Boom!

User Rating: 9.7 | Bomberman Live X360
Lots of classic games have been returning to our TV screens lately with mixed results, thanks to the advent of services like Xbox Live, Nintendo's Virtual Console, and the PlayStation Network. Not all of these old series have passed the test of time. Hudson's Bomberman, however, is a perfect student of modern gaming. This new version of the old classic doesn't just capture the series' antique essence; it actually makes more sense now as a casual online multiplayer game than it did in the late eighties when it exploded onto Nintendo Entertainment Systems everywhere. The only downside is that it's utterly boring to play by yourself, but considering that this game seems tailor-made for multiplayer action, that's perhaps understandable.

If you aren't familiar with Bomberman, it's pretty easy to understand. The game is played from a top-down perspective on a battlefield full of blocks--some destructible, some not. You run around planting bombs, collecting power-ups, and blasting your friends or foes. To drop a bomb, you simply hit the A button, and then get out of the way. This is usually pretty easy, since - power-ups notwithstanding - bombs only explode in two dimensions--vertically and horizontally. However, this gets a lot trickier when eight players are dropping them all over the board, especially since the bombs tend to increase in power toward the ends of matches, when all the players have collected bevies of power-ups. If a match lasts more than two minutes, the screen is quickly covered by dropping blocks that wall the remaining competitors into an ever-smaller space until only one remains