Friday, July 13, 2018

Bombaman



Bomberman sucks!

Ever since I first played Erik And The Floaters on my ZX Spectrum, I have enjoyed many different Bomberman clones and here is yet another one called Bombaman. Developed by Kevin Callahan for the Atari STe, this conversion is multiplayer for two-four people, with support for those enhanced joystick ports lurking on the side of the computer.

Blowing up stuff is superb thanks to light and responsive joystick controls. Tons of power-ups are available and contain some favourites, like a molotov cocktail and chucking bombs over a wall. Others can increase the number of bombs we are able to drop - but watch out for chain reactions during their explosions as that will detonate others. Roller skates speed up gameplay whilst flap jackets protect us but slower players better watch out for zombies. Fun is the name of this game!

Want a screenshot? Well, brace yourself and get ready to squint...



It starts tame but soon you're using power-ups and blasting everything!


Aesthetics

The visuals are incredibly colourful but may require sunglasses to protect your eyes from all that glare!! Okay, the colour is completely over the top and looks like a child would have picked the colours but who said Kevin was an artist? Thankfully, everything runs smoothly at 50fps thanks to the Blitter and is displayed in overscan too I might add.

Chipmusic plays throughout, which I really enjoyed because it's downright awesome. Thankfully, it never overpowers the DMA sound effects bursting out of your Atari STe and that is how all games should be!!

Yeah, the colour palette is very trippy so let's annoy your eyes on final time with another screenshot...



All that colour could drive you insane - if it wasn't such a great game!!


The CryptO'pinion?

This is a brilliant multiplayer which has lived up to my expectations and I'm sure you will love gathering around the ST to play this. Okay, okay, I admit that I would have loved a single-player option but that's my only gripe as we have thoroughly enjoyed Bombaman - my daughter says it's her favourite Atari ST game [watch our video recording].

This is a cracking game for those who enjoy throwing bombs at their friends. Who doesn't? So download it. Now.

Update: Kevin has since found the floppy disk of the registered version. This is now safely stored on AtariMania. Go on and grab it now!

2 comments:

  1. Everythingcompletely written from scratch as I was doing some 68k stuff for work at the time and thought it would be more of a challenge. Lots of info from the bullfrog series in St format as well to use the STe enhancements, but admittedly I just guessed methods and made it up as I went along. Apologies for the crude graphics and music lol not my forte and I was using 1 bitplane as a mask to speed things up a bit.. Most of the vocal sound effects are my voice sped up btw...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Everything completely written from scratch as I was doing some 68k stuff for work at the time and thought it would be more of a challenge. Lots of info from the bullfrog series in St format as well to use the STe enhancements, but admittedly I just guessed methods and made it up as I went along. Apologies for the crude graphics and music lol not my forte and I was using 1 bitplane as a mask to speed things up a bit.. Most of the vocal sound effects are my voice sped up btw...

    ReplyDelete