Bomberman 64 Multiplayer

[Rodney Liuzzo]

Everyclassic series has to start somewhere. While most everyone familiar with Bomberman remembers it for its legendary multiplayer it was not the party game in the beginning. Bomberman was a simple puzzle game initially without a hint of multiplayer shenanigans. You will recognize nearly all of the aspects that made the series great. But as a single player only title it falls short due to repetition. I can respect it but the original Bomberman is not a game I want to return to.

The objective of every level is simple. In each maze you must use your bombs to destroy walls and defeat all of the enemies on the map and find the exit before time runs out. Each level is about three screens wide, giving enemies plenty of room to hide/wander around. Preventing you from making a bee line to them are an assortment of blocks. Some are indestructible while others can be destroyed. The layout of each map makes your simple task a lot harder than it should be but that is part of the fun. Aiding you in your task are a litany of power-ups waiting to be uncovered.

Bomberman starts out fairly weak as he can only drop a single bomb. But soon enough you will uncover many different creative power-ups that speed up gameplay somewhat. The most common will allow you to drop more bombs, up to as many as four. You can increase your speed, gain the ability to walk through walls and even have immunity to your own explosions. Hands down the best item in the game is the detonator, which allows you to remotely detonate your bombs at any time. The detonator is incredibly fun and I daresay the game almost feels incomplete without it.

Unfortunately Bomberman is a heavily repetitive game that can grow old fast. By stage fourteen you have seen all but one of its eight enemies. That means for the rest of the game you are fighting the same group of enemies on the same boring gray and green map that never changes. The layout differs but you are looking at the same assets for the entire game which grows old fast. You could lobby the same criticism at games like Pac-Man but Bomberman is not a game you are playing for score. Even something as simple as new tile sets every ten levels (which would come in Super Bomberman) would have gone a long way to making this solo campaign more tolerable. Many will find the core gameplay strong enough to overlook this flaw but I could not.

Bomberman is considered a classic for a reason. Its gameplay loop is addicting and fun. But in this case its simplicity does not hold up over fifty levels of repetitive action. Appreciate Bomberman for what it has established but not as a game that you return to over and over again.

Bomberman 64 was a valiant attempt at creating an engrossing adventure to accompany the series multiplayer mode. While it was not perfect it was an enjoyable game with an excellent soundtrack. Apparently someone at Hudson was really dead set on nailing the campaign as Bomberman Hero completely loses the multiplayer and is a single player experience only. The singular focus should allow the game to reach its potential. Bomberman Hero is a flawed experience that has its moments but is not as good as its creators probably hoped.

For a game that wants to tell an expansive it heavily rips from Star Wars. Bombeman is training at the Bomber Base when he is instructed to investigate a crashed spaceship. There he discovers Pibot, a robot who informs him that Garaden Empire has attacked the planet Primus Star. The princess Millian is kidnapped but manages to smuggle one of the four disks the Garaden Empire were after on Pibot. With his new sidekick in tow Bomberman sets out to rescue the princess.

Bomberman Hero goes full on 3d platformer and arms its hero with a host of new moves. He can finally jump and grab ledges like your average platforming star. These abilities are called on frequently throughout the game. Most of the techniques from Bomberman 64 return such as kicking bombs. Unfortunately you can no longer pump up bombs to create larger explosions. Instead charging up will toss three bombs simultaneously which sounds cool but I never found a use for it. In the biggest gameplay departure you now have a life bar which is a god send as the game would be near impossible otherwise.

The varying bomb power-ups return with a few new ones in tow. The most basic increase the number you can throw or drop (up to 4) and their radius. The most important are crystals which will increase your life bar at set amounts. You will need a lot of these to reach the max of heart bars but in a stupid move if you turn the game off it defaults back to four. Sadly the various other bombs are rare. Remote bombs, ice bombs, and salt bombs (!) are situational and mostly used to solve specific puzzles. This is a shame as the game could have used the added variety they provide.

Bomberman Hero is a mix between a full 3d platformer like Super Mario 64 and the on rails adventuring of Crash Bandicoot. Most levels are small 3d arenas that simply task you with reaching the exit. Occasionally there is another objective that needs to be completed first such as collecting four pieces of a key or defeating all of a certain enemy type to progress. These eventually graduate to large, full blown maps that you can explore at your leisure somewhat. Bee lining the exit is simple in most cases. But to see all the game has to offer you must collect items to earn higher end level ranks. To switch things up there are numerous levels in which Bomberman will ride a vehicle such as a submarine or helicopter for light shooting action.

The game has big aspirations but falls short in a number of areas. The camera is the biggest issue. Bomberman Hero uses a fixed camera you can manipulate slightly but not nearly enough. This causes all manner of problems with the frequent platforming. Judging distances and lining up jumps is frustrating and leads to many, many deaths. The framerate is also a problem. In the more enclosed areas it is stable. But once the game opens up it drops precipitously. The game begins to chug badly around its midpoint and rarely gets better. The lack of a lock-on function is glaring. Most enemies in the game are dumb and easily dealt with. The bosses however are smarter and will actively avoid your attacks. Trying to aim is needlessly frustrating and makes these battles drag on. The Ocarina of Time and its influence could not come out soon enough.

Bomberman Hero has tried and succeeded somewhat to make the single player portion of the series better. But sacrificing the trademark multiplayer that made Bomberman what it is was the wrong choice. This is a decent game but on a platform with so many better options that does not cut it.

On September 29, 2021, the Nintendo 64 will turn 25 years old in North America. Throughout the month of September, I\u2019ll be covering the console, its games, its innovations, and its legacy. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

How do you make a 3D platformer work without a jump button? Hudson Soft set out to answer that question in 1997 by combining elements of the more traditional, overhead Bomberman experience with that of its side-scrolling platformer cousins, and the solution they arrived at was an explosive one: Bomberman would simply walk across bombs he had set, using them as platforms, before they exploded. In theory, anyway: the timing of it all was pretty integral to the success of this style of platforming, as you can imagine. Timing has always been the thing with Bomberman. You know, so you don\u2019t explode yourself.

A story in a Bomberman game was nothing new. Even the arena-based games of old had a single-player story to them: it just played out in the same kind of stages that multiple players would attempt to blow each other up in, competitively, in the head-to-head mode of those titles. What set Bomberman 64 apart is that it still utilized the overhead view of those arenas, but in larger platforming stages and action-adventure bits, and all in 3D. The camera could now move around to multiple angles to peer around corners and follow Bomberman regardless of where you directed him, while the 3D environment could be utilized for hiding items or switches or what have you: typical 3D platforming stuff. Seeing it in a Bomberman game, though, wasn\u2019t so typical!

Is Bomberman 64 the best Bomberman game? No. Is it the best fifth generation Bomberman game? Also no: Saturn Bomberman exists, and might also qualify as the best overall title in the series, too. (The \u201Cmight\u201D is because it\u2019s hard to make a pronouncement like that and have it be universal law, considering over 70 Bomberman games have been released since the original in 1983: I have played many a Bomberman, but I have not played anywhere near all of them.) Bomberman 64 was the first of the 3D Bomberman games, however, and negative reaction to it at the time was almost universally centered on how its multiplayer was a bit of a disappointment: what made the game work in 3D in solo mode made the Bomberman experience a bit more aggravating and less fun in multiplayer. That made Bomberman 64 something of an oddity for a console release of the series, since you could always rely on the multiplayer to be, at the least, a good time, and with the right combination of tweaks and rules and items, it could be a fantastic time. And yet, with this first N64 release, the opposite was true: after reviews made it clear multiplayer wasn\u2019t quite right, you bought Bomberman 64 because you wanted a fulfilling single-player experience.

I should point out that the multiplayer isn\u2019t terrible by any means: it\u2019s Bomberman, and there is an inherent goodness there. It was more obviously disappointing to folks who were familiar with Bomberman and expecting the series\u2019 traditional rules to apply, such as movement in four directions in a more enclosed space, rather than the anything goes, eight-direction movement of 3D. But if you weren\u2019t, well, this could be a lot of fun for you still, for sure. If you were already familiar with the series\u2019 predecessors, if you had already sunk a ton of time into Bomberman \u201893 or or Super Bomberman or what have you, then maybe you felt differently about what was supposed to be an upgrade on a new console.

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