Brian_McInnis

Good god in heaven. That first fifty minutes is one of the most gorgeous stretches of cinema I've seen in my life. An experiment in underexposing objects and textures that so subtly, so strangely and so strongly brings back the mid and later '90s of my childhood, and is profoundly effective in the existential horror vein it mines. After that it gets jolted over into an utterly different movie made mostly in Lynch's usual Soap Opera 'n' Chaotic Screaming Idiocy mode.

'Parently there's some complex 'dissociative psychogenic fugue' Möbius strip business that makes the movie's two (or three?) parts more cogent than they first look if you have some understanding of it, but aesthetically it crashes and burns at the sixty-minute mark, apart from the basic visual texture which is still quite beautiful. My god those are some terrible music choices.

But that first hour is so transcendently good-looking I just bought two different Blu-ray editions that have different color and lighting values. That first hour I was asking where has this movie been all my life.

Among N64 games I place this behind only the two Zelda adventures. Every few years for twenty-five years now I've tried to figure out what exactly it is that made J. F. G. A masterpiece standing so completely outside of time despite being on the surface a game mostly about mowing down giant bipedal ants and collecting cutesy monkeyfolk. One key seems to be the score combined with the many vast landscapes and technoscapes, which together often speak what seem odes to a great and lost splendor. Sekhmet, Anubis and the Lost Island are among the best examples of this.

Another key is simply the scope and sheer beauty - often majesty - of its worlds. I don't know how it is that Rare excelled in lighting details, gradations and effects so far beyond any other gaming company and regardless whether they were working in Super Nintendo, N64 or their famously unparalleled promotional renders, but excel they did. And never more than here. They put in the extra grief and sweat to make every last hidden nook look totally unique. The game is a meditation on light and shade. I've also never seen lens-flare effects used anywhere skillfully as here. The Lost Island area alone should've won some sort of Oscar for breaking new ground in video-game beauty.

This game is one of desperate few games I can think of that were known well to everyone when they came to us, but now seem very nearly forgotten. And this a profound travesty, Jet Force being so much greater an achievement than the Banjo games and all else Rare made for the system. I've always thought a sequel made on GameCube graphics would've fit its fabric so well. May it be accomplished one day.

More would I, but life is short and words are cheap and great works like this one beckon us on in our shrinking time. Boom shanka.

This game got a rather poor reception from critics when it came out, largely due to its 'unpolished' nature and probably also to its not especially exciting or dynamic cut-scenes and story line in general (I think those last two in particular are highly overrated elements for a video game, but anyway). The other problem of course was that its main audience was Bomberman fans, and no previous Bomberman game was anything like an action platformer. The aggregate ratings it has today are actually not bad at all. Basically average. Gamefaqs and Backloggd both have it at 3.5 out of 5. As for moiself, it's gradually grown and grown in my estimation over the twenty years since I picked it up, and at this point I've come to regard it as one of the greatest games I've ever played.

It's an unusual situation admittedly. The game isn't deep in the senses that the other games in my pantheon tend to be. The thing I started noticing was that it seemed to have just unlimited replay value for me. For one thing it's extremely, extremely fun. Throwing bombs in arcs is a mode of combat very unusual to see in games and Bomberman has this sort of moonwalk jump and it makes just going through the game a whole lotta fun. That and the superb and highly unusual, weirded-out technoesque score by Jun Chikuma, a renowned figure in Musicland especially as a composer of Arabic music.

The structure of the game is a refreshing (especially for the time) throw-back to 2D games that were made of oodles of short levels, and this really seemed to fly in the face of the N64 platformers I was seeing at the time - Mario 64, the Banjo games, Donkey Kong 64 - almost all of which had a handful or so of huge levels that took for ever to get through (and in most of these games the levels all seemed to be basically round and with a great big towering structure in the centre). And the rest - whether it was the Zelda games, Bomberman 64, Quest 64, Jet Force Gemini - everything was just goddamn huge and took ages to get through and had no end of secrets you had to collect if you wanted to unlock the final world or whatever.

So by contrast the bite-sized-to-smallish levels in Bomberman Hero are really fun to bounce quickly along through (there are secrets and a hidden final world in Hero too, but it's not the same when it's little bitty levels somehow. Trust me on this). There are seventy-seven levels in the game's story mode and the amazing thing is that all of them have their own shape (each one's got you running, climbing, winding around in a different direction) and their own visual palette and their own ideas and quirks going on. That's probably one main reason the game doesn't get old for me. And still more variety's added through Bomberman's four vehicular transformations (plus a couple rides on Louie's back).

And the 'unpolished' quality only makes it more charming and unique. A stripped-down polygonal world is of course a stylization in itself even if it's not by intention. I've seen many shots of beta-version N64 and GameCube games that look more mysterious and alluring than the finished products. And the lower-density graphics just make the game that much lighter and quicker and more fun to play. Bomberman Hero's one of gaming's great overlooked - and unexpected - masterpieces.