BOMBERMAN BOMBERMAN BOMBERMAN!!

[Persona]

I love Bomberman! I was the sicko who played Bomberman on the NES at a cousin’s house and fell in love, and then when they announced a Super Bomberman for the SNES with an included multitap for multiplayer, I was all in and it became my life for a year.

Look at that beautiful Greg Martin art

This box was gigantic. Like a cereal box?

I played Super Bomberman multiplayer all the time with church friends and anyone else I could trick into playing. Unfortunately I only had one OEM pad so I had to scrape by with 3 cheap controllers including the infamous Turbo Touch 360 which was awful but also the perfect handicap for me when I played against others. I got so good with the shitty controller that I eventually had to hold it upside down as even more of a handicap. This inadvertently trained me even more to minimize my inputs and instead focus on reverse psychology to defeat opponents and only made me a stronger bomber

In an alternate universe, if Super Bomberman released a few years earlier, I would’ve grown up as a Bomberman kid instead of a Sonic kid. I drew Bomberman so much and included him in Sonic comics I drew as the rival antagonist. Helps that Bomberman was so easy to draw compared to Sonic too lol

Bomberman fell perfectly in between the cute and cool scale, with his adventures across different levels and weird giant face bosses, culminating with a showdown against cyborg clone Bombermen in a boxing ring filled with a cheering crowd. It’s so good, the first game is truly a perfect package.

Anyway, there’s a new collection out for all the SNES games and it made me want to make a thread about Bomberman. Do we have any sicko Bomberheads in this forum??

[Persona]

In this thread we love and respect Bomberman Act Zero

[Persona]

It’s funny how much of a glow up Bomberman character designs have had since their origin

Went from a cute fat baby

Into a sexy stud

I think their late 90s look is the platonic ideal Bomberman though.

[hellojed]

not sure why the Bomberman Hero OST bangs so hard but it does

[swarm]

Miss that Hokkaido era of Hudson Soft… hope the founder is riding trains in heaven…

Someone tell Chris Kohler to re-upload that old, old, video of some media event at Hudson USA with the live band singing about Bomberman, and the guy in that Bomberman outfit. That was a hell of a video.

All the remains of it is clips in this Bomberman rap mashup vid from Jun Chikuma.

[thecatamites]

i love bomberman and think he deserves to forever remain one of the preeminent little guys of videogames. as a kid i was so enthralled that i played bomberman irl by rolling a marble around the mazelike metal grid of a nearby manhole cover. sorry if this sounds like something a victorian waif would say (if they knew abt bomberman..?)

last gasp of chunky bomberman might be the plastic toys that have a hole in their chest to be able to fire out a marble if you put one there. i was always curious exactly how hard they could fire it, and it looks… a little more powerful than i would’ve expected?

i will never be used to the new design where they all have long thin legs.

[LaurelSoup]

[Drem]

Oh, I’ve been wondering what that theme I’ve been humming for years came from. It was the Bomberman theme!

I’ve recently been playing Power Bomberman with a friend and I have no idea what 99% of the power ups do.

Power Bomberman 0.7.8b - BombermanBoard

[GherkinForce]

There’s Bombermans hangin’ on my walls

[RT-55J]

[Persona]

Yes yessssss
All the secret bomberheads coming out now, excellent

I don’t know anything about that marble stomach Bomberman series except it was like The Bombermedia during the 00s? I remember always seeing merch and candy for it when I went to the Little Tokyo Japanese market. Why does he have a marble in his belly???

[Persona]

@swarm

All the remains of it is clips in this Bomberman rap mashup vid from Jun Chikuma.

Omg her YouTube channel is a gold mine. Bless the Bomberman Hero composer, what a talent

[iguferon]

her personal music rocks too, i love this album she did in 1986

[loki]

bomberman act zero is the anne widdecombe of videogames: despite being as ugly as it is, its looks are still somehow its most positive attribute.

@thecatamites

last gasp of chunky bomberman might be the plastic toys that have a hole in their chest to be able to fire out a marble if you put one there. i was always curious exactly how hard they could fire it, and it looks… a little more powerful than i would’ve expected?

i had one of these! someone gave it to me as a gift at my first anime convention. i wish i still had it ;_;
i can confirm that those marble shot out with considerable force.

