![]() ![]() It's a risky maneuver that puts the scavengers into harm's way but the potential for a huge payout means it's often worth that extra exposure to danger.Įven PUBG's shrinking play area is something that we've seen before in the Bomberman games. This is not unlike something you'll witness in PUBG when, at the end of a prolonged shootout, players scramble to be the first to reach the corpse crates and take their pick of the contents. In Super Bomberman 2, when a player meets their maker, the items they were holding are scattered across the arena, prompting a looting frenzy amongst the surviving players. You have to move a little further forward in the Bomberman franchise to see another similarity. Others, confident in their abilities, will take on the role of hunters, chasing down those who were less fortunate when it came to loot placement in the early minutes of the match. In Dyna Blaster a clever player will wait for a greedy opponent to run down a tight corridor towards a power-up before rushing in to block their only exit with a bomb. (We all know how spiders love a good bathroom.) By placing a medkit on the floor just inside the room they can entice people into their lair and then quickly dispatch them while they're tabbing the health into their inventory. Some PUBG players will lay in wait in bathrooms, ready to pounce like a trapdoor spider. When it finally comes to combat, again we can see tactics mirrored in both games. In the end though, it all boils down to the same thing - players need to rely on speed, forward-planning and a certain level of luck if they are to succeed. In PUBG weapon attachments and high tier armours replace Dyna Blaster's cartoony power-ups, in Fortnite it's weapons of varying rarity. In these you land, you loot and you prepare to shoot. This opening chapter of hurried, panicked preparation plays out in exactly the same way in games like PUBG or Fortnite Battle Royale. ![]() Being able to see all the players in Dyna Blaster offers a tactical advantage that's absent from modern Battle Royale games. The more power-ups a player collects, the greater their chance of surviving their first enemy encounter. In later installments of Bomberman other power-ups would appear, like roller skates that increased player speed or gloves that allowed bombs to be thrown over walls like grenades. Finding extra bombs means there's a higher chance of trapping an opponent between a succession of well placed explosives, whilst extending the blast radius of bombs with a Flame power-up increases the likelihood of taking out someone from a distance. The anticipation of conflict is the driving force here and in Dyna Blaster the race to quickly remove blocks and uncover as many power-ups as possible is all consuming. In PUBG that attack is a simple punch, in Dynablaster, a single bomb with a limp explosion, good for nothing more than removing surrounding blocks.Īs the rounds in each game begin there's always short period of time before players meet up - the looting phase if you will. That's because, when you look closely at the gameplay loops of both games and understand the way the matches play out, beat by beat they're almost identical.Īt the start of either game, players are on a level footing, alone, defenseless and with a basic attack. For me, PUBG elicits many of those intense feelings I had in 1991 - the highs, the lows, the fear and the adrenaline. But anyway, I digress.Įver since the release of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds I've been thinking a lot about Dyna Blaster. It's a replacement name that lacks the snap of the original but at least it's better than 'Eric and the Floaters" the unfortunate title given to the 1983 version of Bomberman for the ZX Spectrum. Dyna Blaster was the name given to the European versions of Bomberman that came out in 1991. If you're not familiar with Dyna Blaster by the way, that's probably because you knew it by a different name. We'd scream with excitement at every kill, we'd jostle and punch arms with every loss and we'd continue on that way for hours until a hungry belly, or an exasperated parent sent us home. With every match we'd laugh until our sides hurt and tears ran down our cheeks. God, we had so much fun playing Dyna Blaster's Battle Mode that summer. 12 years old and huddled around an Amiga 500+ with four of my friends in a tiny bedroom in Garsington, Oxford. I only need to hum the first 10 seconds of that jingle and suddenly I'm transported back in time to 1991. 26 years on, the opening ditty to Dyna Blaster on the Amiga is still seared into my memory, a perfect, personal time capsule that exists nowhere else but my brain.
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