Super Bomberman 2

Super Bomberman 2 by Rider is an unfinished Nintendo 64 port of the original game for the Super Nintendo. It was originally released on 25 December 1999 for the Presence of Mind 99 competition in which it won 12th place. It is a very buggy port that crashes after less than a minute of gameplay so it’s not recommended that you play it.

You can download it from its download page by using the password superbombed. You will have to change the file extension from .bin to .z64 for it to be recognised. Not that you would want to though.

About Super Bomberman 2

I think that to understand what this ROM is all about, it’s best to have a look at the enclosed readme file.

OK here it is, my pom99 entry.

It is very incomplete, it crashes, hangs, halts, stops, garbles, flutters, fluctuates, etc… but I released it anyway. It had sound, until I removed the sound to release the source, and at one point killed my backups, and recompiled, thereby compiling the sound right out, oh well. I spent too much time converting the game as it looks now into high-res. I had found a graphician who wanted to do some high-res graphics, so I converted, then the graphician went missing two weeks before pom99, so I went back to my old low-res stuff. I also spent too much time looking for the bug that causes it to hang, this bug is so serious that it prevents you from playing the game longer than 30 seconds. And when I say too much time, I don’t really mean that I spent alot of time, it’s just that I spent a majority of the very little total time I did spend on this project. I have found that recently I have less and less time to waste on things like this.

Which is why the source is included, if someone wants to try and finish this, look through the src, get really confused, ask me how it works, ask me for the full source archive, ask me a bunch more questions, then realize it sucks and give up. But if you want to try, go ahead. You’ll also notice there is no greet list. It’s late, I’m lazy, they all pretty much look the same anyhow, oh well. That’s about it I guess, enjoy 🙂

-rider

I gave the game a test on N64 hardware and the ROM is true to Riker’s words. The game crashes after about 20 seconds. The opponents don’t do anything. Some of the modes aren’t even active. The powerups don’t get picked up. The character just glitches off screen when trying to pick something up. There is no sound or music.

My first thought is that it is kind of weird that all of these features were missing from a game that is meant to be a port of a SNES game, but then I realised… This isn’t an emulated SNES like VNES or the Blackbag Gameboy Emulator, but rather a complete recreation of the original game from scratch. That means that this game is more of a pre-alpha build than an emulated or transliterated port.

This is further shown by Riker including the source code for the game. You can tell that it is a remake port because the game is divided into files like normal and if you look into them, they are filled with functions from the N64 SDK.

All that said, Rider’s port of Super Bomberman 2 is a very good start at making a game but unfortunately it suffers from lack of completion. I don’t think we’ll ever see this project finished, but I’m still glad that Rider submitted this project to POM ’99 so that we could see what the N64 homebrew scene at the time was capable of.