@thecatamites

as a kid i was so enthralled that i played bomberman irl by rolling a marble around the mazelike metal grid of a nearby manhole cover. sorry if this sounds like something a victorian waif would say (if they knew abt bomberman..?)

this isn’t bomberman related, but don’t worry: a popular summer afternoon pastime among the kids on the street where i grew up was, after someone had washed their car and the water was flowing down the road’s gutter, building dams out of leaves and dirt to make little “lakes”.

---

i don’t think i can quote a post that’s just a youtube embed, but of course i am the “simpsons did it” of weird old games:

3-D Bomberman (MSX)

and as a bonus, another weird bomberman spin-off that’s yet to be mentioned in this thread (and a post from 17 years ago wtf):

Panic Bomber World (SNES)

[Mothra]

@physical and I were chatting the other day about how amazing the Bomberman 64 soundtrack was. It’s hard to compare them but I do think Hero’s better overall, but like, nothing really sounds like these OSTs, they’re just fantastic:

My main Bomberman memories are of being extremely psyched by the release of Atomic Bomberman on the PC, which meant I could play it via LAN with my brothers and friends.

Now this game plays and sounds and looks like complete ass, but, it was just cool to play it on the computer.

Bomberman Quest, and to a lesser extent Bomberman Max, were complete delights for me and the first time I felt like Bomberman could actually extend itself outside of the fugging grid. All the mechanics are there! You can do anything with them! You can do a Links Awakening if you’re so bold!

I did feel like Max was a crazy strange misstep in terms of character design, but like, Bomberman never REALLY figured out its style. Nobody else but Bomberman looks like him, which is extremely strange. This gave the series this vibe of not being a “real” series, like it wasn’t well considered and they were just throwing shit at the wall, which isn’t untrue but it is also what most other properties were doing, and them not having a consistent visual style felt like they really wanted this to not be Bomberman.

Bomberman 64 on the other mitt DID feel Bomberman as hell, even with all the overcool sentai villains all over the place, and I clearly clearly remember this being one of those videogames that caterpiller-age Mothra was fucking obsessed with:

I simply couldn’t believe how much SHIT was in this game, you could go through entire city blocks and unlock new costumes and fight a huge variety of unique bosses, all to that banger soundtrack. As an N64 game it of course looks like true horsepiss now but man, this was a game that genuinely amazed me as a youngling.

Multiplayer also absolutely ripped, played a whole lot of Bomberman 64 at sleepovers and the like.

Also notable is this cute SNES multitap I picked up years back for Secret of Mana:

Now sadly Secret of Mana ended up sucking pretty bad but this multitap is a prized possession of mine all the same.

My last offering is related to the soundtrack again:

About a year and a half back the company I was working for launched this robotics site at a very high-visibility location across from the HQ of our client, and all hands were on deck to just make sure it all went well. Everyone had to cycle through and fly down there to keep the site running well. When it was my turn, I did an overnight shift in the Frozen section, where we were within a giant freezer, opening up boxes and loading the product into totes for the robots to receive.

The locals I worked the shift with brought in a Spy Kids-ass bluetooth speaker and asked if I was good with them playing music while they worked, I of course said yes, they then proceeded to play the Bomberman 64 soundtrack while we worked our way through three pallets of cases. I’ll never forget what an insanely improbably music choice that was.

[LaurelSoup]

I think I have one of those marble chest hole bombermans somewhere that I found at an import shop back in high school, but I never knew what you were supposed to do with the hole.

[swarm]

Can’t forget that era of Hudson putting Game Boy games in tins!!

[MintyJuffowup]

The GBKiss era

[loki]

pocket bomberman is another gb bomberman game that does stuff with the formula, being a platformer where you place bombs to kill enemies.
it also has an extra mode where it’s a platform game with vertical stages where bomberman is constantly jumping.

for some reason, i have a really prominent memory of playing it while watching an episode of the bill when i was a kid

[Sykel]

We played so much Bomberman 64 back in the day, it’s a really fun 3D riff on the formula

I have a English PAL only DS Bomberman rpg style game but it got middling reviews… Haven’t played it myself yet

Do any of the more traditional Bomberman games have decent solo modes?

Also the curse words pack for Atomic Bomberman gave me a sensible chuckle