Even though Bomberman 64 deviated from the traditional formula of over-the-top 2D view with focus on battling others, it managed to provide a decent new outlook with a 3D adventure that seemed appropriate for its time with all the new concepts and mechanics developers were employing with 3D technology.

Controls had a steep learning curve and were not very intuitive, gameplay and performance were a bit buggy at times but overall the levels were fun to play and figure out the progress. Creating your own character/Bomberman was a nice aspect at the time, providing some (basic) customization and variety to the game.

Even though I never managed to beat this game, it was a fun game to experience and see what developers had in mind at the time for the Bomberman games and concept.

Bomberman is a much loved multiplayer game, and with the Nintendo 64 having four controller ports built in, an N64 version seems like a no-brainer, you could even have 8 players by having players sharing controllers, one using D-pad and L and the other using C-buttons and R.

Bomberman 64, however, leaves multiplayer to be an afterthought, focusing instead on a 3D puzzle-platform game.

The start of Bomberman 64 is immensely more difficult than the rest, with the main challenge working out the mechanics of the game. The controls feel extremely imprecise and the game gets you to use the barely-working method of dropping a bomb and then pressing b to pick it up – except if you get close to a bomb, you’ll kick it and it will slide away.

Then, after you’ve completed the first world, the game tells you “oh, if you press A and B together, you’ll hold it straight away”. It’s strange that the game lets you struggle with it before telling you the proper way to play.

Little frustrations plague the game. From thin platforms that aren’t suited to the game’s controls, the game hiding objects in places where the game’s bad camera struggles to see and that once you’ve figured out the main mechanics, you realise that there aren’t really any puzzles other than roaming around, hoping you’re going the right way.

Your bombs also explode in a circle, with the blast radius increasing slightly every time you collect a power up, which makes it very difficult to judge how far your bomb will explode, although even at the maximum, it’s nothing compared to the + shape explosions we know and love from Bomberman, one that is integral to the gameplay.

To get to the credits, there are 5 zones, each with 2 levels and 2 bosses. The bosses are quite tedious and not exciting, and Bomberman can only take one hit. There are also golden cards to collect. To collect these, you have to search every nook and cranny, as well as attack bosses in certain ways – with no clues for any of them.

If you find all 100, and fight the boss again, you’ll unlock the secret final world, but when the game is so tedious to play, is more even a good thing?

Bomberman 64 is slow, tedious and the transition to “3D” has taken away everything that made Bomberman fun and enjoyable. It’s no surprise that Bomberman ended up returning to its 2D gameplay.

Played a lot of multi-player against my sibling, cousins and cpu during the early stages of my childhood in battle mode.

The story mode was well above my depth back in the day so didn't make too much progress in that department.

Kept playing until our cartridge could no longer load it :(

Update Just finished the adventure mode. Rushed through most stages, but enjoyed the boss fights. The game is old so I understand, but the gameplay could be really sluggish and controls really frustrating at times for me.

The ending credits show ways one could use the bombs to traverse the stages you normally would have to think outside the box for. Most likely not collecting all Gold Cards as I am not a fan of collecting things in most games in the first place.

For what's it worth a very nostalgic game.

Neat lil N64 puzzle platformer. Despite being hella older, this game def reminds me of captain toad in how you can't jump and rotate a camera around small areas to find things. You can also use the bombs to solve puzzles and get collectables which is neat. The game has collectibles in the form of golden cards that you can find by doing various things, yet it seemed like the conditions you have to fill to get the cards are a bit arbitrary and obscure so break out that guide if you want to get that true ending. I didn't bother with the card hunt and got the bad ending but who knows maybe I'll come back to this and finish what I started. All in all, the vibes are good, musics good, visuals are fun and colorful, overall a rather pleasant lil time.

It's a shame this style of Bomberman game isn't made anymore, because it's a fantastic foundation. It has neat and varied level setpieces where no two levels are similar. The boss fights are fun and decently challenging.
It mostly falls apart when you try to 100% the game. 5 Gold Cards per level are required to reach the true ending and we can't really see ourselves going for this true ending again. Some of the bosses that were previously fun just become finicky when trying to win all of their Gold Cards in a single run (ESPECIALLY Black City's mid-boss) and the final world, Rainbow Palace, isn't even that much of a reward for going through the headache. It's a series of guide-dangits with bomb jumping puzzles with otherwise no actual substance beyond figuring out the trick.
The multiplayer mode is also a fun amount of distilled chaos, even if you're only playing against CPUs.
It's a far from a perfect game, and is at its most enjoyable if you just forget Rainbow Palace exists and ignore the Gold Cards entirely, but it's still enjoyable in its own right.

This probably has one of the funniest bad endings I've seen in a video game.

