Bomberman Act: Zero - What Happened?

[Applause] hello and welcome to another explosively depressing episode of what happened the show we crack open the powder kegs of fiery failure that have left shockwaves all over the bomb puns cuz Bomberman ever since we opened up our stage there's been a constant hum a buzz if you will to cover one of the earliest most spectacular faux pause in the HD generation of gaming Bomberman acts zero or zero our III confused the two sometimes anyway I've said it before so I'll say it again the seventh generation was rough y'all dog rough because breaking through those skyrocketing budgets and unreal threes poor texture Loden and coming out the other side as a success was a fairly rare occurrence Hudson soft made a name for themselves to the 80s and 90s but franchises like adventure Island bonk bloody roar and on top of them all milon's secret castle so they weren't the best equipped to compete with the gloppy grey shooters of the HD era and their premiere character Bomberman was the illest equipped of all now let's take a closer look at this man of bombs this Bomberman adorable little expressive eyes bright colorful costume he's just so very and of course he wields weapons of mass destruction that caused pillars of fiery death that chase people down hallways gee I wonder which of these aspects will make it into the Xbox 360 games you don't bother man yeah this is bomberman extreme are you prepared for his axe 0 no good they get ready for body or techno-organic cyber at future big fat animate kitties no local multiplayer all the things you love about Bomberman so tell your folks buy me zero out act zero or go to hell that's not so yeah for HD consoles hudson sausage try they they tried something different with Bomberman now if history is any indicator and a most of the time is whenever a new generation kicks off the first shanwa that blows up the hardest is what other companies will try to emulate for the next few years for example Grand Theft Auto 3 spawned many similar open-world sandbox --is therefore Gears of War spawned many Gears of War [Music] Japanese publishers were already trying to adjust the fluctuating tastes of the West even at the tail end of the ps2 and Xbox is life you'd start to see cheap attempts to cash in on violent Lord Darkar affair stuff like Konami's nano breaker Capcom shadow of Rome or beep down or Namco's urban reign so the seeds were being planted nice and early in addition with Xbox Live and online multiplayer burgeoning popularity Hudson also felt at best again on that train as well and a they chose to do so with their flagship franchise which is something that should have never happened why did this all happen well an article via the cartel that no longer exists online but was archived written by 1 John Lee paints a picture and why's it gotta be like this Hudson felt this overwhelming need to please his shareholders so games like Bomberman ax0 came to be before the u.s. division of Hudson was fully established the remaining creative minds and Hudson wanted to update Bomberman to cater to Westerners the company believed that the US was an opportunity to grow again fortunately the game was developed in a vacuum is based on with the Japanese thought Western tastes and gaming were that the original Bond man creator on board to protect the brand without input from US operations which at the time didn't have any real developers on board yet Bomberman was thrust into a post-apocalyptic world that was dark and sinister now for him to fit in this horrific post-apocalyptic world Bomberman need to go through some changes from this little guy into a far more generic bland armored killing synthoid that wouldn't be out of place on any pc accelerator card from like 1998 some people have theorized that Hudson may have taken inspiration from the original Bomberman design featured on the NES box art but like yeah who does that who in the right mind would willingly implement a terrible version of their marquee character into a red [Music] regardless it seems the original Bachman was indeed a source of inspiration because in a Japanese interview upon the game's reveal a very reasonable question was posed to leave game designer caliche Takeshita the Bomberman series so far featured cartoony characters but this time it's presented in realistic 3d options like cell shading could have been a new way of expressing personality so why did you go for realistic 3d characters the new world and design was an order from our producer right at the start bomber man's image has been skewed towards younger audiences the past few years this time we drop a comical appearance and decided to build fresh off the origin of Bomberman the story was already there in the original game on the Famicom in the manual described a story set in a cramped underground dwelling where they aim to escape to the surface we looked at that and asked the question what if it were realistic so it became Bomberman ax zero it wasn't going to be a guide in the story or a what-if tale it's another take on the source material that's terrible anyway not content with only just having a muscular badass Robo cyborg synthoid hudson realize that American gamers like other things like bazongas as was the style at the time thus they also took pink bomber this gal right here and todd mcfarland her into oblivion making sure to place emphasis on certain specific areas these same areas of course got special attention in game as well now that's all fine and good but why reboot it at all x0 what does that even mean in regards to Bomberman is there any meaning behind the title of x0 to us zero means a brand new beginning at a fresh start in fact early in development it was called Bomberman Begins but because a movie about a certain bat themed character came out that title couldn't be used act 0 better invoked the image we wanted from begins anyway okay sure whatever dude this all seems really ill-advised doesn't it well John Greiner a former boss at Hudson USA tried his best to explain why this happened to plan an earth I think this was a case where Hudson and we cautioned against it we said don't call it Bomberman you might piss people off they didn't quite get that and said we want to make Bomberman new you know people don't look that new they want new features or something like that but not a new character their point was to make a game that looked new but also maintained the features and sensibilities of Bomberman that is a logical plan a logical approach to putting out good products over a period of time but they changed the character in world too much there were good things next 0th had everybody ignored because they were so pissed about the character um you're not wrong about that last point now if you want to make a