I want to talk about something I call the Overlap Principle. Basically, if two or more balloon enemies are overlapping on the same space when a bomb goes off, only one enemy is allowed to die and the rest will survive. This must be some kind of programming error or oversight because it feels like it's not warranted the way it occurs.

See this example here. There are clearly three enemies on screen. All 3 are overlapping in the frame the explosion happens. After the smoke clears, it is revealed that one died and two survived! Guess they used him as a shield.


I included one more example here as well. By the time the bomb explodes, two balloons are completely overlapping with one balloon being halfway into the space beneath them. This causes only one of the two in the original space to die, while the balloon a half space below dies as well. This further cements the idea that a complete overlap will only allow for one death and that it must be perfect! Half space differences will still pop those balloons to bits!


The final bit of interest I found in this game was the timer. See the word Bonus up there on the top of the screen? Not only does it act as a score bonus for faster players, but it also works as a clock. Once that bonus hits zero, all soft blocks disappear and the balloons have free range to hunt you down. I'm not sure if they become more aggressive or not, but fighting off four of them was difficult.

The game is almost completely identical to the NES version, with the same enemies, items, and gameplay. It just runs slower and is more boring than the NES. I would like to note it only ever gave me one skate the entire time while I had about 6 bombs, 5 fires, remote control, soft block pass, and bomb pass. I was nigh invincible in that game but I was as slow as can be. It was torturous enough having the game move slow on account of the MSX but as we all know, Bomberman with one or two skates is way too slow. Sonic would be ashamed!

Anywho, I should note that the size of the stages are intact as well. Just that the stage has to push the screen in order to show the rest of it, kinda like it does in the original Legend of Zelda. Each stage has 3 sections like that and standing around, trying to bomb things on those lines can make you disoriented.



It takes a lot of patience to beat this game so good luck with that. As I write this post, I was going to mention the bonus stages. A bonus stage occurs every 5 levels, with 10 bonus stages in all. Each bonus stage uses a different enemy except for stages 8 through 10 which just recycle Pontan. I assumed this was different from the NES version but when I went to do a double check, I was incorrect! This bonus stage pattern IS the same as the NES version. I already uploaded all these GIFs so I'll just leave them because they look cool. Kinda like an exhibition of all the enemies.

These are bonus levels 1 through 8 in that order.



Moving on, one distinction though is level 50, which consists entirely of Pontans while the NES game has multiple enemies.



So after all my hard work, we get to see Bomberman become Lode Runner in all its MSX splendor right?



I've been duped again!   They didn't even have the courtesy to finish the sentence. By soft do they mean Hudson Soft or software in general? That makes one ending non-existent and one half complete on my scoreboard. I should hope the next game can deliver for me.