Welcome to another ST-urday, chowdah-heads, as we head to Beantown for all the bams, booms and kablowies we can arrange. It feels like a game with "Bomb" right in the title is a long time coming for this feature, given where it's hosted. But we'll get to all that when it is indeed gotten to. Yes.
Instead, let's talk about October some and how this site's been crazy busy of late. If it's not a seven hour quixotic quest to complete a boss fight against an enormous demonic undead foe with difficult platforming and pinpoint accuracy (the new Destiny raid), it's a three hour quixotic quest to complete a boss fight against an enormous demonic undead foe with difficult platforming and pinpoint accuracy (the finale of Vinnyvania: Dracula's Curse). Yet I feel this is just the beginning: October, I can sense, is going to be a busy month for all of us in the games coverage biz, amateurs (hi there) and professionals alike. Even though half of the list of highly anticipated games of 2015 have put up a "Do Not Disturb" sign on their proverbial hotel doors and decided to sleep in until next year, we're still going to see a lot of releases over the next couple of months. Even as someone who buys all his games with a six month price-drop buffer, this year has left me spoiled for choice: I'd love to get around to Witcher 3, Bloodborne, MGSV, Super Mario Maker, Fallout 4 or Just Cause 3 before it's inevitably time for GOTY considerations, and those are just the AAA games. There's more 2015 Indies I'd love to get through than I can count: Soma, Undertale, Axiom Verge, The Book of Unwritten Tales 2, Ori and the Blind Forest and Titan Souls to name but a few.
I also wanted to talk a little about my recurring TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine feature Octurbo. Three days into my favorite month without a peep should be enough of a hint that I'm not making it a month-long daily series this year. I feel I've covered almost everything of note between the two prior years and the two recent WikiProjects to get all the US-released TG16/CD games on the wiki with full pages, but there might be a handful of PC Engine holdouts I could build an Octurbo week around. But hey: when it comes to covering games for a system barely anyone remembers or cares about, ST-urday is here for you. Let's get on with that.
Boston Bomb Club
Boston Bomb Club is another creation of our fantastical French friends Silmarils - we explored the first part of their Ishar trilogy before wandering off and getting ganked in a forest. Boston Bomb Club was developed a year before they began on the Ishar games; in spite their Middle-earth-inspired name Silmarils actually worked on a lot of curious projects outside of the standard Tolkien fantasy template. There's still a few more of those I might be covering further down the line.
In one of those happy little coincidences, I'd already picked out this week's game of petard pandemonium before the site chose to focus on the hilariously mean-spirited Ultimate Chicken Horse (both the Unfinished and the back half of the recent UPF are worth watching). Though Boston Bomb Club is an entirely different barrel of buzzsaws, it shares a similar philosophy of "creativity meets chaos".
Boston Bomb Club imagines an old gentlemen's club in the great Massachusetts city of Boston run by eccentric inventors and pyromaniacs who frequently convene to create contraptions that the unseen player has to guide a number of bombs around. The bombs pop out two at a time and the player has to configure the course to guide them safely to where they can be extinguished and removed. It effectively plays like a cross between Pipe Dream and one of those many Rube Goldberg-ian "The Incredible Machine" types of puzzle game. Naturally, as the product of a French game development studio, it also has a very distinctive, off-beat art style (not to mention some borderline NSFW pneumatic bunnygirls).
A little more about the general rules of the game before we start dropping screenshots: the player only has to ensure the safe removal of one bomb in their initial stock of five in order to move onto the next stage/table. However, the bombs are effectively "lives": once all have been destroyed (dropped off the table, hit a deadly obstacle or another bomb, left on the table for too long) the game is over. As with Lemmings 2: The Tribes and its eponymous suicidal rodents or Breakout with its multiple ball power-ups, the game is entirely possible to complete with only one moving piece to worry about, but having as many as possible around is a useful safety net. There's definitely a "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" risk/reward paradigm in play here, as trying to focus on escorting two bombs at once can mean losing them both.
