All the players start at the bottom of the bottom screen and there is a crown at the top of the top screen. The first player to reach the crown wins, so much trampling and back-stabbing ensues. Some people plough away headstrong while crafty players stay at the back, waiting to trap the hasty frontrunners in a dead-end. There’s a sub-mode called Kin-kin Crown, where everyone has fully powered-up bombs and the walls don’t block explosions! Very hairy stuff.

Item explosion
Both screens have a huge lake of bonus items to pick-up surrounded by a thin wall of blocks. Break into the items and run to pick up as many as possible before your opponents. Spice things up by dropping bombs in the middle of this free-for-all!

The session was cut short, but it was massive fun, and probably some of the freshest new stuff I’ve seen in the Bomberman series for some time. There are so many different modes that it would take a long time to check them all out too. But from Hudson’s site, here are some descriptions of other new stuff:

Panel panic

When you set off a bomb, the explosion changes the colour of the floor panels and the player with the most panels at the end of the game wins.

Voice activation
You can setup a game where the mic is used for a key command, e.g. drop bomb, remote bomb, or shield. We didn’t try this because it would end up being even noisier than a typical bomberman fest, but it could be fun having 8 people screaming “Bomb!” in a small room, especially if your voice interferes with other people’s machines!

After-death interference

After you’ve died, you can lob bombs onto the field to swing the game. This has existed in previous games, but this time you can use the touchpen to propel the bomb further, including the top screen.

Here’s all the power-ups I can think of off the top of my head.
- extra bomb
- increase range of explosion
- death bomb (explosion covers a square area instead of a cross)
- blue flames (these go through multiple blocks
- bomb line (double click to set up all possible bombs in front of you)
- bomb kick
- bomb throw
- walk through bombs
- speed up
- slow down
- shield (protects you from explosion)
- remote bombs
- slime bombs (after you throw them, they run about a bit)
- mines (leaves small spot on screen, so not impossible to see)

So they seem to have covered most of the power-ups in the series. There were a couple of others that I can’t remember too.

My favorite arenas in the multiplayer are the ones that are open. That is, they don’t have a grid pattern of solid objects to cower behind. Once all the destroyable blocks are gone, there’s nowhere to hide. Carnage with 8 bombers, I tell you what.

Here’s the full item list, 28 in all: