Understatement: The game ranking for Bomberman Zero is 33%.
The reviewers more or less agree that Bomberman Zero removes all the good parts from the series:
- Top-down view.
- The characters
- Dying instantly when being hit
- Multiplayer on one console/screen.
While adding new unwelcome features:
- New “futuristic” characters.
- First person view (most of the time).
- Health bar.
- 99-level single player with no continue option.
Compare this to, say, New Super Mario Bros (89%), which has managed to take an existing series and genuinely update it (it is absolutely great).
My take is that it is about how you deal with technology and game style changes:
- Bomberman Zero seems to follow the ca. 1999 laundry list of “new cool things”: First person view, vague futurism with murky textures, online multiplayer and follow that slavishly. (Single player without continue is more 1986 than 2006 though, retro in the bad way.)
- New Super Mario Bros sticks with the 2D format (retro in the good way), but mostly builds on advances in character animation tools and game physics: The game feels modern due to the great animations and the exquisite physics – it is all about a sense of bodily presence in the game. Modernized, but not by way of a laundry list, and without destroying the game’s core.
There you have it: This is how to make a modern version of an old game. Ok, so it is not that simple. New Super Mario Bros is probably easier to modernize because a slightly open game of exploration and travel is quite contemporary, whereas single-screen 2d action games are hardly made anymore.
Still, I could imagine a 2D top-down Bomberman modernized like New Super Mario Bros: Better animations, better physics. I would play that.
Right, the old Mario games are still fresh by today’s standards, whereas the old Bomberman games, while great, haven’t exactly had a huge influence on where games are today.
In Defense of Bomberman
Interesting post. Though, I am not sure how effective the comparison between Bomberman and Mario is — in light of the recent changes you have mentioned. They are two very different games arising from two very different design contexts. A few thoughts:
Over the years Bomberman has been widely adapted (thirty plus titles) and cloned (see BlitzBombers, Spod Masters etc.) and while there is a distinctive avatar, I dont have any sense of that avatar as a character, with distinguishing personality traits that exist outside of the games operations. This is of course in stark contrast to Mario, Nintendo’s flagship character. I think there are important contexts for appreciating a franchise like Bomberman that exist outside of the question of Zero’s deviation from the core game mechanic.
I think there are reasons behind the shifts made in Zero. First the question of comparison. If any could be drawn it would be between bomberman and japanese sentai (see power rangers, kamen rider) culture, of super powered anonymous masked heroes distinguished by their signature colours[1] and signature poses (we see them on tv, in manga and anime, in literature.) With sentai, and in bomberman, the anonymity is valuable to the avatar as a component of the game form. Anonymity is an enabling device which makes the character expendable, versatile, perhaps throw away. Dying and resurrecting over and over. This is of course what bomberman is all about.
If you look across the numerous incarnations of Hudsonsoft’s franchise and the wide variety of platforms it has appeared on since 1983 they have continually experimented with different mechanics and settings. Perhaps the apotheosis of the franchise is the super nintendo’s Super Bomberman (1993, with its port of Genesis/Mega Drive) which was a signature mutliplayer title for that platform, but it is important to remember that even at this point the massively popular battle mode was designed alongside a level-‘n’-boss-battle interative arcade mode. In this arcade game the sentai spirit of the characters was emphasised through the boss battles (giant crabs, walking pyramids etc.) Racing versions of the game have also appeared.
In Japan, the ‘Zero’ suffix (and sometimes working as a moniker for a particular type of character [see Mega/Rockman]) seems to be used to mark a break in a significant characteristic of a franchise. The Street Fighter Zero series represented the largest change in the series’ gameplay mechanic and took place chronologically at a point preceding the landmark Street Fighter 2. So we might read Hudsonsofts latest game in this light. Just because one particular incarnation of their game proved massively successful and memorable, that doesnt diminish the considerable experimentation the developer has undertaken with the gameplay mechanic of the franchise. To take another example, the same is true of Pokemons many incarnations.
Thinking through the comparison to Sentai further, if we look to recent Japanese Cinema the anonymous superhero has taken a cyborg twist in films like Casshern (Kazuaki Kiriya, 2004). Anime is replete with cyborg or gynoid sentai (Bubblegum Crash etc.) Likewise in games the image of Master Chief (Halo) and Samus Aran (Super Metroid) recall the classic Sentai image but add a militant cyborg twist. The lastest Bomberman is developed in this context and is clearly informed by it.
The foregrounding of these contexts in the final design is driven by commercial factors. The game is resonates with expectations surrounding the 360 platform as being largely indigenous to America and Europe, and the design is clearly anxious of this fact (Master Chief is haunting Hudsonsoft). Retrospectively, it could even be said to recall those North American games of the period of the originals release which were most like it, such as Super Smash TV and Speedball 1 and 2 (dystopian setting, sci fi styling). Bomberman Zero is a fascinating index of how national discourses in games play out and manifest in design decisions; it is of its moment.
All this amounts to a context so separate from that of Mario it invalidates a comparison. Massively different development and publishing interests inform the two games. The capacity (and desire) for change to a peripheral (yet cult) arcade multiplayer like Bomberman is presumably much greater than the sacrosanct image of Mario as face of Nintendo. One franchise anxious of falling into the abyss between Japanese and American markets, the other so entrenched it drives me to dismay. New Super Mario Bros? It’s a case of the Emperors new clothes for me.
