I watch the funny cacti boundin', gyrating on screen, racking up points faster than a day trader, and I just think they're neat. /marge

Other reviews have pointed out how Saboten Bombers takes after Snow Bros. or the much earlier Bubble Bobble mold of single-screen elimination platformers. To me, knowing a few things about NMK's catalog, this brought something like Buta-san to mind first. The developer was no stranger to iterating on notable contemporaries like Bomberman, having removed that series' mazes in favor of open-range puzzle combat. Now we have a more conventional take on the genre, albeit with its own unmistakable zest. Simply put, filling the screen with balls of explosive fun couldn't be more pivotal and delightful than in a game like this.

Those '80s pigs' carefully-timed bombs are traded in fun for chaotic physics and the (relatively) unique mechanic of traveling within your projectiles. It's a risky and rewarding proposition to the player: do you lob the balls from a comfortable position, never getting into the thick of it, or is riding into the fray to score higher and faster more your thing? Saboten Bombers does a great job of letting players adapt to the cadence of each stage, allowing both safety and surprise attacks on these floral & faunal interlopers. Much like the whack-a-mole rhythm found in Buta-san, most foes tend to waddle around and languish until finally prepping any attacks, so the difficulty curve here is also friendlier than you'd expect for an early-'90s cabinet game.

Trouble is, there's really not a lot of variance in play and content to justify the length for a 1CC, or even just feeding through to the end. Clearing Buta-san takes scarcely more than 15 or so minutes, yet this can go past an hour even with quick, skillful tactics. One can get a vertical slice of this '92 bonanza in less than 300 seconds, and a lot of repetition sets in around the 25 to 30 minute mark. Of course, I'd never play something like Saboten Bombers simply to see all the major enemies, settings, and situations it throws at you. This genre's all about taking big chances for big prizes, and so the adrenaline and unexpected humor in this particular game shores up these other problems. It's hard to really hold the few types of baddies and predictable stage layouts against this ROM given it's best played and learned in spurts.

NMK almost always had to punch above its weight, making idiosyncratic forays within a market often dominated by Taito, SEGA, Konami, Capcom, etc. So it's cool to see all the little details they crammed in here which liven up an already cute and inviting action-platformer. Each critter's got smooth, stretchy animation with tons of frames and rare idle variations. The color palette's rich beyond its years, looking like something made for Sega Saturn later in the decade. And while Saboten Bombers wisely avoids shoving in huge sprites for the sake of it, every design's readable at a glance and has plenty of meaningful detail. So even if an expert playthrough will end up repeating itself, all this meticulous production ensures it won't feel that stale.

Add in two kinds of boss stages, a ridiculously detailed (if opaque) scoring system, and one of those crunchy, catchy PCM-only soundtracks for a delicious time overall. Maybe there are more polished examples of this style of scrappy screen-clearing software snack. I'm not yet experienced enough with this era to highlight them, though, so any bit of cruft I found here is possibly more palatable as a result. What can I say other than that Saboten Bombers nails both the essentials and many extra you'd hope for in anything this straightforward? Sometimes all you need are pyrotechnics, pizzaz, and wacky fruit collecting all inside the family restroom. These electronic eudicots have nothing better to do than trash the place, and I'm all here for that!

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Mar. 14 - 20, 2023

I have a soft spot for NMK. For the classic arcade game enthusiast, they are one of those devs - the small, plucky dev with like 15 people on staff that manages to pump out 3 games a year that are somehow mostly quite good (UPL, Athena, Jaleco, Video System are other examples) - that is always so wonderful to discover the library of. And before the 90s, they're kinda like most of those examples - fun but mostly a curiosity. No one these days is going to play Argus over the other shooters of the time from Konami, Taito and Toaplan because it's legitimately the best on offer.

But with the turn of the 90s, and acquisition of some incredible talent, NMK really started hitting some home runs. Gunnail, P-47 Aces, Super spacefortress Macross 2 are truly top class shooting games to this day, and their magnum opus Thunder Dragon 2 is one of the absolute best in the genre. They are really up there with Taito and Toaplan as the STG kings of the early 90s.

Yet at the same time, they never stopped being NMK. Whilst many of their games look pretty "generic", they almost always contain some ridiculous game design quirk or just... oddball decisions, and it's great. Saint Dragon has you basically play snake and R type at the same time. P-47 Aces has a bizzarely chirpy soundtrack and scoring based on you bouncing inside of enemy hitboxes, and Saboten bombers is Saboten Bombers.

Saboten bombers is quite frankly, unhinged. It is an almost self-parodical take on the snow bros/bubble bobble, fixed screen elimination platformer formula. It really just is snow bros with lots of explosions, ultimately. And that does make it a better game (sorry Toaplan ilu too) - Snow Bros really becomes a very methodical, slow game with tonnes of setup when you actually want to play it well, and whilst Saboten does have it's level of setup at a very high level, it is much more chaotic and way faster paced, and I really think it nails it's balance in terms of having to act fast to beat the time limit, but with enough care to avoid getting caught up in your own, and others explosions.

But chaos alone does not make Saboten so wack. It must be mentioned Saboten is essentially a sister title to 91's truly heinous Hacha Mecha Fighter - one of the most adorable shooting games ever produced which is also extremely hard and unbelievably cursed. I'll spare you the full details but a huge part of scoring in that game involves hugging the right border of the screen. Where enemies spawn from. Without warning.

And somehow, Saboten is even more ridiculous for high level play. You will struggle to find a game that is more random and full of as many insane secrets. You will get a random bunch of points at the end of each stage for no reason. You can hold start for the first two stages after inserting a coin and get multiplier items. You can deliberately die straight up for multiplier items. Item spawns are mostly random. Extends are mostly random. Enemy actions are mostly random. You can freeze your multiplier at 8x after deaths but only the WR holder knows how. Start the game holding P1 jump and P2 bomb (even if P2 isnt playing) to get half a free extend. If you hold jump for a whole stage, you get a free peach. If you ignore one of your extremely rare extends, you get a 9x multiplier, and that isn't even a quarter of it. Of course, outside of an extremely rare handbook NMK made none of this is conveyed to the player remotely. Brilliant.

Watching a high level run of Saboten is about the most ridiculous game experience you'll ever see. Doing absurd snow bros chain setups at the same time as relying on a bunch of luck and doing some random other shit to make things happen, all ocnducted by a silly cactus. The scoring potential is frankly ridiculous too - this game can be counterstopped in it's first loop with a combination of insane luck and skill, yet new players probably won't even touch the top 5 digits on the scale. Stupid-ass game.

And yet is also extremely well made. Perhaps the most obvious thing about Saboten is how utterly pretty its pixel art and particularly the animations are. There was absolutely no need for them to go so hard on the adorable cacti dancing on the name entry screen. There was no need for so many background screens. There was no need to make that enemy cactus to a delinquent pose and smoke whilst standing still. But they do, and Saboten as a result feels utterly alive. Things are constantly moving, even going AFK enemies are probably doing a silly dance or something, and it's just quite joyful. As aforementioned, it's also extremely fast paced by the standards of a fixed screen platformer, and a lot more interesting as a pure survival game imo compared to snow bros, which really only gets interesting for scoring. Saboten's level design is also great, with stages embracing the bouncyness and the AOE of the bombs. Of the Shitpost duology, I definetly think it's the better game than HMF, and i find it a fun game just to embrace the silliness of. Especially if you can wrangle a friend into fightcade and continually bomb them.

Now, for the real plot twist. Whilst actual credits for Saboten Bombers are unknown, as it doesnt have any - based on other NMK games of the time, it is very likely that this game's composer was Kazunori Hideya (HIDE-KAZ). AKA the lead sound engineer on Metal Gear Solid 3. And if it wasnt, it was legendary composer Manabu Namiki. And it's designer/lead? Based on other credits around the time, it is very likely to have been Gunnail head Morio Kishimoto. The current head of Sonic Team and director of Frontiers. That explains a lot, I feel.

Anyway, Saboten owns. It's so stupid.

     「今日はいたずらなサボテンや害虫からご主人様のお留守をお守りしようと、鉢植えを飛び出して戦い始めました。」


Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Mar. 14 – Mar. 20, 2023).

The undeniable success of Bubble Bobble (1986) had spawned many sequels and derivatives, both from Taito and other publishers. One such title that proved popular with some audiences in the West was Toaplan's Snow Bros. (1990), in which the objective was to throw snow at enemies to create a large snowball that the player could roll at other opponents. This concept was revisited by NMK in 1992, resulting in Saboten Bombers, which would not be released outside of Japan until the Switch port in 2021. Players assume the role of cacti, Wanpi and Tsupi, protecting their master's mansion from insects and other evil plants. Just like in Snow Bros., players must eliminate all enemies on the screen without attacking them directly, but by throwing bombs at them. These bombs catch the enemies and carry them in their path before exploding after a certain amount of time. The objective is to maximise points by catching as many enemies as possible before the bomb detonates.

While Snow Bros. had the same obsession with scoring, the title allowed for more deliberate positioning and execution, as the trajectory of the snowballs was easier to gauge. They often just rolled across the platforms, following the natural movement of gravity. In Saboten Bombers, the atmosphere is much more chaotic: the bombs bounce around a lot and often stay at the same height, so the player has to be very careful not to get caught in their own explosion. Most of the levels are a cat-and-mouse game where one must quickly determine their angle of attack before avoiding the myriad explosions on the screen. This anarchic frenzy takes a while to get used to, as it relies so heavily on the player's ability to react quickly, but it suits perfectly with the title's gummy-pop flair. There is something charming about seeing plants and insects running around with exaggerated movements and throwing bombs at each other, contrasting with the peacefulness of the environments, which could easily be mistaken for PC-Engine visual novel backgrounds.

Every five stages, the classic levels are interspersed with a battle between the two players – or the player and the CPU if playing alone – or a boss fight. The former work well, as they capitalise on the chaos inherent in the gameplay, but the latter are a little more mixed. While Snow Bros. also struggled slightly with these boss sequences, they were more natural, as they involved figuring out the method to defeat the boss while avoiding being trapped by the enemies. At worst, they were sections that borrowed the traditional grammar of arcade action-platformer bosses, namely painless and forgettable encounters. In Saboten Bombers, the most annoying factor is the awkward trajectory of the bombs, halfway between a high trajectory and a ground shot. The boss fights are thus generally uninteresting, as they do not build on the verticality or the bounce of the bombs. Fortunately, these sequences are relatively rare and thus innocuous.

The main attraction of the title is the scoring system, which can be as subtle as it is esoteric. Aside from the secret tricks and techniques – for example, allowing the timer to run out causes a shower of bombs to explode on the screen; staying alive earns a significant scoring bonus – efficient routing and intelligent use of power-ups make for an exhilarating experience, as the player dodges the many explosions that blossom on the screen. There is an absurd, candy-coated poetry to Saboten Bombers. Why it didn't benefit from a Western localisation, unlike other NMK games, is unclear; perhaps the elimination platformer craze was not yet consolidated enough in the early 1990s. Either way, Saboten Bombers remains a pleasant little curiosity, distinct from the shoot'em ups and adventure games for which the company is generally known.