Bomberman 64 To Have Or Have Not

[Manuela]

Gamingfranchises need to evolve to stay relevant. Whether it's expanding on certain mechanics or overhauling quality-of-life features, any great series that's been around as long as Bomberman is forced to make changes or be left in the dust. Unfortunately for Super Bomberman R 2, the changes it makes to the formula are mostly unsuccessful. While games with your friends can be thrilling, online play is hit-or-miss, and its story mode is a huge letdown. I respect Konami for trying new things with Bomberman. In this case, it just turned out to be a misfire.

The main story is the worst part of this game. It opens with a series of cutscenes introducing the protagonist, White. He lives with the other seven Bomberman siblings, each of which is written with the explicit purpose of annoying him. The writers have done such a great job at making them annoying that I found these cutscenes excruciating, and would have skipped as many as possible if not writing a review. It doesn't help that lines are read slowly, with over-the-top performances that get old immediately. The gist of these cutscenes is that a mysterious Black Moon is attacking planets, and the Bomberman crew is off to stop them.

The gameplay of story mode attempts to fuse classic Bomberman gameplay with a pseudo-open-world design. As you explore three different planets, you find cute little creatures called Ellons that have the ability to power technology. Up to five can follow you, and you use them to unlock fast travel points, but they can also be killed by your bombs, so you must keep them close to avoid getting hurt. Meanwhile, your total Ellon count is used to open gates to new areas or enemy bases. The hunt for Ellons gets stale quickly for a simple reason; Bomberman's toolset is not designed for exploration.

As you destroy blocks, you level up to gain experience and unlock new powers, but most of these powers don't mesh with the design of this mode. While the abilities to punch bombs over walls and move faster are both useful, increasing your bomb's explosion size often felt like an inconvenience, rather than an upgrade. Unfortunately, you get no say in which abilities you want to upgrade, because they're automatically unlocked at certain levels.

In a party game, comically large explosions are fun, even when they result in self-destruction. If it makes you angry, you can jump right back into a new match seconds later. But in story mode, explosions kill any Ellons following you, and if you're out of lives, you must retrace your steps through areas you've already played. Because of this dissonance between player ability and world design, the bulk of the story is frustrating at worst and boring at best.

You can also raid enemy bases, but there's an added level of difficulty there. Konami has translated the Bomberman siblings' irritating nature into a gameplay mechanic, and while it might seem like they're on your side during these raids, if they reach the treasure chest first, you lose. It's an odd decision that I didn't process for the first few raids, but I admire the consistency between the characters' personalities and their in-game disruption. Still, this added obstacle frustrated me more than it engaged me.

Luckily, the game is more than just its story mode. Competitive battle modes make a return as well, and you can play both locally and online. The highlight is the Battle 64 mode, which originated in the now-defunct Super Bomberman R Online. Similar to games like Tetris 99 and F-Zero 99, it pits you against 63 other players in a series of interconnected stages. As a solo player playing online, this mode was the most consistent fun I had.

The decision to let the RSP and CPU process sound made the N64 more like a PC than a traditional home console, at least on the audio side: it utilized a unified memory subsystem that brought together audio, video, and the CPU in one place, which was also the direction that personal computers were heading in once more. Consider that the SNES had a soundchip, but it was designed to allow for audio samples that topped out at just 64kb in size. It took some slick thinking and programming by Yuzo Koshiro while composing for ActRaiser to discover the workaround for this limitation that would allow for less obvious looping and more complicated song structures in compositions for the platform, but that there was a limitation at all was the thing that eventually bothered Nintendo enough for them to do something about it at the hardware level.

It looks like many Europeans have a little more bite on the technical side of things. From our perspective, the N64 is almost as complicated as the [Sega] Saturn. You can do amazing things, as those last Saturn games that are still coming also prove -- but you have to program in a way that you use the resources to a tee. And many people over here don't seem to be able to get to terms with that and the outcome is often disappointing. To say it bluntly, in that respect it seems that European and Japanese companies -- with few exceptions -- are simply better. Rare has gathered the cream of the European programming elite, and it's quite visible that they're technically ahead. And in Japan, look what Major A, Konami, managed to squeeze out of the N64. In that respect, it seems that many Americans just have a to try a little harder (laughs).

