Bomberman on the Saturn has been out in Japan for months. And for months, US Saturn owners waited patiently, wondering what was taking so long. Turns out Sega felt the need to add NetLink support to the game, letting four people (are there still four people that actually use the NetLink?) duke it out over the Internet. Other than that and a few voice changes, the game mirrors the Japanese version closely.
Bomberman really reached its apex with the SNES version of Super Bomberman 2. Since that classic game, every subsequent Bomberman game has closely mirrored it, while tacking on a few silly features that kept the game fresh without really adding anything useful. Saturn Bomberman combines all these silly features into one game, giving you what should be the ultimate Bomberman game. But any serious Bomberman player has seen all this before. Fortunately, there are a few benefits to the Saturn version. First, Saturn Bomberman lets up to ten players play at once, resulting in two things: Your eyes will hurt from playing in the ten-player arena, and you'll probably have to go out and buy a slew of new controllers and a couple of those silly six-player adapters.
The graphics in Saturn Bomberman are about as good as they've ever been. Not much has changed over the years. Now, instead of just multicolored Bombermen, you can choose from characters from other Hudson games, like Milon (Milon's Secret Castle, NES), Bonk (Bonk's Adventure, TG-16), and Higgins (Hudson's Adventure Island, NES). While some may find this refreshing, I would have rather just had multiple Bombermen. The soundtrack is pretty standard B-Man fare, but this game crosses the same line that the PC version of Bomberman crossed by giving the characters voices. Now, characters exclaim "Power Glove!" when they pick one up. There are also vocal taunts in the game. While they don't ruin the game as much as the voices in the PC's Atomic Bomberman, they add an unnecessary element to the game.
Even though it has its problems, Saturn owners should still buy a copy of Saturn Bomberman. Its multiplayer mode easily beats out the upcoming Bomberman 64, and the PlayStation version will only support eight players. But if you don't have that many friends and still have a Super Nintendo, just pick up a copy of Super Bomberman 2 and go nuts.
