So Konami released Super Bomberman Collection today, and it's a pretty interesting retro compilation, for both good and disappointing reasons.
Based on the game credits, programming was done by Red Art Games with Konami providing assistance to the team (a technical advisor, sound engineers, an artist).
First: the good. The team clearly has the right ambition – there are fresh translations of the Japan-only games (4 and 5) and the front-end is quite attractive. A lot of care and attention to detail has gone into providing gorgeous-yet-snappy menus where you can unbox each game, look at the cartridges, look at the manuals, all that good stuff that is tied to the releases of the games themselves.
Plus there's GameShare support for online play with one copy of the game.
And the addition of a gallery is great, there is concept art and plenty of scanned artwork and posters etc. as well.
The core issue I have with this collection are related to the emulation of the games themselves:
- …noticeable input lag. I have the originals on Super Famicom and they are immediately responsive – so it's not the source content. Moving Bomberman around corners quickly and making micro movements doesn't feel as responsive as it should. You can see what I mean here – the cursor moves after my finger has already left the button: https://streamable.com/ejvnvg (recorded at 240fps)
- The CRT filter is terrible. There is no attempt to emulate the unique properties of a CRT (like the phosphors), you get basic scanlines and they don't even line up with the sprites! This is not how the games were originally designed to be viewed.
- The graphics aren't correctly scaled if you choose aspect ratios other than 8:7 (the default is 4:3), so you get shimmering on moving objects, this was immediately noticeable on the introduction scene to Super Bomberman 2.
Based on the IP notices attached to the game it seems it uses:
- SNESticle for SNES emulation
- cddNES for NES/Famicom games
- URP_RetroCRTShader for the CRT Shader
If the developers can fix the issues it'll be a great collection. It just needs more work. If you're not sensitive to lag and don't mind raw pixels you'll have a good time.
by LightPad