Bay Route (Arcade)

Yes, that title does sound a lot like "Beirut", though the game is set in a generic post-apocalyptic sci-fi land, so I have no idea why they did that. But anyway, it's a game developed by Sunsoft and published by SEGA, that's a lot like Contra. As is so often the case with SEGA arcade games from this period, I have to wonder why it never got a Mega Drive release. The resemblance to Contra makes it even stranger, since that series was so popular back then, and it could have been a bit of a coup to say "our console has a game like contra, that's more colourful and better looking than anything on Nintendo's console!"

Like Contra, you play as some guy going from left to right, shooting lots of generic enemy soldiers, a fair few pieces of big enemy military hardware, and occasionally a big enemy weird monster here and there, too. The first boss is even a big barricade wall thing with guns on it, like in Contra. There's some differences, though: for example, you start with four weapons and can switch between them at any time, instead of waiting for the right powerup to come along. Also, the flamethrower is definitely the good kind of flamethrower, as opposed to Contra's rubbish fireball gun thing.

On its own merits, without comparisions to Contra, Bay Route is pretty good overall. It's nothing particularly special, just a well-designed run-and-gun game, with easily-learnable enemy behaviours, some cool set-pieces, and a nice smooth difficulty curve. It looks and sounds pretty good, though nothing mindblowing for an arcade game of its era. Obviously, it's not even slightly original, but I don't want to be too harsh on it for that, especially since it's of a pretty similar quality to the series it's ripping off, rather than being significantly worse. Unfortunately, that averageness makes it kind of hard to write about.

I guess I can recommend playing Bay Route? You won't be missing out on a great deal if you don't, but you'll have a decent enough time if you do. It's hard not to be on the fence about this game; there's a lot of reasons why a game might fade into obscurity, and this one clearly did just because it's so completely unremarkable.

3-D Bomberman (MSX)

Though it seems like an obvious thing to have tried at some point in the mid-00s, maybe around the time of the awful Bomberman Act Zero, as far as I can tell, this game from all the way back in 1984 is the only attempt at a first-person Bomberman game. To put that in perspective, I don't even think anyone involved had even realised the multiplayer potential for the series at this point! Obviously, this doesn't use polygons, or even sprite scaling for its 3D effect, instead using Phantasy Star-style dungeons to stage an action game.

By that, I mean they're mazes with identical walls, where your movement is in pre-determined steps, and you can only turn in increments of ninety degrees. This wasn't the only action game from this era to use such a setting, with the most famous example in the UK being 3D Monster Maze, released in 1981 on the Sinclair ZX81, a computer with significantly less power than the MSX. An important difference between that game and 3-D Bomber Man though, is that while 3D Monster Maze had the player as a passive participant, running and hiding from the T-Rex in the maze, the player in this game is tasked with killing the enemies (malevolent green balloons, the eponymous floaters from the UK's localised version of the first Bomber man game, Eric and the Floaters), by dropping time bombs in the grand Bomberman tradition. You can also escape from the maze by finding a ladder, but you don't get any points for this, and I'm not sure if the game has an ending to reach.

The game's execution is about as good as can be expected with the technology of the time, with two small exceptions. Firstly, each of your steps covers the distance of half a block in the maze, which, couple with the stiff 90 degree turning, means you can sometimes get stuck on corners for a few seconds, which can be annoying when you're being chased. The other problem is that there are two types of wall: the indestructible outer wall of the maze, and the destructible walls within, and they both look identical. You do have a small radar that only shows you, the enemies, and the outer walls, but it's a weak compromise. There are other problems, but they're not so much problems with this game, but ways in which someone playing it in 2019 can see that it could have been improved upon with more advanced technology: things like atmospheric stereo sound, the ability to peek round corners, and move in directions other than backwards and forwards would all have added a lot, but obviously wouldn't really have been possible in 1984. Which makes it stranger that it's not an idea Hudson ever revisited, as far as I know.

3-D Bomber Man isn't a bad game, but at the same time, it's more interesting than it is good. It's worth playing out of curiosity, but not much more than that. Also, since I mentioned it at the start, I want to point something out about Bomberman Act Zero: while everyone laughed at that game's attempt at applying a dystopian sci-fi aesthetic to Bomberman, the real problem it had was that it was barely a game at all: the single player mode consisted of 100 identical boring stages, and the multiplayer mode was only playable online. And even then, you could only play in that one stage that's in the single player.