Blitzbombers

Title           Blitzbombers
Game Type       General Action
Players         1-8 (or 16 in linkup)
Compatibility   AGA only
Submission      Isaac Abraham eyesy@usa.net

Review
BB was originally pencilled in for release sometime in `96,  but just before
it was finished and put out into the market, SunSoft, creators of Super
Bomberman, came along, and complained that it was too much there game, and
threatened legal action (although isn`t SuperBomberman like DynaBlaster? Or
MasterBlaster?). So, the game was put on hold indefinitely, until about
January '98, the creators of BB decided to finish it off a bit, a put it out
on the internet for free!
As soon as I found out about it, I downloaded it immediately, the archive
was only about 500K in size. However, you must be careful about running the
game, it is quite chip mem hungry, it needs about 1.7 megs of Chip, so
either reduce your screen depth, get a gfx card, or play it from AmigaDOS.
I won`t go into much depth about the point of the game, suffice to say that
it is a DynaBlaster clone, but offers several things that better it. For
those who`ve never played that game before, it`s an action game basically
centering around the following premise : You and up to seven other people run
around a maze (viewed from above, of course) dropping bombs as you go. When
the bombs explode, the explosion goes in all four directions. The idea is to
destroy the blocks surrounding you and then to kill your opponents. Blitz
Bombers is AGA only, so immediately you`re assured that the graphics
will be fairly lush. The sprites are a little on the small side, but that
does allow for big arenas, and there`s a special Highres mode, that allows 8
players at once on my Amiga, and 16 if you link up two machines!
There are a huge amount of options - one can choose which powerups can exist
in the game, what their effect is, how good you are (and thereby give you
more bombs and shields by default), what controller you`re using, and so on.
The only niggle is that without a CD32 joypad, the 2 player game stops
after a few goes, because it expects to find the green button to continue
after the first level, otherwise it quits! There`s still some decent one
player levels, and whilst the computer players do tend to run around like
headless chickens, they at least display some signs of artifical
intelligence.
There are nearly one hundred level, meaning that you`re not going to get
bored of the level design soon, and there is plenty of variety in the
scenarios within the game.
BB is played at a frenetic pace, certainly much faster than MasterBlaster,
and may be a little disconcerting for the beginner, but once you master the
controls and learn what all the powerups do, you`ll quickly get the hang of
it, and will soon be trapping your opponents with ease. It may also take
time to learn what all of the power ups do, by the way...
Overall then, not a bad game at all - BB has plenty of options, and if you
like this type of game, you`ll proabably come away very happy. Whilst the
core of the game itself is very simple, the programming team have done as
much as possible to spice it up, and for this they should be commended. And
bearing in mind that all this game will cost you is about 20 pence,
depending on the speed of your internet connection, there really is very
little to grumble about - it`s certainly worthy of the space on my HD.

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