game with a dark edgy theme with violent overtones and even a bit of titillation that's fine create a brand new franchise that offers those things but if you take a character series that's been established for years decades even and decide to do the same thing well when is that ever worked [Music] oh right never fans did not take this new direction well but it's easy to assume that a percentage of players that enjoy the Bomberman of old would be able to ignore the ugly reskin and still enjoy that same tried and trued gameplay those people would be wrong one of the key things of playing classic Bomberman is situational awareness being able to see the entire screen and make split-second decisions about bomb placement and enemy positions ax0 decided for some reason to shift the camera angle to be far lower limiting that field of vision once again that Japanese interview seems to question this really bad design choice when people hear Bomberman they think of the bird's-eye view perspective why have you adopted the new fpv mode the class of automatic gameplay is still intact that part of the game has been completed and it is terrific there were people who wanted to see this new action from the bomber man's point of view we built the fpv mode to satiate that desire there was some trial and error before reaching its current state like tested on a first-person shooter style of camera however we still respected that the traditional gameplay was about scanning the battlefield and thinking things through it's different but it's still the same traditional game of Bomberman so I think we've done a good job oh you didn't okay we we need to unpack this fpb stands for a first-person battle but it's not first-person at all but rather a weird third-person behind-the-back sort of thing it simultaneously shows less of the battlefield than the original games but it's also not as interesting or novel than if it were actually in first-person so this literally pleases nobody and was one of the main complaints fans and reviewers lobbied against act 0 they also had a life bar in a Bomberman game they even knew this was all a big mistake because fpb is its own separate mode as the standard mode takes place from a more traditional perspective why this just wasn't a toggle in the options is anyone's guess now that's just how the action is presented the camera angle it's framed in so what could be worse than that well remember all those great memories you had uh playing to four or even eight player ball men with friends well forget all that because for reasons that can only be attributed to I guess the focus on Xbox Live all forms of local multiplayer were axed not only did this indeed piss off much of the fan base as it might be the first mainline Bomberman title since the NES original with no local multiplayer it also ensured that the game would be pretty much useless in the future as yeah no one has logged on to the servers in years except for maybe stop skeletons from fighting now we saved the best or worst for last but it was fundamental of fundamentals that ax0 lacked was the complete absence of any sort of save feature no auto sales manual stays and before you say passwords there wasn't any passwords so you better clear those 99 levels on one single life because if you don't you start the whole thing over from the beginning I hope you don't mess up on like level 98 I'm surprised the game didn't try to make passwords edgy somehow like bio codes or bomb memories which lets you save the tortured mutated thoughts of your Bomberman or whatever regardless this completed the triumvirate of massive gameplay issues that blew up this attempt at trying to reboot the franchise so with all these problems as well as the aesthetic choices that fans didn't really appreciate it might come as no surprise that barment x0 is one of the lowest rated titles of the generation and was a sales disaster for Hudson soft John Lee in his article stated Bomberman x0 was a low point for the company sales for the series dropped to a low about 20,000 units from a high of more than a million copies per game during its peak in the 90s well that's only because they eaters and detractors spread their baby lies about ax0 and weren't real gamers according to a blog post on Hudson sauce now defunct official website I'm here to tell you that Thurmond AK 0 is actually pretty damn cool if you think I'm talking out of my ass check out my xbox live gamer card I'm actually playing the game and enjoyed it forget the haters out there and all the lemmings who jumped on the bashing bandwagon this is the first Bomberman game that tracks player stats on a worldwide level it's all you smack stalkers out there it's something to put your money where your mouth is you get scored for every kill so for those of you with the realest skills can boast while people like me giggle when we accidentally win but if you're still a hater then go play your Bomberman PSP Wow and go play with your Hello Kitty toys to this I command if you'd like to know more about ax 0 1 check out some snazzy wallpapers helper official game page now god ok bar red is is fine nowadays there are more traditional titles that came out after so it didn't even kill the series there if you know of any other really bad or stupid game I cave there's just be give up put a post comment in the comments below or go to the patreon and check that out go play with your Hello Kitty toys are you serious [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 439,325

Keywords: Bomberman, Hudson Soft, What Happened?, Wha Happun, Video Game Disasters, Xbox 360, Sonic The Hedgehog, Super Mario, Video Game Documentaries, Matt McMuscles, Bomberman Act Zero, Bad Video Games, Worst Video Games

Id: fJmodBvn3R4

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Dart06]

The title reminded me how much I enjoyed Bomberman 64 and Bomberman Hero. Thanks for the tiny dose of nostalgia today!

[u/Rage_Like_Nic_Cage]

Holy shit. I can’t believe that blog post is real. I couldn’t write something so cringe-worthy, completely lacking of all self-awareness, and tone-deaf even if I tried.

[u/llamanatee]

And now Bomberman is now cute anime girls , make of that what you will.

[u/NO_NOT_THE_WHIP]

I knew this was going to be that edgy Bomberman reboot that I've never heard anyone talk about. I remember seeing it at the store once thinking it looked ridiculous then promptly forgot about it until now. Looks just as bad as I assumed it would be.

[u/GodOfWarNuggets64]

I remeber seeing a gameplay trailer for this game way back on GTs channel way back when and having no idea what I was looking at, as it was one of my first exposures to video games. Never knew how bad it was until now.

[u/[deleted]]

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