Game Journal: Bomber Man, Bomber Man World (1 Credit Clear)

I got a 1 credit clear of Bomber Man and Bomber Man World, two arcade Bomberman games by Irem from 1991 and 1992 respectively.

Bomber Man (1991)

Bomber Man, which was also released as Atomic Punk and Dynablaster in the US and Europe respectively, is by far my favourite single player Bomberman campaign. I love how little downtime there is by Bomberman standards;the moment you defeat the final enemy it takes you straight to the next stage. You lose all your powerups after each stage too, so you get to spend the entire game at various power levels instead of just grabbing the remote bomb early and holding onto it for the entire run. The bosses are a lot of fun too, and none of them overstay their welcome.

I have mixed feelings about the powerups all being in hard-coded positions, about being able to use your invincibility at the start of each state to tear through enemies, and about the second half of most stages just being a matter of cleaning up a few stragglers, thanks to the lack of additional enemy spawns.But none of that can counteract the positives I listed above. If you're at all interested in PvE Bomberman I highly recommend it. It even has co-op, and the US and EU versions support 4 players!

Bomber Man World (1992)

Bomber Man World is a direct sequel to Bomber Man and there's a lot that I love about it compared to its predecessor. The bosses are great, the enemy counts are increased, the stage layouts are mostly better about not letting you instantly win in the first two seconds, the remote bomb powerup only gives you a few bombs instead of trivializing the rest of the current stage, some of the enemies are more interesting to fight (like the bomb-dropping enemy who now runs away from bombs instead of using an invincibility shield), walking into a wall no longer pushes you sideways, and so on.

However, it introduces some new issues that make me personally like it less than the previous game overall. Most of the enemies either ignore you completely or only chase you when you're very close to them, making most of the game completely static and predictable. The extra lives system now encourages you to dig around for a bonus letter in each stage which grants you the reward of being able to spend more time digging around for an extra life in the bonus stage, so even if you don't care about high scores you're encouraged to spend lots of time digging around. And finally, despite remote bombs now having limited ammo you can keep them between stages. This makes it trivial to carry a stack of remote bombs from the bonus stages into the boss fights, making them far easier than they otherwise would be. But if you don't mind a bit of downtime and you don't mind a game that is more about coming up with optimal solutions for stages and less about dealing with chaotic situations and improvising on the fly, Bomber Man World has a lot to offer.

I just played Bomber Man World for survival, with no scoring strategies used. The game has an interesting scoring system, and if you want to see it pushed to its limit I highly recommend watching DangorouNishida's run and reading the corresponding blog post.