The first NES/Famicom version of Hudson Soft‘s Bomberman was a significant enhancement of the Bomberman concept, and was the first game in the series to feature the famous Bomberman player character, with the white helmet (actually an enemy graphic taken and adapted from Hudson‘s 1984 Famicom port of Brøderbund‘s Lode Runner). Bomberman was released in 1985 in Japan, but wasn’t released in North America until 1989.

While the game is an improvement over previous versions of Bomberman, it does still suffer a bit from a lack of variety. The same green backgrounds; the same enemies; the lack of bosses, and the same tile graphics, are a bit repetitive, at least when compared to the PC Engine version.

The explosions have been improved a lot, and now overlap properly, and animate very well. The power-ups have also been improved, with speed up; extra bomb; increased blast radius; remote detonation, and walk-through-walls power-ups being introduced, each with its own graphical identifier. Gone is the ‘auto bomb’ mode, where – on certain levels – bombs drop automatically. The bonus stage now requires that you to blow up as many free-roaming enemies as you can in thirty seconds, and – if I’m not mistaken – on these stages you can’t blow yourself up with your own explosions (I’m not 100% sure, but I was caught in a blast a couple of times and didn’t die, so it looks like a feature and not a bug).

Overall, the NES/Famicom version of this first Bomberman is very good, and is playable and absorbing, but there is no multiplayer mode.

This is not the version I’d play, if I could only play one version of Bomberman, but it’s good enough to warrant owning if you have real hardware. A sequel to this – Bomberman II – was released for the NES/Famicom in 1991 (in Japan and Europe), and 1993 (in North America), and that does have a multiplayer mode, plus enhanced, more varied graphics.

More: Bomberman on Wikipedia