves your interests in battle mode NOT to drop bombs, because you’ll just blow yourself up before the other players blow themselves up.
The single-player offerings on the Gamecube have been overall lacking for me, but between this, Smash Brothers, Mario Party and Wario Ware, I am set for four-player gaming parties. Now I just need to have one…maybe after ARR is old enough to play.
Overall: Bomberman multiplayer is an old favorite of mine. This is as good a choice as any; but the experience is pretty much the same on any system you own four controllers for. And the single player campaign? Meh.
This is a game with two very distinct parts: There’s a single player quest mode that’s vaguely action-puzzler and revolves around the plot—such as it is—summarized above. You roam a 3-D area dropping, kicking and throwing bombs at roaming enemies and using both bombs and handy stage elements to solve puzzles. Along the way, you collect power-ups that grant you more bombs, bigger explosions, greater speed, and special abilities. You can recruit/collect “Charaboms” that give you special powers and can be used to duel other Charaboms in an absurdly complicated rock-paper-scissors battle. And there are some irritatingly hard minigames that unlock special bomb fusion powers.
It’s okay. The controls aren’t great, the puzzles don’t really call out to me, the action (at least early on) isn’t particularly hard but isn’t boringly easy either. (Which bodes poorly for my performance on later levels—I suspect it’s supposed to be childishly easy.)
The reason I bought this was for the second mode, the multiplayer mode. Four-player Bomberman was one of my favorite group activities back on the SNES, and one of the reasons I bought a Playstation multitap. Given that the Gamecube is designed for four player multiplayer, this seemed like an obvious choice.
There are half a dozen of the standard four-player 2D grids where you lay cross-shaped bombs, snag powerups and try to kill the other players. (Including the “revenge” shooters after you die, which I think originated in the PS1 version.) There are also a bunch of alternate multiplayer battle modes: Reversi, where you try to bomb squares on the map to flip them, and whoever has the most squares of their color wins. Coin mode, where bombing blocks releases coins that you need to collect (or steal from other players) to win. Survival, where bombs fall from the sky (you can’t drop them) and you need to dodge them longer than the other players. Revenge, where you start in the revenger shooters and score points by playing whack-a-mole (and a penalty is being revived on the battlefield). As with all other incarnations of this game, it often serves your interests in battle mode NOT to drop bombs, because you’ll just blow yourself up before the other players blow themselves up.
The single-player offerings on the Gamecube have been overall lacking for me, but between this, Smash Brothers, Mario Party and Wario Ware, I am set for four-player gaming parties. Now I just need to have one…maybe after ARR is old enough to play.
Overall: Bomberman multiplayer is an old favorite of mine. This is as good a choice as any; but the experience is pretty much the same on any system you own four controllers for. And the single player campaign? Meh.
