Re-release this: Bomberman: Panic Bomber
Re-release this: Bomberman: Panic Bomber
Bomberman's multiplatform puzzle game from the 90s won't be available anywhere very soon.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
If you weren’t around for the golden age of Bomberman games in the 90s and early aughts, you might think the series is something of a one-trick pony. Excellent arena-based multiplayer, yes, but that’s the whole deal. Bomberman was much more than that before Konami got its mitts on Hudson’s mascot, however: his multiplayer arena games also had single-player modes with campaigns, sometimes there would be more party-game focused multiplayer releases, there were both 2D and 3D platformers, an adventure game, a kart racer, and in Japan, there was even a tactical Bomberman game.
One title released during this era was a falling block puzzle game called Bomberman: Panic Bomber. Regretfully, the time at which it released was also one in which far too many critics saw falling blocks that you clear through matching and immediately said, “Tetris clone!”, an especially unfair criticism of Panic Bomber, which leans pretty heavily on Bomberman not just for its visual style, but also for its gameplay. Bombs play a significant role in Panic Bomber, and are also how this puzzle game manages to stand out a bit in what was admittedly a crowded post-Tetris field for the genre.
Here’s the basic setup: maneuverable L-shapes drop from the top of a rectangle with a literal bottleneck. These shapes can be composed of multiple Bomberman colors, and your goal is to match at least three of them together in the standard formations — three in a row up and down, diagonally, or side-to-side. There are combos if you manage to kick off a chain reaction, the reward for which is additional blocks of punishment that can only be cleared by explosions ending up on your opponent’s board. That’s all pretty standard stuff for a falling block puzzler, but it’s the rest of the equation that makes this game stick out for me, and that differentiation makes it worth going back to.
Every time you clear a set of three or more blocks — which are all in the shape of different colored and animated Bomberman heads with various changing facial expressions — you add a bomb onto your game board. It’ll come up from the bottom and rearrange the position of the blocks that were already there, which means you’re not just playing Puyo Puyo with Bomberman blocks even if the game’s physics might otherwise remind you of that series — you can set yourself up for combos, but they’re going to be harder to intentionally setup in this game compared to Puyo Puyo, which the entire point of is massive combos to wreck your foes in one fell swoop.
These bombs are not lit, and you’ll not only receive them from each successful match, but also sometimes as blocks to drop down yourself where you wish. Occasionally, you’ll receive a lit bomb, which is either bright red and pulsing, or simply surrounded by a red aura, depending on the version of the game you’re playing — you can’t mistake it for the non-lit bombs, regardless. Those lit bombs are how you set off the others: drop a lit bomb down into the blocks below, and it’ll explode in the same fashion that bombs do in your standard Bomberman arena battler: in the four cardinal directions, further depending on how powerful your bombs are supposed to be at that point in time. You increase the range of these lit bombs by successfully clearing blocks and surviving, which makes it easier for them to reach the unlit bombs and set them off in their own cardinal direction explosions. This is where the real combos of the game live: you set off a lit bomb in the right place with the right range, in a board full of unlit bombs, and you can clear triple-digits worth of blocks from the screen in one move, easy.
Which is vital to your survival, because of those aforementioned punishment blocks I mentioned. They’re black blocks that look like Bomberman’s face after he’s caught in an explosion, that can’t be removed any other way besides being caught in the range of an explosion of your making, so your options are to catch them in a massive combo like described above, or to have built up enough of a score to have earned a huge bomb that clears anything from the screen within its considerable range. You can’t really rely on the timing working out on that massive bomb, though, so you should be focusing on making sure there is always a chain reaction possible whenever you’re given the chance to toss a lit bomb.
Because of these blocks that your opponents can send over in concert with the bomb blocks you are yourself adding to your board by playing well, a game of Panic Bomber can go south in a real hurry. You have all the tools for it to end in a hurry with you as the victor, however, but doing so at the game’s later stages in its story mode or on its tougher difficulties is no picnic. Practice will get you in the zone you need to be in, though, and alert you to how those losses you might have thought were unfair were more due to you not properly preparing yourself or reacting as you should. Nothing will get you to lose faster than a failure to set yourself up for future bomb combos, because then your opponent is never on the defensive, and is able to just pile on you at a speed you won’t be able to counter.
Panic Bomber was basically everywhere when it released back in 1994. It first came out on the PC Engine CD, developed and published by Hudson Soft, but would see ports to the Neo Geo MVS, Super Famicom, Japanese PCs like the FM Towns, NEC PC-9821, and Sharp X68000, as well as the Virtual Boy. The Neo Geo edition was actually developed by Eighting, or 8ing, depending on where you’re reading it — you might know them as Raizing, as well, which was formed out of the ashes of Compile, a studio which, among other things, originated Puyo Puyo.
