Bomberman 64: A Blast From the Past

Bomberman is a franchise that I've always adored. While many of the games are nearly identical—typically sticking with the mazes filled with blast-able blocks and power-ups—it's great to see that the developers experimented a few times in order to get Bomberman to make the difficult transition into 3D. I really enjoy the traditional flavor of Bomberman, and while the thought of a 3D Bomberman game is very interesting, I haven't touched them or even attempted a playthrough of any of them. Little did I know that I'd be in for a treat.

I recently decided to sink my teeth into Bomberman 64 because I'd been invited to talk about it on another podcast—Flashback 64. I didn't know what to expect with this game, being a 3D Bomberman. I've seen gameplay of Bomberman Hero, and that looked to be a full-on 3D platformer. While they share some small similarities, they're very different games to say the very least.

Bomberman 64 lets you explore each stage to your heart's content, hiding the goal of each stage in plain sight. It's up to you to toss, kick, or plant bombs wherever possible in order to find that goal.

I started playing the game on my Anbernic RG353PS (my trusty retro sidekick), but unfortunately the game didn't run very well on there. I tried a couple different cores, but no luck. I'd either get a black screen after the "PRESS START" screen or loads of visual artifacts. Nintendo 64 games are notoriously difficult emulate, so I came close to just sticking with the poor performance and hoping maybe it wouldn't be so bad. But then decided to try running the game on my laptop, and it worked perfectly. Thank goodness for Launchbox!

The story is what you'd typically expect from a Bomberman game: a bad dude named Altair is draining planets of their energy, and it's up to you, as Bomberman, to stop him.

The gameplay loop is very simple and keeps things short and sweet—each world has 4 stages of the same structure: puzzle stage, a mid-boss, another puzzle stage, and then your world boss. There are five worlds in total (actually six, counting the hidden final world), and you need to complete the first four in order to access the fifth. You can complete the first four worlds in any order that you want. Naturally, I went from the first world the game plopped me onto and worked my way onward.

There are six worlds (if you collect 100 gold cards) in total:

• Green Garden: A lush, vibrant green area that is filled with deep blue water, green vegetation, and lots of stone pillars and walls.
• Blue Resort: An industrial area, with lots of bridges, pipes, and even more water.
• Red Mountain: A blistering hot volcano, filled with molten magma.
• White Glacier: A glistening, white winter wonderland with lots of slippery ice and cold, blustering winds
• Black Fortress: A futuristic, technological marvel, with lots of traffic and hi-tech booby traps
• Rainbow Palace: A stone shrine nestled in the clouds.

The controls seem pretty simple at first, having you run around and lay bombs. You also have the ability to kick, throw, and pump-up bombs—the latter increasing the size and damage of a bomb. But there are a couple of techniques—bomb bridge and bomb ladder—that the game doesn't tell you about outright, requiring you to figure them out for yourself. Mastering those techniques is key to 100%ing the game, as they can shave quite a bit of time off of a stage when implemented correctly.

At first, I couldn't figure out what to do or where to go. When you start a puzzle stage, the game plops you right in, with no direction or anything telling you what to do or where to go. After running around the stage for about 10 minutes, I was able to figure out how to progress and what my goal was. Admittedly, this annoyed me, and I considered not playing the game at all. But after giving the game more of my time, I started to really enjoy this structure. Bomberman 64 lets you explore each stage to your heart's content, hiding the goal of each stage in plain sight. It's up to you to toss, kick, or plant bombs wherever possible in order to find that goal. Along the way, you'll need to avoid getting touched by an enemy, hit by a projectile, or blown-up. Bomberman can normally only take one hit and then he's toast—at which point you'll lose a life and restart the stage from your last checkpoint. Thankfully, each stage is pretty short, and while there is a timer at the top of the screen, that only matters if you're trying to speedrun a stage to get 100% completion.

Speaking of 100% completion, Bomberman 64 contains oodles of hidden collectibles in the form of:

• Gold Cards: 5 hidden in each stage, can also be obtained by completing certain objectives in mid-boss and world boss battles, and by beating a level within a certain time limit.

  • 100 Gold Cards are needed to unlock the final world, final boss battle and the credits option in the main menu.

  • 120 Gold Cards gets you a samurai costume in multiplayer and 4 new stages in multiplayer.

  • 120 Gold Cards and completing the game on Hard Mode in under 3 hours gets you a sweet golden armor suit in multiplayer.

• Costume Capsules: Each one contains a piece of a certain costume, which can be used in multiplayer to customize your Bomberman.

In my playthrough, I didn't go out of my way to try to collect the gold cards. But if I came across one, I'd snag it—and in doing so, I was able to complete the game with 76 gold cards, which isn't enough to get the true ending or the true final boss. But after looking through some guides to find the cards that I'd missed, I don't think I want to try to collect 100. Quite a few gold cards are hidden in incredibly obtuse areas, not to mention the ones only obtained after practically speedrunning a stage or boss fight.

Boss battles come in two distinct flavors: mid-bosses and world bosses. The world bosses contain a lot of variety in terms of enemy design, attack patterns, and even the arenas. For example, Draco's battle sees Bomberman confined to a small bridge in a dreamy, cloudy sky, as Draco lunges at you from far away. You'll have to be quick about lobbing bombs at him when he gets to a certain distance from you, otherwise you won't hit him. Hades sees Bomberman in a pit of lava, dodging Hades's whirling robotic fists, kicking bombs at him from across the stage. These battles feel like what I'd expect from a 3D Bomberman game and felt so fresh and fun. On the other hand, the world mid-battles felt like a traditional Bomberman experience—you vs another Bomberperson, trying to outwit the other in order to blast them with a bomb. Surprisingly, I enjoyed both the mid-boss and world boss battles. While they were frustrating during my first few attempts, I was quickly able to pick-up where their weak spots were, what their attack patterns looked like, and blew them to 64-bit smithereens.

OH WAIT—THERE'S ALSO MULTIPLAYER! I didn't have anyone to try it with, but I assume it's just as good as always. Judging from the various screenshots and videos that I've watched, there's much more verticality and strategy involved versus traditonal Bomberman.

While I really enjoyed most of what this game had to offer, the camera was often a gigantic pain in the ass. When rotating the camera to a point where it would collide with a wall of any kind, the game would act as if the camera were behind the wall, completely blocking your view. This resulted in some pretty unfair deaths and almost made me stop playing the game once I got to the Red Mountain world.

Speaking of Red Mountain, that area made me want to do a kickflip off of a cliff. The first puzzle stage was confusing and the game went berserk with stage hazards here—with geysers and fiery rocks around every corner, killing you with one hit and munching away at your lives until you run out and have to restart from the main menu. It's so much worse on the second puzzle stage.

My final issue with the game is the inability to skip cutscenes or world boss intros. When you start a world boss fight, you have to sit through a 10-15 second scene of the boss busting into the room, or emerging from lava, or whatever the other bosses do. After restarting a boss fight over and over and over, not being able to skip those scenes was getting pretty annoying.

Setting those greivances aside, Bomberman 64 was awesome. The stage design reminds me a lot of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, but with way more explosions. The boss battles are challenging and fun, the music is DYNAMITE (Bomberman always has great tunes), and the game mechanics are simple, but offer a surprising amount of depth that rewards you for experimenting and taking risks.

If you're looking for another Nintendo 64 game to try out, I very highly recommend Bomberman 64. Regardless of whether you're a longtime fan of the franchise or a total newbie, you're sure to have a good time with it.

Stay tuned for a review of the sequel: Bomberman 64: The Second Attack.

PEACE.