Saturn Bomberman

About Saturn Bomberman

Saturn Bomberman (1996) is Hudson Soft's eleventh Bomberman game, best known for battles of up to ten players on the Sega Saturn, and EGM's Saturn and multiplayer game of the year for 1997.

Saturn Bomberman in Depth

Alongside the usual battle and story modes, a master mode has the player race through a series of levels for a rank based on time, kept on a saved scoreboard, and there are several new power-ups. Dinosaur helpers hatch from eggs released by destroying soft blocks and come in three sizes, baby, adolescent and adult. Each can take only one hit, absorbing it in place of its rider, and a meter filled by collecting power-ups makes it grow; in battle mode it grows whenever its rider collects another egg. Players can jump off at any time.

The story mode, for one or two players, has Bomberman blow up poles topped with glowing red orbs, called Zarfs, while dodging or destroying enemies and collecting power-ups; once every Zarf is gone, an exit appears, followed by a short cut-scene leading to the next level. Battle mode supports two players without multitaps, six with one and ten with two, as well as computer opponents. With more than eight players, it switches to a widescreen arena with tiny characters and blocks and disables many power-ups, including the dinosaurs. The North American version also supports the Sega NetLink for four-player online play, two players per console.

Making Saturn Bomberman

Hudson Soft developed and published Saturn Bomberman for the Sega Saturn, and it sold 129,616 copies in Japan. Critics were generally positive, especially about the ten-player mode and the range of modes and options: Sega Saturn Magazine's Matt Yeo praised how players could "simply pick up a joypad and leap straight into the thick of things", and Saturn Power's Dean Mortlock called it "probably the best multi-player game you'll ever play". Next Generation and GameSpot's Jeff Gerstmann felt it did not escape the shadow of Super Bomberman 2, and the graphics and music were seen as failing to move the series on, while the story and master modes were faulted for difficult AI and unforgiving bosses, though Next Generation thought them its one advance on Super Bomberman 2. EGM named it 1997's Saturn Game of the Year and Multiplayer Game of the Year and ranked it the tenth best console game of all time. IGN later called it the best Bomberman alongside Bomberman '93, and GamesRadar placed it fourth among Saturn games.