I watch the funny cacti boundin', gyrating on screen, racking up points faster than a day trader, and I just think they're neat. /marge
Other reviews have pointed out how Saboten Bombers takes after Snow Bros. or the much earlier Bubble Bobble mold of single-screen elimination platformers. To me, knowing a few things about NMK's catalog, this brought something like Buta-san to mind first. The developer was no stranger to iterating on notable contemporaries like Bomberman, having removed that series' mazes in favor of open-range puzzle combat. Now we have a more conventional take on the genre, albeit with its own unmistakable zest. Simply put, filling the screen with balls of explosive fun couldn't be more pivotal and delightful than in a game like this.
Those '80s pigs' carefully-timed bombs are traded in fun for chaotic physics and the (relatively) unique mechanic of traveling within your projectiles. It's a risky and rewarding proposition to the player: do you lob the balls from a comfortable position, never getting into the thick of it, or is riding into the fray to score higher and faster more your thing? Saboten Bombers does a great job of letting players adapt to the cadence of each stage, allowing both safety and surprise attacks on these floral & faunal interlopers. Much like the whack-a-mole rhythm found in Buta-san, most foes tend to waddle around and languish until finally prepping any attacks, so the difficulty curve here is also friendlier than you'd expect for an early-'90s cabinet game.
Trouble is, there's really not a lot of variance in play and content to justify the length for a 1CC, or even just feeding through to the end. Clearing Buta-san takes scarcely more than 15 or so minutes, yet this can go past an hour even with quick, skillful tactics. One can get a vertical slice of this '92 bonanza in less than 300 seconds, and a lot of repetition sets in around the 25 to 30 minute mark. Of course, I'd never play something like Saboten Bombers simply to see all the major enemies, settings, and situations it throws at you. This genre's all about taking big chances for big prizes, and so the adrenaline and unexpected humor in this particular game shores up these other problems. It's hard to really hold the few types of baddies and predictable stage layouts against this ROM given it's best played and learned in spurts.
NMK almost always had to punch above its weight, making idiosyncratic forays within a market often dominated by Taito, SEGA, Konami, Capcom, etc. So it's cool to see all the little details they crammed in here which liven up an already cute and inviting action-platformer. Each critter's got smooth, stretchy animation with tons of frames and rare idle variations. The color palette's rich beyond its years, looking like something made for Sega Saturn later in the decade. And while Saboten Bombers wisely avoids shoving in huge sprites for the sake of it, every design's readable at a glance and has plenty of meaningful detail. So even if an expert playthrough will end up repeating itself, all this meticulous production ensures it won't feel that stale.
Add in two kinds of boss stages, a ridiculously detailed (if opaque) scoring system, and one of those crunchy, catchy PCM-only soundtracks for a delicious time overall. Maybe there are more polished examples of this style of scrappy screen-clearing software snack. I'm not yet experienced enough with this era to highlight them, though, so any bit of cruft I found here is possibly more palatable as a result. What can I say other than that Saboten Bombers nails both the essentials and many extra you'd hope for in anything this straightforward? Sometimes all you need are pyrotechnics, pizzaz, and wacky fruit collecting all inside the family restroom. These electronic eudicots have nothing better to do than trash the place, and I'm all here for that!
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023
Other reviews have pointed out how Saboten Bombers takes after Snow Bros. or the much earlier Bubble Bobble mold of single-screen elimination platformers. To me, knowing a few things about NMK's catalog, this brought something like Buta-san to mind first. The developer was no stranger to iterating on notable contemporaries like Bomberman, having removed that series' mazes in favor of open-range puzzle combat. Now we have a more conventional take on the genre, albeit with its own unmistakable zest. Simply put, filling the screen with balls of explosive fun couldn't be more pivotal and delightful than in a game like this.
Those '80s pigs' carefully-timed bombs are traded in fun for chaotic physics and the (relatively) unique mechanic of traveling within your projectiles. It's a risky and rewarding proposition to the player: do you lob the balls from a comfortable position, never getting into the thick of it, or is riding into the fray to score higher and faster more your thing? Saboten Bombers does a great job of letting players adapt to the cadence of each stage, allowing both safety and surprise attacks on these floral & faunal interlopers. Much like the whack-a-mole rhythm found in Buta-san, most foes tend to waddle around and languish until finally prepping any attacks, so the difficulty curve here is also friendlier than you'd expect for an early-'90s cabinet game.
Trouble is, there's really not a lot of variance in play and content to justify the length for a 1CC, or even just feeding through to the end. Clearing Buta-san takes scarcely more than 15 or so minutes, yet this can go past an hour even with quick, skillful tactics. One can get a vertical slice of this '92 bonanza in less than 300 seconds, and a lot of repetition sets in around the 25 to 30 minute mark. Of course, I'd never play something like Saboten Bombers simply to see all the major enemies, settings, and situations it throws at you. This genre's all about taking big chances for big prizes, and so the adrenaline and unexpected humor in this particular game shores up these other problems. It's hard to really hold the few types of baddies and predictable stage layouts against this ROM given it's best played and learned in spurts.
NMK almost always had to punch above its weight, making idiosyncratic forays within a market often dominated by Taito, SEGA, Konami, Capcom, etc. So it's cool to see all the little details they crammed in here which liven up an already cute and inviting action-platformer. Each critter's got smooth, stretchy animation with tons of frames and rare idle variations. The color palette's rich beyond its years, looking like something made for Sega Saturn later in the decade. And while Saboten Bombers wisely avoids shoving in huge sprites for the sake of it, every design's readable at a glance and has plenty of meaningful detail. So even if an expert playthrough will end up repeating itself, all this meticulous production ensures it won't feel that stale.
Add in two kinds of boss stages, a ridiculously detailed (if opaque) scoring system, and one of those crunchy, catchy PCM-only soundtracks for a delicious time overall. Maybe there are more polished examples of this style of scrappy screen-clearing software snack. I'm not yet experienced enough with this era to highlight them, though, so any bit of cruft I found here is possibly more palatable as a result. What can I say other than that Saboten Bombers nails both the essentials and many extra you'd hope for in anything this straightforward? Sometimes all you need are pyrotechnics, pizzaz, and wacky fruit collecting all inside the family restroom. These electronic eudicots have nothing better to do than trash the place, and I'm all here for that!
Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023