I'm glad Bomberman 64 is a game that exists. I always loved the premise of Bomberman, being a little marshmallow man that can conjure bombs from thin air, and everything you kill in this world is cute. However, I always found the regular Bomberman gameplay kind of repetitive considering there's like 50 versions of Bomberman with similar gameplay.

Bomberman 64 breaks that cycle and provides an action adventure game where you are given levels to explore and solve puzzles while bombing the living daylights out of cute things.

The gameplay is pretty simple, it's a fully 3D Bomberman where you can conjure bombs, but also kick and throw them. With these skills you can explore each level to complete the objective and reach the end. You either have the choice of just finishing the level objective to get the bad ending, or going out of your way to fully explore each level and find all the collectables by completing some sort of puzzle or defeating some big enemy in order to get the good ending. Regardless it's a fun time with a lot of cheap kills by dying to your own bombs (this will happen a lot).

It's fairly short if you only focus on the objects and can beat the game in about an hour. It can be quite challenging if you aren't familiar with the tricks, so it's fairly replayable and you can get better and better with each run.

This is an absolutely charming little game that I recommend you play once if you're for some good N64 nostalgia.

Continuing my little Bomberman kick brought on by playing Baku Bomberman 2 a few weeks ago, over the past week I played through the first Baku Bomberman game, or Bomberman 64 as it's known in the West. It's overall a much shorter but much better game than it's sequel, and it only took me 3 or 4 hours in total to complete with the bad ending.

Baku Bomberman is another attempt to make more of an action adventure game out of the Bomberman formula, but with much more DNA of the classic Bomberman style than its sequel. The evil Altair and his four lieutenants have come to planet Bomberman seeking to drain all of its life force for Altair's evil schemes. Bomberman rushes in to beat the four islands and the final lair of Altair himself in 20 stages of action platforming. The story is much lighter than the sequel, and the cast of characters is much more forgettable as a result. Granted, this is Bomberman, so that isn't exactly a huge strike against the game, but it made me appreciate the effort the second game put into the characters with just how little this game has to its writing.

There are technically 20 stages in the game, but about half of those are boss fights, with each of the 5 worlds having 4 stages and two of those stages being just boss fights. If you found the remote power in the previous stage and finished the level with it, though, you get to go into the boss fight with remote detonation bombs, which is pretty darn helpful lemee tell ya. The levels aren't super long or difficult, and are all around pretty darn forgiving, as there's a life system and a continue system (much like the American version of Baku Bomberman 2) where losing a life just puts you back to the start of the last room you entered, while using a continue totally restarts a level. Even then, you never lose your fire or bomb powerups even by using a continue (although you do lose remote detonation bombs when you lose even one life, which is unfortunate).

There are some light puzzle elements in each stage, but it's mostly just going from one end to the other and following the path in front of you. While there are hidden custom parts to make yourself look snazzy for the battle mode, what are also even more well hidden are the secret golden cards hidden in every stage. Each stage has 5 of them for a total of 100 (and if you get all 100 you get a secret good ending), with three hidden in the stage, one for killing a certain amount of enemies, and one for beating the level in a certain amount of time. I'm fairly sure you don't need to get them all in one go, as the time requirements would make that kinda impossible, but those hidden cards are often REALLY well hidden and even in the earliest levels really require mastering the bomb kicking and throwing mechanics to be able to bounce yourself to far off places and over seemingly impossible pits. I had no patience for that as those mechanics you need to master are pretty finicky and not all that fun to push through, but it's a nice little extra thing you can do if you really wanna sink your teeth into this game.

Verdict: Recommended. While I think the second game will last longer in my heart due to the longer time I spent with it, this is easily a better all around product and far easier to recommend. It's far more forgiving, the stage design is tighter, the bosses (while some are still definitely not super intuitive and kinda crap/too easy) are far more consistent in thier difficulty, it's less buggy. This is a far more recommendable game that you'll probably have way more fun with than the sequel, even if it's something you'll probably blow through in an afternoon and not think about too much afterwards.

