This article was released two weeks early for Patreon subscribers. Get early and exclusive articles by becoming a Patron!

The title 'Atomic Punk' sounds way more awesome than the off brand Irem made port of Bomberman this game actually is. I wasn't expecting such a well known console game to pop up in a random sampling of MAME emulated arcade games. I was hoping for a new gameplay experience, and I have experienced plenty of bomber men in my life. I actually did get a new experience though. I had the chance to learn what Bomberman would be, if it was bad. Well, not that bad.

The only thing I really learned from this game is that there is bomber lore that no one has ever concerned themselves with.

At first glance, you would assume a joystick would translate pretty well to the game play style of Bomberman. That was not the case for me. Maybe because of so many rounds of Super Bomberman 2 on with that SNES D-pad, but the joystick is painfully unresponsive in the moments I need it most. The biggest issue is the lack of one button press to one movement block. Combined with the amount of travel on the joystick, cutting corners quickly is frustratingly difficult. Besides the time I erroneously trapped myself behind my own bombs, it felt like every loss of life came at the expense of not being able to navigate the map grid with anywhere near the amount of precision I'm looking for in a game like this.

I even have proof of how bad it is just to navigate this simple 2D space. You can literally see Bomberman get caught on corners like he got his coat stuck in a door. Movement is the most basic mechanic in Bomberman after the bombs! This is just embarassing.

All you do is move in the four cardinal directions, and also drop some bombs. Navigate to where you want to drop the bomb, drop the bomb, escape range of bomb blast. This is Bomberman, as it is played. I can drop bombs well enough. When running around the maze, Bomberman gets caught on walls, which lead me to every single death I sustained over my one continue. It's impressive in a way that a series which already had successful and well controlled games could end up so broken.

I didn't think I'd be able to make such a concise review of a game in which I only partook in about a minute and a half of actual gameplay.

How does a game like Bomberman drop the ball every so often, even though they perfected the Bomberman formula several times over. It all comes down to who develops the game I suppose. I've never played it myself, but Atomic Bomberman for the PC is supposed to be pretty bad as well. At least these terrible Bomberman entries got slapped with the “Atomic” label. I guess they didn't mean “atomic” as in a large, spectacular explosion, but more like, “Caution! Atomic Radiation! Stay away!”