Prior entries in this series: Introduction | NiGHTS into Dreams | Virtua Racing and more | Virtua Fighter 2 and Daytona USA | Sega CD Gaiden
Last time we covered a slew of Sega CD games that I originally presented to victim Andrew maybe a year ago. It was a pleasant detour we all thoroughly enjoyed. But now it is time to get back on track with the original intent of the project – familiarize Andrew with Saturn games before it is too late. For him, not me. I don’t plan on dying.
Gunbird may or may not be hellish
We briefly revisited Galactic Attack before playing Gunbird. Everyone had more fun with the latter as I sat there smiling politely but slowly shitting my pants in veiled anger. See, I’ve never really liked the bullet hell subgenre of shmups. My experience consists of possibly only Castle Shikigami 2, but that seemed sufficient to make a blanket judgement. (That game does have a solid plot, though.) Because I am officially sworn in before I write posts, I must admit under penalty of perjury that Gunbird was kind of fun. This led me to the arduous research of looking at Wikipedia.
Immediately I disagreed with the publicly available definition of a bullet hell game. The world may stand against me but I refuse the label for Ikaruga. That game has a lot of bullets but so did many old shmups. Crucially, half of the bullets on the screen roughly half of the time are not actually bullets because they match your ship’s polarity (or color, for my stupider readers) and so pose less than zero threat – they actually charge your super weapon. Another key distinction to me is the environmental hazards in Ikaruga. Bullet hell games do not have level designs, they have encounter or pattern designs. Any shmup that requires navigating around and between stage elements that can explode you is not a bullet hell game.
Gunbird is from fairly early in human history, all the way back in the olden days of 1994. The always correct Wikipedia credits Batsugun for inventing the danmaku (that’s the Japanese term and when you’re a good writer you try to alternate words as to not create a boring repetitiveness to your work; this is almost as important to retaining high readership rates as brevity and also succinctness) all the way back in 1993.
This leads me to three possible conclusions I like to call lunatic (shooter), liar, or Lord(s of Thunder). In our first scenario, the first two stages were not yet fully hellish but would eventually get there, and so we all enjoyed ourselves despite the specific subgene of shmups we were indulging in. The second option is that Gunbird is not a manic shooter but a moderately intense shooter and everyone is lying to me. The subgenre had not come to fully dominate the supergenre by ‘94 so Gunbird’s quality may be explained by it simply not being a bullet hell game. Finally, the most terrifying possible conclusion is that bullet hell games can be good and enjoyable. This would require a significant reinvention of myself, however, as a solid third of my personality and identity are rooted in liking shmups but not bullet curtain games, and so this possibility should be dismissed with prejudice, but not the racial kind that I am against.
Here is Andrew’s subtle haiku on the game.
Gunbird
Not a bullet hell
Let me be extremely clear
Screen full of bullets
The affordable, 10 player game
As someone with a Hudson bee shirt I bought from someone who doesn’t own the copyright from RedBubble, I am qualified to discuss the Bomberman series, particularly games in it I have never played. Hudson was a cool company that released roughly 37,000 games yet they’re not particularly well known to the average player. But then the average player doesn’t have an RGB modded PC Duo R so is it worth even considering them people? I have secret aspirations to write something on Hudson’s output but like most of my plans it’s something I conceived of to ensure I didn’t accidentally perform labor while at work.
Konami bought Hudson in 2011 after having a controlling stock in the company for 6 years. Unfortunately, Konami sort of pulled out of video games to focus on upsetting gamers, which oddly generated larger profits than releasing games. Now that they’ve been dipping their toes back into the medium, Konami has kept only two Hudson properties alive. The first is a peach railroad related board game no one in America is legally allowed to know anything about, and the other is Bomberman. The Switch version of Bomberman has no one from Hudson in the credits, unfortunately, but at least some guy who has been at Konami since at least ‘94 produced it. Apropos of nothing, have you ever played the first Bomberman game on the NES? What the fuck is that?
I have something of a blind spot for the Bomberman series after the NES release but before the Saturn one. There were a bunch of PC Engine and SFC releases that likely make the evolution of the series apparent to those well read in the series. Ideas in the Saturn game I think are cool, such as a stage based scenario, may not have originated in that game, but from my limited perspective there are a lot of clever and fun additions to the basic formula to be found in Saturn Bomberman. A key designer of the game, Tatsumitsu Watanabe, led design of the prior year’s Super Bomberman 3 for the Super Famicom. This game apparently did include some form of story mode, so as I suspected, Saturn Bomberman cannot be credited with this innovation.
Andrew and his son Alfonso seemed to agree with my positive feelings on this game – we all had a great time taking turns playing the campaign with two players. Bosses in Bomberman, what will they think of next? Despite, or maybe because of, the simpler 2D graphics and traditional gameplay, this game seems to have aged particularly well and is still appealing to stupid, cultureless fools who know nothing of the mighty Saturn. As with many of these games, Alfonso was better than his father. One day we will deduce if this is because young peoples’ brains are not yet disintegrating or if Andrew just sucks.
Bomberman
Running for your life
Co-op pandemonium
Trails of deadly flame