I think that games journalism should think through its retro nostalgia and desire to see franchises (which achieved particular successes) reiterate their core principles in more technologically adept but creatively stagnant terms. New Super Mario Brothers is a case in point. It certainly employs ‘character animation’ and ‘physics’ in an unoriginal rehearsal of its familiar codes, icons and spaces. The easiness of the game is testament to the sheer embeddedness of its codes and conventions into gaming consciousness. Pixel perfect runs and jumps of Mario’s Lost Levels are blunted by the 2.5D collision detection and ‘innovations’ which seem to invite the player to succeed in a way that douses the old frustrations of true retro gaming (as does the save function for that matter). Western criticism does certainly focus on game mechanic, and the veil of nostalgia that grips the industry (to the advantage of nintendo) does little to further questions of new game form.
Mario plays tennis, drives a Kart, roleplays through his own storyworld, stars in a cartoon series, the list goes on. No surprise, but it does trouble me that good character animation and physics and the incredible potential of the DS device isnt put to better use on the possibility of new franchises, characters, gameworlds. I favour games attempting to reflect new contexts in design (and perhaps failing), over the money for old rope we see in New Super Mario Bros.
DGS
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[1] The colours yellow, green, blue and red often seen in Sentai are associated with Byakko the tiger, Seiryu the dragon, Genbu the turtle, and Suzaku the phoenix of the Shinto spiritual system indigenous to japan. White and Black are often included to reflect Ohryu (Light) and Wu (Void). The summoning of giant mechanical versions of the sacred animals in the original power rangers series affirms this association. These colours are used in the bomberman series, and intermittently through japanese games design.
Even if this is an unuseful or invalid comparison when centered on cultural context (which is exactly as useful a paradigm for viewing such things as you decide it to be), I appreciate Jesper’s comparisons here. For my money, coming more from a games-as-systems-that-modulate-player-information-amongst-other-things perspective, these are excellent and core observations.
In fact, I would really love to see a larger list of such game iterations that change the frame of player information and, in the process, break the core game. The two other examples that come rapidly to mind are versions of Pac-man for handhelds that involve screen scrolling, and likewise versions of Lode Runner that involve screen scrolling. Most single screen games simply don’t seem to survive the transition to multiscreen (or, god forbid, first person).
It might be more interesting, though, to make a comparison between this new Bomberman (compared to the few versions of Bomberman that worked beautifully) and Mario 64 specifically (compared to, say, Mario 3). Nintendo has, both with Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, some really interesting examples of making those sharp technological transitions and making game designs that accomodate those jumps.
I think you make a really good point here Nathan, which is really at the heart of my critique. A comparison of transitions (of mario from 2D to 3D to bomberman from 2D to 3D), and perhaps more titles alongside that would prove especially useful in gaining a picture of the various approaches to overcoming the hardware hurdle. Or rather, gaining a picture of what is going on during such a technological and pov shift from a variety of game-based perspectives.
From this sort of approach we start seeing the connection between formal game critique and a broader games history. I want to know what was happening in the 16-bit to 32-bit (and 64-bit) period. Likewise I want to know what consequences CD storage capacity, external savegame and realtime motion graphic capability had on gameform, and an analysis of longstanding franchises (like those you mentioned) in a co-textual parallel development.
This broader critical approach both reveals something of what makes certain games significant (and i certainly agree Super Bomberman, Super Mario 3 are significant!) and also helps to contribute to an understanding of the infrastructures of innovation that cut across discrete game titles — those games-as-systems-that-modulate-player-information-amongst-other-things qualities that need to be flagged up and analysed if we are going to have a durable and thorough understanding of games development/culture.
I think Jesper’s criticism is warranted, but that it provokes a desire to rethink the scope of this sort of comparison. For me it is enhanced if we think in terms of the parallel development of series’ who endure the periodic technological shifts that have characterised the medium in recent years. It is a question of the comparison of like things; it is more useful to think conceptually in terms of developing franchises passing through broadly felt moments of cultural and technological change in order to understanding what is going on in a given series of titles, than it is to set one title against another irrespective of their scope or formative context.
I think that a defensible formalist theory of games (yeah I did say formal) needs this sort of attention to methodology. We need to take our games histories and set them alongside, against and across oneanother, to gain a measure of how we arrive at a unified sense of, say, the games design of the 70s distinct from 80s distinct from 90s and so on.
Of course, this approach has one obvious limitation. Those franchises which have seen titles appear on a succession of consoles through various technological changes will almost invariably come from developers and publishers that constitute the gaming mainstream. Through Nintendo, Sega, Microsoft, Sony, EA and the like we can get a picture of the continuities innovations and breaks in games tech and culture. But this is a hegemonic picture, and doesnt account for the peripheral titles, or titles which were commercial failures and so did not achieve visibility, or titles created outside the sphere of commerical production, which have nonetheless furthered or characterised the games design of a given period.
A part of me thinks my concern over scope is premature however, since games criticism is so young. A methodical critique of mainstream developments is better than anything and Stephen Kline et als Digital Play (2003) is certainly an example of a step in this direction.
A comparison of a franchise like SEGAs Phantasy Star alongside Square-Enixs Final Fantasy would certainly provide a picture of how two companies hyperconscious sense of eachothers practices reflect in their output (perhaps revealing something of how style is deployed to enhance the larger brand). We could even revisit the playground mantra of Sonic Versus Mario.