While the basic game is the same in all formats — save for a little less leeway with blocks stuck-ish at the bottleneck in the Neo Geo version — there are significant visual differences. The Super Famicom version is actually called Super Bomberman: Panic Bomber W (with the W standing for “World”), and is in the style of that Super Famicom/SNES series that had five mainline games. It features a story mode and character art in the background of your puzzle board. The Neo Geo arcade version is the most advanced graphically and wasn’t beholden to a particular style of Bomberman art, since Neo Bomberman didn’t actually release on the system until years after Panic Bomber. It displays multiple pieces of character art per match in the background, but no effort was put into creating a little map for Bomberman to walk around on between matches — you just go from one piece of static opponent art between matches to the next. The PC Engine CD version is somewhat in between the two, with the story mode flourishes and console-specific art style in place, but no character art on the board whatsoever: just static backgrounds with a basic pattern.
The PC Engine CD version might be lacking against the powerful Neo Geo one visually speaking, but there’s simply more game there. Not only can you change the difficulty to be lower or higher since it’s not an arcade release, but the story mode is much beefier: there are 16 opponents to challenge in the PC Engine CD Panic Bomber, each playing in a different way that’ll cause you to have to adjust your own strategy as well, but just nine in the Neo Geo version. In addition, there’s a mode where you have to play with specific instructions and goals in mind, like achieving a combo of a specific size in order to clear the stage. Rather than just two-player multiplayer, the PC Engine CD version allows up to five to face off against each other. (Though, that’s not a standard number of players for the system — you would need a multitap to pull to that off.)
The Super Famicom edition of Panic Bomber is even smaller than the Neo Geo one in terms of opponents, with just six of them to face, though, there are five difficulty levels to choose from, so you can get a lot of mileage out of those six opponents, and it featured four-player multiplayer (multitap necessary here, too) and a mode where status effects impact your gameplay, as well. Panic Bomber would also end up on the Playstation Portable in 2005, and like the others that preceded it, was a Japan-only release. It’s not a port, but its own game in the series, with its own graphical flourishes and modes.
As there’s more game in the PC Engine CD version, that version of the game has a longer soundtrack. Jun Chikuma, composer of many classic Hudson soundtracks, handled the original PC Engine CD release, but the arrangements on the shorter Neo Geo version were put together by Kenichi Koyano. They sound fairly different, given the PC Engine CD was able to use Red Book audio given its format, while the Neo Geo MVS did not — a Neo Geo CD edition of the game that could have had similar audio to the PC Engine version was planned, but never released. So, the first stage for the PC Engine CD edition of Panic Bomber sounds like this…
…while the Neo Geo arrangement has a completely different feel to it, both in speed and sound:
They’re both excellent soundtracks that feel incredibly right for Bomberman, which is what you should expect out of a Bomberman game whether it’s a mainline or spin-off title, but they’re also clearly different despite having the same basic DNA. To me, the Neo Geo one sounds more like where video games had been, while the PC Engine CD original sounds like where video games were going as audio technology on consoles opened up.
Bomberman: Panic Bomber is actually still available right now, but it might as well not be. It was included on the Turbografx-16 Mini console, which was an Amazon exclusive and is not available anywhere besides secondhand as of this writing, among the PC Engine releases. It’s also available in its PC Engine CD form on the Wii U eShop for $7.99, but that edition has two things going against it: the fact barely anyone has a Wii U with which to purchase it, and that the shop is shutting down in the spring of 2023, anyway. The PC Engine CD version isn’t just there so Konami can flaunt the history of the consoles it owns the rights to — as you can probably tell by the descriptions above, it’s the superior version of the game because of all that’s included with it in both single and multiplayer modes. And you won’t be able to purchase it legally anymore as of the end of March 2023. Fun!
Konami should simply re-release it somehow before that happens — as a digital purchase on the various consoles that includes scanlines, rewind, and maybe with online multiplayer enabled like Capcom has managed for many of its classics upon re-release — but not just stop with the PC Engine CD version. There’s no good reason for the Super Famicom edition of Panic Bomber to missing from Nintendo Switch Online as an import, and there’s an entire line of Neo Geo-specific Arcade Archives releases, and yet, Panic Bomber isn’t one of them. And that series, published by Hamster, isn’t shy about releasing Japan-only arcade games into the North American wilderness for whoever wants to seek them out, either.
Panic Bomber is a fun and challenging falling block puzzler that forces you to think about the genre a little differently, and that’s about all you can ask for from one as stuffed with options as this. It’s also just months from vanishing from availability, which will force anyone who wants to check it out to emulate it themselves. The threat of that hasn’t exactly convinced Konami to fix their issues with making games available again in the past, but hey, that shouldn’t stop us from asking for more than what we get.
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