Another day, another mini-game compilation for the Wii, this time starring Hudson’s lover of all things explosive, Bomberman. With Bomberman having shown up on every gaming platform since Cro-Magnon man made the Thagotron 5000, it’s only natural that the Wii be graced with his presence; however it’s a shame that the game is such a poorly implemented, boring mess.
The Bomberman Land noted in the title of the game is an amusement park filled with mini games that the various Bombermen and Bomberwomen visit to see who the Bomberman Land Champion is. At some point in time, a new Champion was named, and this new Champion is hell bent on destroying all that the Bomberpeople hold dear. Well, not really. Actually, the new Champion is just a jerk and as such, takes over Bomberman Land, ousting the commissioner and makes the Bomberpeople, with you as Cheerful White, compete to see who can best him as Champion. If the story sounds silly, it’s because it is, and not just silly, but horribly written, long and drawn out, and impossible to skip. Fun!
Once you get past all of the ridiculous cut scenes, you’ll be placed in the training area of Bomberman Land. Here you can try out the various mini games in the hopes of gaining training points. The training points allow you to enter the first area of Bomberman Land, entering the competition in the process, as well as buy costumes to make Cheerful White look more cheerful.
Once you’ve entered Bomberman Land proper, the real fun begins, fun being tedious mini games. Competing in this amusement park of the damned goes something like this: in each area, you get tokens, more if you have a spiffy costume equipped. You then take these tokens and spend them to play mini-games. Based on how well you do in the mini-game, you’ll get a certain number of points. Get enough points to score in the top ten and the next area will open up for you. If you don’t score enough points you’ll either have to do the current area’s competition all over again, or worse, get sent back to the previous area where you’ll have to do its competition all over again just to move ahead and do that area’s games all over again. Welcome to Sisyphusland Place, er Kingdom.
Any collection of mini-games, no matter how good, would have a hard time standing up to the sheer amount of repetition required by this game. Unfortunately, the mini-games here aren’t very good at all. The use of motion controls is nothing you haven’t seen before, and many don’t use the controller in any Wii specific way at all. There are a handful of good games here, but none worth wading through all of the not very good ones, and flat out boring to the point of tears ones. The fact that you have to play them so much, while training to get tokens, and then playing them to compete, adds insult to injury. It certainly doesn’t help that the games have zero style to them. You could replace Bomberman with an Iguana and call it Iguanaman Land and see no discernable impact. At least some of the mini-games support up to four people, for those entrenched deeply in the “misery loves company” camp.
Graphically, there’s nothing here you couldn’t have seen on the Gamecube. The various Bomberpeople communicate via pained facial expressions and what appears to be crotch thrusts, no doubt to make up for the lack of a mouth. On the audio side, there’s nothing to write home about, and the music may have you searching though your cd collection for music appropriate for a ten minute long jump rope minigame.
The game is not completely without merit though, as it includes the Bomberman Battle mode, which allows up to four people, with computer controlled Bomberpeople standing in for real live humans, compete in six different stages of bomb throwing, adversarial mayhem. The action is fast paced, and fun with a room full of people, however given that this mode of Bomberman is available in so many other Bomberman games, including Bomberman ’93 on the Wii’s Virtual Console, there’s no reason to buy Bomberman Land just for the battle mode.
