The first 50 levels (out of 99) of the Single Battle mode in Bomberman: Act Zero

Get Information for Bomberman: Act Zero for Xbox 360: http://www.vizzed.com/videogames/game.php?id=37449

Submitted by DavidMcC1989 of vizzed.com

you heard me right, BOMBERMAN ACT ZERO

And now for something completely different… this game is… well, it’s… definitely… uh… well, let’s just come out and say it: “bad”… and not bad outside quotation marks or even stressed with the burning passions of a thousand suns, just… “bad.” It’s not a good game by any means, but it is… well, what you see is basically what you get here.

Oh, and just by the way, the title is rather insistent with regard to the “Act:Zero” part… no spaces, the “Act” part is not after the colon as the subtitle of the Bomberman title… it just… doesn’t make sense! But it is consistent about it, so I guess I’ll just roll with it. (It’s still got nothing on certain Final Fantasy spinoffs, so this is a pretty simple by comparison.) The one place where I did decide to break with the as-given title is by choosing not to use “BOMBERMAN” in all caps in the title, because that seems a bit excessive for plain text in a video title. Rewind and relive: play atomic runner online for classic gaming thrills!

Anyway, this is… the result of a strange idea to retool Bomberman to be darker and “next gen” for whatever reason, and I almost have to applaud them for going for the effect so calculatedly to fit in and carve out a little home for Bomberman among the rest of the the distressingly homogenous-looking big hitters of the Xbox 360’s lineup… and then I stop myself and must chide them for doing such an incredibly insane and, well, silly thing in the first place.

I must admit that this game came back to my attention as the indirect result of some comments I’ve received fairly over time on my brief multiplayer tour of Bomberman Generation from such critical laureates as you might be wont to find on YouTube…

“Ew this one looks ugly”

or

“They Run Retardedly And Sound Retarded And LOOK Retarded In This Game….iiiii Think Its Best This Game Is Deleted From Humanity And Replaced WIth A Better 1 :3”

Which, I mean… I’m a little confused, because there’s not much you can do WRONG to Bomberman given his traditional simplistic design (although it HAS happened, like say the cover to the DS game simply called “Bomberman”), so any complaints about the way Bomberman is and has been since the very beginning in-game seem a little misguided…

Speaking of what you can do WRONG to Bomberman, he’s not quite as bad off as the so-called “Bad Box Art Mega Man” (alternately, “U.S. Mega Man”) from the old NES days, but initial attempts to flavor him in a fashion that might be more palatable outside Japan ranged from being a ripoff of Samus Aran or Dig Dug (yes, apparently Namco has decided that the character’s name is the same as the game) or even some sort of weird ninja… well, THIS is kinda the “worst” that can be done.

So, congratulations, random naysayers of the world… you don’t like Bomberman for whatever reason as he is and always had been… so now the world has Bomberman Act:Zero… … …uh, thanks? I mean, YOU’RE certainly welcome to take a deep whiff of what came of your unfathomable whims… no, I’m afraid I must insist. Enjoy.

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Enough fake drama over weird and spectacular failures to appeal to an unpleasable and difficult-to-comprehend audience (an incredibly profitable one, so the aim is not entirely wrong, even if the methods woefully misguided), let’s deal with the game itself. As a longtime Bomberman fan, I’m willing to unironically enjoy a Bomberman game, even if that game is… this one. Any philosophically perverse laughs we can get out of this twisted spectacle I will consider an added bonus.

At its core… and by far the most “interesting” (though still another missed step in its execution) aspect to the game is the decision to base it around the now-discarded excuse plot of the first game’s NES and Game Boy games revolving around a robot’s quest for freedom from a subterranean deathtrap facility… and basically turns it to the grimmest and darkest possible version of that basic thought and runs with it. It doesn’t run very FAR mind you, but it basically uses it for about all it can be in a game about running around mazes and placing bombs with the sole purpose of blowing up the other inhabitants.

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The other major thing that I’ll touch upon here is the fact that your player character is… one of these… things. You get to choose a gender, which is interesting and… allegedly progressive… and…. unfortunate in some of the plug placements, but hey, it’s nothing The Matrix hasn’t already had the good taste to not directly demonstrate, I guess. I do find it a fair bit disappointing that there’s only eight static choices, meaning that a full eight-player game is extremely unlikely to have the full palette diversity. (Unless repeats are quietly recolored from the player’s perspective such that they always SEEM unique.)

Random unrelated thought… is it more or less horrifying to consider the possibility that these are just repurposed and brainwashed normal humans rather than “blank” artificially-created humans made only to battle one another?