BOMBERMAN 64 – Review

Antes de escrever o que eu achei da parte técnica e artística da obra Bomberman 64, gostaria de falar sobre o carinho especial que tenho com o game.
O ano é 2007 eu tinha apenas 5 anos de idade, não havia preocupações, contas, etc. Tudo se resumia a jogar videogame. Havia 2 games que eu era fissurado eles são: Super Mario e Bomberman. Sim eu era apaixonado pelo homem bomba fofinho japonês, joguei este game a 16 anos atrás (a minha nostalgia batendo em minha porta de novo) eu o amava, jogar o modo batalha com meu primo era sensacional, ouvir as músicas do game eram divertidas e ficavam em minha cabeça, só de escrever sinto saudades de meu tempo. Porém eu nunca passei da primeira fase de nenhum mundo desse game... O que faz parecer que eu só gostava do jogo pelo modo multiplayer e não seu foco principal que são os puzzles apesar do multiplayer do Bomberman ser um forte. Então 16 anos se passaram, estou mais experiente, vamos ver se Bomberman 64 é um game foda ou era apenas memória afetiva. Bomberman 64 é o primeiro game 3D da franquia Bomberman. Sendo assim nos apresentou uma ótima adaptação do 2D para o 3D. Agora podemos explodir os inimigos em áreas circulares, não precisa matar eles em cruz (apesar de Bomberman 64: The Second Attack! Voltar com essa mecânica). Os mapas sofreram uma ótima para o 3D eles são muito criativos, bem coloridos, típico da série. A jogabilidade é bem responsiva não me senti prejudicado pelo controle do personagem e é até bem gostoso de jogar. Logo com tudo que citei, esse game tinha a faca e o queijo na mão para ser considerado um dos melhores da franquia, mas nem tudo são flores.


O game começa com uma mini historinha com os vilões tentando destruir o planeta Bomber, um pretexto para que o Bomberman acabe com os vilões: Artemis, Altair, Regulus e Orion. Com isso você tem uma “ajuda” do aliado Sirius para impedir os vilões de acabarem com o planeta. Para isso o jogador precisa passar pelos 4 mundos que eles sequestram, são eles: Green Garden, Blue Resort, Red Mountain e White Glacier. Logo de cara o jogador pode escolher por onde quer começar, e é aqui que tenho alguns questionamentos.
Se eu tenho liberdade de escolher para onde eu quero ir, significa em algum momento me ensine né? Bom... mais ou menos. O game só ensina a jogar na Green Garden, sendo assim para quem for jogar pela primeira vez, não é recomendado escolher as fases como bem entender você precisa seguir uma ordem, para os experientes se torna legal, pois o você pode ir por onde quiser.


Okay se não é recomendado sair escolhendo as fases, vamos de seguir a ordem (Green Garden, Blue Resort, Red Mountain e White Glacier), logo nos deparamos de como jogar o game, Sirius nos mostra os comandos que para uma criança ela tá super foda-se para o que ele está dizendo, como foi meu caso, então não sabia jogar direito. Mas okay sabendo jogar me deparei que as primeiras fases são bem divertidas e gostosas de jogar, então realmente o que eu esperava de um game maneiro é real, até aparecer aquele maldito cartão dourado... Sim os GOLD CARDS, que o game não fala para que eles servem (exceto no manual na página 27), logo decidi pegar os gold cards, foi uma decisão dolorosa. Sim esse jogo tem colecionáveis, não só de cartões e sim de skins, nesse game é possível customizar seu Bomberman, o que é divertido. Porém o collectathon desse jogo é chato que doí, para não dizer horrível até porque coletar os cartões em Green Garden e Blue Resort, não são chatos, mas esses 2 mundos não salvam a ruindade de caçar colecionáveis. Essa tarefa quebra TODO o clima do jogo, o pior é que para chegar no mundo secreto, Rainbow Palace é preciso de 100 Gold Cards, e eu consegui todos os 100, mas eu desisti de pegar os 20 da Rainbow Palace pelo nível de dificuldade. Quando parei de jogar para pegar os outros Cards eu percebi que jogo melhora (???), isso é demonstra que tentar fazer 100% ou tentar ir até ao mundo secreto não vale muito a pena, a não ser que você queria ver um plot twist e o “final bom”.

Os 2 primeiros mundos Green Garden e Blue Resort são disparados os mais divertidos e fofos para mim, teve as melhores fases e um level design bem legal, porém os outros 2 nem tanto, apesar do White Glacier ser um pouco mais tranquilo. Já Black Tower e Rainbow Palace, parece que é mais fácil comer vidro que jogar esses 2 mapas sorrindo pela dificuldade que é. Vamos entrar em um detalhe que esse jogou pecou demais além do collectathon é o level design e a câmera do jogo, vou começar com o level design.
O que eles pensaram na hora de fazer algumas fases? Tipo tem uma fase no mundo White Glacier que a câmera OLHA PARA BAIXO DE VOCÊ E OS CONTROLE DE FRENTE E TRÁS INVERTEM, poxa isso não se faz, foi a pior mecânica que eles colocaram no game inteiro que sofrimento! O game tem diversos problemas com level design, algumas fases são confusas e nem tudo está muito claro para o jogador forçando a ele ir na tentativa e erro. Isso pode ser muito frustrante e acaba com a experiência, MAIS o fato de que câmera é bem limitada, as vezes você morre por não ver o boneco ou não ver o que está a sua frente. Na moral isso é sinal de que você vai mandar o game tomar no cu dele, pois ninguém gostar de morrer injustamente porque não viu o boneco, porque a câmera obstruiu a sua visão, ou porque a fase é confusa demais, a penúltima fase do mundo Rainbow Palace.
Desculpem, MAS CARALHO!!! COMO PODE UMA PORRA DESSA, OS INIMIGOS TÊM UM RESPAWN RIDICULO, FAZER “BOMB JUMP” É UMA DESGRAÇA! PARECE QUE JOGO TESTA SUA PACIÊNCIA SENDO INJUSTO COM O PRÓPRIO JOGADOR, PORRA ISSO NÃO EXISTE.