Welcome to Boston Bomb Club! Now there's a face you can trust.I really dig the game's early 20th century speakeasy look. As with Shufflepuck Cafe, which I covered back in ST-urday #010, this splash screen also operates as a menu of game modes. Each of the five gentlemen sitting around the table, left to right, will take you to a specific stage: 1-4-7-10-13. The ostensible goal is to get a high-score, which is easier if you start low-level and work your way up. (Clicking on the bored bunnygirl in the background will take you to the credits, by the way.)Despite the evident median age of the Boston Bomb Club being around 65, they employ a bunch of these buxom "boxing round announcer" women. Best not to think about it.Here's the first stage. Quick primer: You can click on any space on this grid, but you can't move those orange pieces around. What you can do is turn those dials with the branching paths (where the mouse cursor is) and any tile with a silver gate: clicking those tiles moves the gates so it blocks one of the other exits. Those wooden bridges will vanish as soon as a bomb crosses over it and won't return. As in Pipe Dream, a tile can't be interacted with if a bomb's passing over it. Simple enough, right?Stage 02 "Jump" introduces trampolines, which moves a bomb through the air by the number of spaces indicated. The blue striped dials will randomly toggle through configurations instead of turning 90 degrees. That "200" points icon is a randomly placed score bonus: the reason you want to spread out the path of the bombs is to sweep by and collect them (and to keep the bombs separated so they don't collide).Many of the stages are themed around other American cities. For instance, this stage is called "New Orleans" because someone dropped a saxophone down there and Louis Armstrong won't leave you alone. You'll also note the geezer with the newspaper: he covers up a part of the table for 90% of the time, so you have to make sure the tiles he's covering are in the right configurations whenever he turns a page.Shout outs to the GB West crew in San Francisco. All right, we've had a quick blast through the basic tiles. The game is full of surprises though, and it's hard enough keeping one bomb active without worrying about more of them.Golden Gate goes all in on the one-way bridges, forcing the player to separate their bomb paths out of necessity: each path to the exit can only be taken once, due to the abundance of these bridges.As you can see from this image, the bottom route has now been rendered impassable, though it at least means I'll have saved one bomb for the next table. The most annoying tile on this whole board is that one close to the end (the end point is the target and bucket, I forgot to mention) that has a red dot on it. The player can't interact with that: instead it'll change automatically whenever a bomb passes through it. Stage 05 (Big Ben) is one of those tables you kinda need to pause and consider. As with the last table, the player needs to funnel their bombs across five separate trampolines. Towards the end, though, there's only one effective route and it means turning a 3x3 grid of dials to look like the above: the bomb then bounces to the bottom of the table, bounces back to the top and then to the bottom one more time to get extinguished.I haven't talked about Colonel Sanders up there yet, but he's one of the worst of the game's many "distractions". Occasionally, he'll reach across the table to change one of the dials or silver gate tiles. Whether he's trying to help or not is entirely academic, because it really doesn't help. Ever. Especially if you've set up the correct path beforehand and don't notice him reaching over to mess it all up.You'll get these bonus stages occasionally. They give you one bomb, a time limit and a table full of bonuses to chase after. If score's not important to you, neither are these bonus tables (though you can earn extra bombs with a high enough score).It would be very small to make a joke about French humor and toilets, but it's not like the UK's much better. Bombs sent down the lavvy appear where the tap is, though are effectively invisible when inside pipes (there's no cartoonish bulging as it passes through them). The little screw to the bottom right actually creates a platform needed to continue, so it's integral you send a bomb over there to push it (and make sure another or the same bomb doesn't turn it back off again).I got a Game Over here thanks to the missing tile and this accursed automatic one I'm pointing at. Fortunately, the game lets you start on later tables by clicking on the right person on the title screen.Level 08 "Grandfather". The cherry there will instantly give you another bomb ('cause it's a cherry bomb) but you'll also be sacrificing a bomb to reach it. This stage gives you two old people with newspapers to contend with. The game's also getting way more complex besides, and having the two starting points for bombs on opposite sides of the screen really doesn't help.Skipping ahead now, stage 13 "Baby's War" occasionally drops a goddamn infant on the table who crawls across changing any tile he or she touches. They'll even grab the bomb as it passes by and deposit it somewhere else. Nothing about this seems particularly safe for an ankle-biter.Stage 14 "Men and Women" introduces two toilets that lead to the same tap. Also, because it only just occurred to me when I wrote that statement, but how gross is it that there are toilets hooked up to faucets?Stage 15 promises cherries with its name, "Cherries Pie", but it's just referring to what looks like the insides of a pachinko machine.Man, this game is already getting bleak. I think I'll stop here before I end up moving a bomb through a dead guy's skeleton.
