So this game features a few sports and a life mode where you can play as Bomberman characters. You can think of it like Hudson's attempt at being like the Mario sports titles and it does feel that way in a sense. The classic battle mode is here so I'll discuss a few things there first.

I played Hardball which is the European version of this game and in it, many of the names are different from what we know. White is Ivory, Black is Star, and Green is Jade. I can't confirm if this is the same in the Japanese version but it's strange we've never seen their names changed like this before. Black being changed to Star makes no sense to me.



I should point out this game uses a lot of sound effects from the Land series and almost feels like a spin off of that series, given the returning characters.

They also renamed some of Settings for battle mode. Knack is the Revenge Bomber mode or "Meanie Bomber" as they call it and Interlopers if the skull setting. It tells you this in the description so I don't know why they even changed it at all.



One cool aspect is this slot machine. Basically a slot machine rolls for each character at the start of the match and I'm not sure if the players gets those items or they appear somewhere in the stage. It's a neat idea though. Besides all this, everything else remains the same, just that the characters wear helmets. I suppose that makes it seem more like an exhibition of sorts.

Now we have Life Mode which is different. You're in this bedroom controlling a custom Bomberman you can make. Using the remote control, you can select one of the sports games/battle and actually spectate a cpu match on television. So if you wanted to just watch a demo of this game, you can do that as your custom character which is just pointless. I believe you can edit this in the settings to where it lets you play the games instead of watch them but I didn't care enough to even try. The room however, is cool to look at. Lots of Bomberman themed objects in here.



So the customization is controlled through the Prize machine. You can use it with points you earn by playing the regular modes. Each sports game has a tournament mode so I recommend doing those to earn points faster. It costs 100 points for a single item and I still haven't unlocked them all. I did find a few weird items, including a nude skin for your Bomberman so they went there for some reason...



Oh the joys of customization.

Next are the three sports games: Baseball, Golf, and Tennis. They all control really easily and remind me a lot of how the Mario titles play. Baseball is probably the most autonomous as you can set most of the abilities to semiauto or auto so the game can most of the heavy lifting for you. Golf and Tennis have almost no customization with settings.



One cool thing I noticed is every mode (except Golf) has an audience which is composed of Bomberman Land characters. It looks as though they took the sprites straight outta Land 2 and put them here and while they look somewhat funny, as flat as they are, it adds a nice touch too.



Another amusing element is the rosters for the Baseball teams. Each character has their own team and each team has a different theme for the names of the players.



And that brings me to this. We can now confirm the existence of Uranus and Cancer the Bombermen. Of all the obscure facts of the Bomberman series there could ever be, I think this one will be surprising for a long time.



Finally I wanted to point out a few of the Golf courses. I already posted a playthrough on my channel but these are worth sharing. Almost all the holes are pretty standard for golf games but the final three holes resemble Bomberman.



That about covers it. Overall the game is fun to mess around with but it's just another strange experiment in the Bomberman franchise. I do applaud Hudson for trying to expand Bomberman in the ways they did but nowadays this just seems like a strange artifact of time. And Hardball is such a strange name for a game. I wonder why the European version had so many weird name choices? Ah well.

Thanks for reading guys.