Me exaustei demais com o game, mas tenho que falar sobre seus méritos também. O game vem com uma soundtrack muito cativante e bem estilo da série, além de me fazer lembrar da época que eu jogava, de vez em quando eu coloco para ouvir enquanto tomo banho ou trabalho de tão boa, apesar da fase Rainbow Palace ser um cu de difícil, eu estou escrevendo a review ao som desta fase. Claro não podemos esquecer do multiplayer, como eu disse, é o forte da série e eles não podiam deixar de fora, agora em 3 DIMENSÕES. Joguei esse modo com amigos, namorada e familiares, pois esse modo de jogo nunca perde sua essência e seu charme como só a série Bomberman consegue fazer.


Minhas considerações finais, simplesmente uma sensação de extremo amor e ódio, de um lado temos uma criança interior sorrindo pelo fato de finalmente ver os créditos desse game subir e saber que o planeta Bomber foi salvo, porém o outro lado mais velho percebe o quanto esse jogo tem muitos defeitos de level design/câmera/curva de dificuldade e colecionáveis irritantes sem sentido algum.

Mas é um game que marcou muito minha infância, apesar dos defeitos eu me senti satisfeito por saber do final do game, me senti feliz ao ver que depois de 16 anos eu aprendi a jogar esse game, e isso fez parte da minha experiência. Está longe de ser um game perfeito, mas não é uma obra ruim, longe de mim dizer que esse game é ruim, mas querendo ou não ele é um clássico por ser o primeiro da série a ser em 3D e marcou uma geração de jovens da época do Nintendo 64, apesar de seus defeitos.
Bomberman 64 é merecedor de 3/5 Estrelas. É uma joia, pode não ser a mais valiosa do Nintendo 64, mas digamos que é um game legal e vale a pena visitar se estiver disposto.

-Essa review é uma carta de amor a este game <3

This is not a good game but I cannot bring myself to dislike it.

Finally... Bomberman finally entered the third dimension... And it was just an ok transition to 3D...
This game reminds me of Wario World due to how the stages are built like some sort of blocks with an overview camera. One of the main issues I had with this game was the camera, it just sucks there's nothing good about it most of the time you can't see what's ahead because the game doesn't make the texture transparent of a wall for example when it's behind the camera so it'll end up just being clipping through the wall with no way of seeing anything!

The level design is honestly terrible, they are like a bunch of small maps that all look like each other and are linked together with the goal usually being "walk aimlessly till you find the exit" and it's pretty dumb, stages also take like 10 minutes to beat max just to figure out what you need to do and like I said it usually never is more than just walking to the end.
The game has a total of 5 worlds with two boss stages and two normal stages per world which is really not a lot for such a short game, and the boss fights are so bad like c'mon! They are just not fun, and the stages are not really well designed but at least I kinda had fun going through them though the bosses are just frustrating and terribly slow.

This game is also a collectathon too, at first I thought it was gonna be neat but it's just shoehorned cards that you need to find in each stage and they are usually just "break X item or kill X enemy to find this card!" and this is NOT how you make collectibles fun, you must carefully place them in intuitive place for the player to find and not just randomly break every item until you find one, this is not fun it's just tedious. Just look how the Lego games did it, I think the minikits are an exemplary game design for collectibles or jiggies even from Banjo.
And they are obviously used to get the secret ending and final world, I did not bother to get them because I don't care enough I can just look the ending up online, but it really sucks that they hid the true ending behind bad collectibles.

My last complaint would be the controls, they are decent, just a bit odd due to being made for the Nintendo 64 controller but this wasn't what I meant, I mean that nothing is explained in this game, there is no tutorial and I was stuck in the third stage of the game because I couldn't figure out that I had to obviously press B and A at the same time to hold a bomb and then spam A to make it bigger to obviously break the stone blocks. A small 5 minutes tutorial would've been such a great addition!

As for what I do truly like in this game, the soundtrack! It's great, chill, and everything you'd need for an action-adventure game about Bomberman. The graphics too, it doesn't look impressive at all but I think it looks very charming and cute so it really fits the Bomberman theme.

I do wish this game would someday get a remake like how Pacman World 1 did, there is so much to rework in this game but if we could somehow fix all the jank of this game we could make one of the greatest gems of the Nintendo 64.