BombermanBoard

Ragey · #1 Posted: Wed May 06, 2009 12:31 pm

I've been looking through some old Bomberman manuals lately, typing up the story sections and any other pieces of interest, and I can't help but notice that some of them have a large amount of great artwork to use, but they're placed to be obscured by text or faded or something that kind of prevents it from being digitally cleaned up or anything like that.

Bomberman Quest, for instance, has artwork of the four bosses, a number of enemies and even unique little action scenes to represent each zone. The only problem is that the manual is black and white, the images are fairly tiny, and a few tiny bits are cropped out. It irks me! It doesn't help that this is the only game those four bosses appear in, and although the Bomberman Quest site has coloured artwork (Hudson's sites for their old games are good for finding artwork that's otherwise hard to find), they're... rather tiny. Definitely not the hi-res material they used as a background those those pages; not to mention it doesn't have the individual pieces of the group art, never mind the scene pictures.

Quest is actually a good example, as Bomberman Hero looks like it had some lovely scenery pictures done of the bosses. This page, although a very bad example, shows a great piece of Natia; it's also the only official artwork of her that I know of. Since I'm trying to create a complete list of every Bomberman character ever (yeah. I'm a little ambitious and crazy!), that isn't cool, and just using a game screenshot when there's perfectly good artwork available just doesn't float my boat. Not to mention I just hate seeing things like game artwork getting lost to the ages.
The Bomberman Hero site? This is the best artwork you'll find on it. It's not even the full artwork, what with the screenshot in the way. It only shows a small fraction of the character artwork for the main characters, too. Frustrating!

The only Japanese manuals I have are for the SEGA Saturn games, but from what I've seen they seem fairly good for preserving the artwork well. I'm not sure what kind of conversation I'm trying to make out of this topic (I just like ranting!) but is it worth hunting down the Japanese manuals for the sole purpose of getting high quality artwork? I mean, I once bought three copies of Puchi Carat just to scan their manuals. Do I dare make that into a hobby? D: