Game 379: Bomb Jack

Following an initial output of derivative and unimpressive arcade games, Tecmo landed their first big hit Bomb Jack in 1984. What looks at first like a quirky, unassuming puzzle platformer with some Pac-Man'ish trappings and far fewer explosions than you'd think turns out to be surprisingly deep and addicting thanks to an intricate scoring system which presents a bit of a learning curve, but handsomely rewards mastery of all its little rules.

Somebody's paced a bunch of bombs around a series of levels, some of them with famous landmarks like the Sphinx and the Parthenon in the background. These are completely harmless bombs that burn without ever exploding, but nevertheless, you have to collect them all while avoiding a bunch of pesky monsters guys roaming around the board, which grow more numerous and aggressive the longer you stay on it.

Bomb Jack has no weapons or defenses against the monsters, but he can jump incredibly high, and through an unusual control scheme that's tricky but oh-so-satisfying to master, you can determine just how high he jumps and control his rate of descent with a fine degree of precision, and use it to glide around the board gracefully as you dodge foes and snag bombs.

You could just grab the bombs quickly and finish the stage in a few seconds.

 

But that's no fun, is it? Even more importantly, your score will be pathetic this way - only a few thousand per stage, when there's a bonus of up to 50,000 to be had just from following one rule - grab them in the right order, guided by the lit fuses - and an appreciable number of other smaller bonuses you can rack up while chasing the big one.

My best score was 319,000 points, and about 60% of that came from the big bonuses alone. Had I played perfectly, they would have accounted for two-thirds of it.

 

Clearly, the game wants you to get the bombs in a certain sequence - you can start with any of the 24 on the board, and after that, the next bomb in the sequence will ignite and become worth double the base points. Collect the remaining 23 in the intended sequence as they light up one-by-one and you'll get the whole 50,000 bonus. Miss even one (or die) and you only get 30,000, and each miss after that docks you another 10,0000.

Of course these sequences aren't laid out in tidy little optimized circuits, and they'll railroad you into zig-zags, spirals, and other contortions as you zip around the board. And when that path funnels you toward a cluster of bombs in an area that's saturated with difficult enemies, snatching them without getting killed is often inconvenient. I imagine that good players develop strategies to efficiently manipulate enemies away from these choke points, but I never got that good.

There are a few other scoring mechanics, none with quite the same payoff as the big bonus, but still worth pursuing. Understanding precisely how they work is key to optimizing your score.

• Bonus coins spawn whenever your score passes a multiple of 5,000, which increase a scoring multiplier by 1x, up to a maximum of 5x, and are worth 1,000 points (times the multiplier) themselves. Everything except the level completion bonus is enhanced by the multiplier. Rarely, a bonus coin may earn you an extra life or even a free game.
• A power meter at the top of the screen increments whenever you collect a bomb, and lit bombs are worth double the power. Ten lit bombs will fill it completely and cause a powerball pickup to spawn, which grants points and also paralyzes the enemies on the screen for a few seconds, letting you kill them for even more points.
• The color of the powerball determines the base score, with silver worth the most at 2,000. The color cycles each time you jump. If you can manage to attain a 5x multiplier and then nab a silver powerball, a that's worth 10,000, plus 5x points on the enemies you kill! Given my colorblindness, I did not bother with this avenue.
  
• You score 10 points each time you jump. Grinding out points this way is probably not a winning strategy, but if your score is close to a 5,000 point threshold and there's a powerball on the screen, a bit of jumping might help coax out a bonus coin to collect before your next scoring chain.

 

All of this hadn't been immediately apparent, and on my first few plays, I found Bomb Jack kind of boring. But pursuing the high score makes all the difference here, and forcing myself to figure out how to optimize its systems as I flit about the stage, skillfully weaving through the air from bomb to bomb in between tricky enemies made it fun. Ultimately, I could never beat level 6, but I think I managed to do pretty well in the levels before it.

GAB rating: Good. I'm reminded a little bit of Mr. Do, in that it took me some time to appreciate the full depth of what Bomb Jack had to offer. It looks simple, but with practice and better understanding of its scoring mechanics, not to mention its well-tuned controls, I felt like a badass acrobat. And I feel that with practice, I could be much better.