Bomberman 64 4 Player

[Gregory Monty]

SaturnBomberman[a] is an action video game by Hudson Soft for the Sega Saturn as the name implies. The twelfth installment in the Bomberman series, it was first released in Japan on July 19, 1996, in Europe in May 1, 1997, and in North America in September 4, 1997. It is best known for its multiplayer functionality for up to ten players. The game received praise from critics for its enjoyable gameplay and multiplayer, but received criticism for not advancing the Bomberman series enough beyond previous installments.

Like most Bomberman games, Saturn Bomberman features a battle mode as well as a story mode. Along with them is a master mode in which the player races to finish a series of levels after which the player is given a rank based on how much time is taken. This time is then saved to memory and kept on a scoreboard for future reference.[4] The game also features several new powerups.

Saturn Bomberman utilises Dinosaur helpers, which are initially found as eggs released upon the destruction of a soft block. Dinosaurs come in three levels: babies (the weakest), adolescents, and adults (the strongest). Dinosaurs can only take one hit no matter how large they are. If a player is riding a dinosaur when this happens, the dinosaur takes the hit instead of the player.[4] As powerups are collected, a special meter at the top of the screen slowly builds up. Once this meter is full, the dinosaur will grow one level, from baby to adolescent or adolescent to adult. However, in battle mode this system works differently. Whenever a player collects an egg while riding on a dinosaur, the dinosaur will grow. The player can jump off of the dinosaur at any time.

The story mode levels involve blowing up poles with glowing red orbs on the top (which are known as Zarfs) while avoiding (or destroying) enemies, blowing up blocks and collecting powerups. Once all the Zarfs on a level have been destroyed, an exit appears. Upon entering the exit, Bomberman will do a victory pose, then a short cut scene takes place. The cut scene shows a piece of scenery moving out of the way, then Bomberman walks through, and something closes up the way he came from. After the cut scene, the next level begins.

Saturn Bomberman supports up to ten human players on battle mode with 2 multitaps,[5] 7 players with just one multitap, or two players without any multitaps. It is also possible to combat against CPU-controlled opponents in battle mode.[5]

If the number of players in a game exceeds eight, the game is played on a widescreen arena, shrinking the characters and blocks to tiny proportions, making the playing field very large. This also disables many of the powerups, including dinosaurs.

Critics were generally positive over Saturn Bomberman. It received enthusiastic reviews from Electronic Gaming Monthly's four-person "review crew", Saturn Power's Dean Mortlock, and Sega Saturn Magazine's Matt Yeo, who were particularly impressed with the ten-player capability[9][13][14] and the numerous modes and options.[13][14] Yeo also praised the game's accessibility, remarking, "Mastering power-ups and building on that initial buzz certainly adds to the game's broad appeal but the fact that players can simply pick up a joypad and leap straight into the thick of things with the minimum of tuition is the real winning factor."[14] However, a reviewer for Next Generation and Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot both felt the game failed to break out from the shadow of Super Bomberman 2. Gerstmann elaborated, "Since that classic game, every subsequent Bomberman game has closely mirrored it, while tacking on a few silly features that kept the game fresh without really adding anything useful. Saturn Bomberman combines all these silly features into one game, giving you what should be the ultimate Bomberman game. But any serious Bomberman player has seen all this before."[10] Next Generation similarly opined that "the basic gameplay goodness of the series isn't tarnished, but nevertheless, the latest offering from Hudson Soft doesn't attain the classic status of SB2."[11]

Critics were also not wholly sold on the 10-player feature, as most noted that the screen size used for ten players makes powerups and characters too small to discern on all but the largest television sets.[10][11][14][16] They nonetheless concurred that the multiplayer modes overall are the highlight of the game.[9][10][11][13][14][16] Dan Hsu of Electronic Gaming Monthly stated that "It's a mediocre one-player game. It's a fantastic multiplayer game. And that's all you really need to know."[9] Mortlock ventured that it is "Probably the best multi-player game you'll ever play."[13] GamePro noted that the screen is much less confusing if there are eight players or fewer, and commented, "If you don't have a Sega multitap, Saturn Bomberman offers the perfect excuse to get one. If you don't have friends, this is a good opportunity to get some of them, too."[16]

