Playing Saturn Bomberman tonight, I am reminded of how poorly programmed the computer controlled characters are in battle mode.

Bomberman Saturn has levels 0 through 3 that you can select for the skill of the computer controlled characters, and regardless of your selection, the characters wonder about seemingly randomly. If all of the humans die, sometime the computer charcters just walk in circles until time runs out. It is absurd. If a computer can beat man at chess, it can surely beat man at bomberman.

Are the newer bomberman games better in this regard?

The older bomberman games are better at that regard (super bomberman 3's ai wasn't good, but I wouldn't call it terrible), the newer ones play alot like the older ones. Chess is a bad example for two reasons, for one it's a game that is basically solved by just looking at every possible outcome and then choosing the move that provides sucks the least, for two the computer doesn't even do much work anymore due to the fact that the opening and endgame book are rapidly approaching each other. Bomberman AI is somewhat matches the first policy, only it's just brute forcing the quickest route of escape from bombs generally, or if it's even better plotting a route that will work and doesn't allow you to actually place a bomb that kills it (making near impossible to kill bots) but they all tend to be really bad at setting traps for human players, who tend to think of the problem in better. A bot that was practically unkillable is completely plausable, and to some extent alot of the bots are pretty rediculous to kill, as is a bot that is good at taking chances to force kills, a bot that plays almost like a easy/medium/good human, faults and all, while also plausable is probably not worth the time. Whether bomberman or chess... especially bomberman, playing against AI is a tremendous waste of time as far as the entertainment you get out of it whether the AI is good or not.

I agree, playing only against a computer is no fun.

But I find them useful as a handicap to equalize between gross skill disparities. The less skilled team gets enough computer teammates to make the match interesting.

On Saturn, this works with players skilled enough to suicide bomb me, but with players who cant even do that the computer teammates are worthless, and I can play 1 vs 7 and still win most of the games.

I haven't played Saturn Bomberman very many times, but I remember a similar AI issue in Super Bomberman 2, where if the human players were all dead and there'd be, say, two COMs left, they'd wander or even stand still for long amounts of time (especially if they were on opposite sides of the map).

And I agree... bots are nice to have there when you're playing against other people in Bomberman. I'd rather have the stage fully occupied than have "blank" areas where there's no action, kind of makes the map seem, I don't know, almost too big or too wasted sometimes.

Yeah, the only real wan to play battle mode in Bomberman is against people.

Bomberman Online PC (japan) ftw. So many ours logged onto that.

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Hudson's Bomberman: 1 of the top 10 game franchises of all time.

The CPU in Generation is very good though, they don't use advanced tactics like throwing bombs at its last second, but they're hard to kill.

well, I have played the bomberman jetters game collection for GBA on an emulator, and that has better AI in its battle mode, at least the AI can stand a chance against a human player.