July marks 40 years of Hudson Soft\u2019s (and Konami\u2019s) Bomberman franchise. Throughout the month, I\u2019ll be covering Bomberman games, the versatility of its protagonist, and the legacy of both. Previous entries in the series can be found through this link.

Whether Bomberman Hero is a good video game or not is up for debate. Sure, the people who don\u2019t think it\u2019s any good or that whined about the lack of multiplayer in it as a reason to not bother with Bomberman\u2019s second Nintendo 64 adventure are wrong, but it\u2019s the kind of wrong you can debate. What isn\u2019t up for discussion is whether Bomberman Hero\u2019s soundtrack is any good: it rips, the end, thanks for playing.

Bomberman Hero\u2019s soundtrack is legendary, and has been included in best-ever lists as well as features on sites like Pitchfork \u2014 think about how many video games there have been, and then consider how impressive it is to make rank on something like that. Bomberman soundtracks in general \u2014 especially those composed by June Chikuma, like this one was \u2014 are excellent listens, loaded with personality and adding very clear value to the gameplay experience itself. Bomberman Hero\u2019s is the best of them, which says something. Chikuma herself has said that it\u2019s \u201Cthe most remarkable title in terms of music among the Bomberman series,\u201D and it\u2019s also the source of this anecdote about actor Nicolas Cage\u2019s taste in video games, in which he showed up in a retro store loaded with imports and requested, \u201Cthe Bomberman game with the good soundtrack.\u201D The employee in question, of course, knew what game this referred to, even though that shouldn\u2019t have narrowed things down at all given the quality of the series\u2019 soundtracks. And yet! We all know, don\u2019t we?

Bomberman Hero\u2019s soundtrack is more than just some killer tracks that show off Chikuma\u2019s excellent understanding and use of drums and cymbals, as well as an extensive knowledge of various electronic dance music genres and subgenres. It\u2019s also a showcase for what the Nintendo 64 was capable of on the audio side; like Bomberman Hero itself, the N64\u2019s audio hardware was often criticized for what it wasn\u2019t rather than what it actually was, and there was more here of importance than either was given credit for.

Nintendo made a massive change when they designed the N64, as they didn\u2019t utilize a dedicated sound chip. The Super Nintendo and rival Sega Genesis had very distinct sounds, due to their vastly different approach when it came to choosing a sound chip \u2014 the SNES featured a chip designed by future rival Sony, that, while it did feature wavetable synthesis that would allow for a more \u201Ctraditional\u201D use of instruments, as Karen Collins put it in Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design, developers more often went for an enhanced version of the chiptune sound of the 8-bit era, which resulted in some more pop-oriented tracks, while the Genesis, with its heavy use of synth thanks to its Yamaha chip, was ideal for a more progressive rock-oriented sound and instrumentation. For the N64, Nintendo wanted to open things up more than the SNES had allowed, and in a decision that would give developers more freedom but also more work, didn\u2019t include a dedicated sound chip.

So, without a sound chip in place, where did music come from on the Big N\u2019s 64-bit system? The CPU itself, or the Reality Signal Processor (the RSP \u2014 which was already responsible for shading, clipping, lighting calculations, and more on the graphical side). Rather than a separate piece of hardware installed in-system like with the Sony chip in the SNES, the N64\u2019s audio could all be processed by the same CPU that was responsible for ensuring that the game on the cartridge showed up on your television and played like it was supposed to. It was a decision that was often criticized at the time and also resulted in some poor sound quality for various games \u2014 more on that in a bit \u2014 but it was also something of an ahead-of-its-time, peek-into-the-future design. Nintendo seemed behind by sticking with expensive cartridges over moving to a CD-ROM format like Sega and Sony had with the Saturn and Playstation, respectively, but they had the one 64-bit system in a 32-bit world, and they were trying to push the boundaries of audio with that extra horsepower, too.

3a8082e126