The Story Mode and Master Mode were criticized by Matt Yeo for the frustratingly difficult AI and unforgiving boss fights,[14] and GamePro similarly described them as "more a trial of your patience than a test of your skill."[16] However, Next Generation contended that these modes are the one area where Saturn Bomberman actually exceeds Super Bomberman 2, as they "offer a decidedly less frantic (but more cerebral) puzzle-gamelike experience".[11]

Critics generally remarked that the graphics and music are very limited and fail to advance the Bomberman series in any way.[10][11][16] Most also complained at the excessive length of time between the game's original release in Japan and its release in North America and Europe.[9][10][13][14]

Next Generation reviewed the Japanese version of the game as an import in 1996, rating it four stars out of five, and stated that "even a mediocre Bomberman game is still worth checking out, and a must for gregarious Saturn fans."[17]

Electronic Gaming Monthly gave Saturn Bomberman the 1997 Game of the Year awards for "Saturn Game of the Year" and "Multiplayer Game of the Year".[15] The same year, Electronic Gaming Monthly listed it as the 10th best console video game of all time, remarking that while it was only slightly better than the Bomberman games for the older Super NES and TurboGrafx-16, it was nonetheless the best entry in the series to date.[19] Digitiser ranked it the second best Saturn game of 1997, below Fighters Megamix.[12]

In 2008, IGN ranked Saturn Bomberman eight on their "Top 10 Sega Saturn Games" list, and in 2009 called it the best Bomberman game along with Bomberman '93.[20][21] In 2012, GamesRadar ranked the game fourth on their "Best Saturn games of all time" list.[22] In 2014, Retro Gamer placed the game on their "Top Ten Saturn Games" list.[23]

Informative article. Very easy-to-digest article that really puts the ECS into good use. Thanks for sharing this!

A note: I know you provided the source code, but it would be nice if you could put up a small example of methods and logic of a system as well. Just briefly, as you have with components above.

Bomberman is a product of an 8bit/16bit era and ran on systems that had very little ram and weren't programmed in higher level languages. As such there were no "powerup components". Powerups were just tiles placed in the map. Making them components and or having them as active game objects would have taken too much ram and too much processing. As tiles they are effectively static. The player tries to take a step in the direction of the powerup. The code looks at the tile, sees it's a powerup tile, replaces the tile with a ground tile and sets a flag in the player they he now has that powerup (or one more bomb).

As another example bombs don't expand. They blow up at their defined size instantly. (Google SNES Bomberman video to see).

The article is a great introduction into ECS but it's also arguably an introduction into over engineering. Sorry, that sounds like a judgement and arguably anyway your game works is fine. It's just the limits of old systems forced or suggested different solutions. Those solutions have their own advantages and disadvantages.

For example, using the tile based (non GameObject) solution you can easily make a level that is filled with bombs because the bombs themselves are tiles. They can only be placed on tile boundaries. When you place one the ground tile is replaced with bomb tile. That means having 1 or 1000 bombs takes the same amount of processing. They only become gameobjects when they are moving and usually only a few are moving at any one time. Possibly max 2 per player. In other words the bomb is tile, if the player kicks a bomb tile (and has the kick powerup) the tile is replaced with a ground tile, a gameobject is spawned, the bomb moves down the hall until it hits the end or the player stops it, the closest ground tile is changed to back to a bomb tile and the gameobject is destroyed.

The bombs can appear to "tick" using tile animation. Rather than a gameobject per bomb all you need is an array of bomb tile locations and a time they were placed. A single function walks the array, any bomb who's time is up explodes the tile. So much less overhead. In fact because bombs are added to the array/queue as they are placed the code only has to check the oldest bomb. So in general only one bomb needs to be checked each frame to see if it's time to explode (or 2 or 3 for those rare occasions where 2 or more players put bombs down on exactly the same frame)

Even explosions are tiles. The moment a bomb explodes the code goes and replaces ground tiles down the aisles with explosion tiles. That means all the aisles on the entire board can be explosion tiles and again there is no processing. (tile animation effectively free on those old systems and can be replicated to be free on modern GPUs. Similarly it makes collisions easy. Each player just checks the max 2 tiles they are straddling. If they are explosion tiles they player dies.

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