Sorry for not making much progress with scanning the new books, guys, just been busy with other things lately. Here's what I've got the Tournament guide so far, which is about halfway done. Might be a while before I even think of starting the other two, what with their cumbersome sizes.

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Don't worry about it, it's not like we're going to get all this translated anytime soon anyway.  

It says "The file you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable", but that's okay - I don't want to bother you with it, I can wait until you're ready to upload the rest of it.

Just saw this. We moved and have been kept rabidly busy. The guide came though I have to locate it again before I can scan it, or even try to. All of the bman guides are together (I think) but the manuals are in two different places. I had kept it aside to scan but things kept getting piled on top of it and as you know, out of sight, out of mind. I actually had my sfc bomberman head tap with 5 pads going last night on Super Bomberman 5 with family. Fun times.

Sorry for my disappearance. :/ I will try to keep checking back and post here once it's scanned.

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Good to know you're still around dood! Good luck with your moving and all if you're still working on it. I know how much of a pain that can be. I've moved 3-4 times in the past 2 years. I think I'm done with it for the long term though.

Though I will be rearranging my room in a week or so since I need new shelving for my Anime DVDs again. I may post some updated pics when it's all done.

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Say Zaphe, could you translate the description for the Hige Hige bandit found on page 34 (guide-18.jpg) of the Tournament guide?

I guess it's wishful thinking, but maybe it'll explain how they are connected to the fiendish five outside of Jetters (in which they work for Bagular, the five's original master).

And I hope we get the rest soon, I'd really like to see an artwork of the caped Golem Bomber.

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Metroid: Other M - As in "There's the good Metroid games... we chose to do one of some Other Make altogether."

Yeah, sorry for taking so long to finish this one. Just been procrastinating and focusing on other things, but hopefully I can scan the rest of it this week. I think I'm always just a little unhappy with my scans and keep thinking to myself, "man, if this book was lost to history and these scans were all that remained, would they be doing the book justice?" All that blurry text just really, really bugs me in ways you cannot imagine.

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After all of this, it really can be said Bomberman has an active fandom. Thanks for all the hard work, everyone. Especially you, Ragey.

Those guides are... sublime.

And here's the whole guide scanned (it's still uploading as I wrote this but in an hour it should be ready). It's kind of odd how Max only has 3D artwork while everything else is just traditional 2D art. I might run through this again in hopes of capturing the artwork better without so much blurriness, though I'll see what happens. The next guide I'll scan will be the Fantasy Race guide, though don't expect to see it in a hurry, I think I've gotten comfortable with procrastinating. :{

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I'll stop you from procrastinating in MSN, Ragey. =p

Harass me on MSN again and I'll sic the dogs on you. =P

Anyway, here's a sample of the Fantasy Race guide (I should hopefully be able to scan the rest of it tonight). I haven't cropped, cleaned up or even rotated most of the images yet, and they're not even in the right order, so excuse the clutter. There's also two attempts of scanning some art from the Tournament guide, though it didn't go terribly well - the colours are too drained and saturated, and the MagnetDragon is still blurry around the edges. I'll try and tinker with the settings next time.

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I'll throw a beef on them.

Anyways, nice work. Preeecious artwork.

Thanks again, Ragey!  

Okay, I'll go through the enemy names, and I'll translate the Hige Hige Bandit's description, though it's probably just going to say something about its behavior rather than its story. Also, on the enemy names, if the monster's name is the same as it is in Super Bomberman 3, then I won't put the kana here.

[page 30]

ドロップ - Drop (slime enemy)
Mad Flower
Trent
Ballom

ネズラー - [Unknown; "Nezura"]
ゾンビ - Zombie
パクパク - Chomp Chomp ("Paku Paku", the snake; apparantly EVERYTHING in Bomberman that eats bombs is a freaking "paku" something)

戦闘員11号 - Combatant #11 (Hige Hige Bandit)
ボ-ッとしている弱
い敵. すぐ倒そう!
[Something about "weak enemy"]. It will probably be defeated quickly!

(Yeah, like I thought... no info as to why they're there. But it should be of note that they're "Combatants", and "Hige Hige" is not mentioned anywhere. Interestingly, the Hige Hige in Saturn Bomberman Fight! is named "Combatant #12"...)

[page 38]
オークマン - Orc Man (pig)
フィッシュマン - Fish Man (minor difference in spelling between this and SB3)
グェール - ??? (Frog, just like in SB3... Spelled a little different though, unless I messed up on the size of the ェ in my old SB3 translation)
カニバブラー Bubbler Crab

[page 44]
バスター - It's either "Buster" or "Burst". It's the same as "Basuta Slime" from SB3.
スパーキー Sparky (Jellyfish)
ゴーガ - Googa? (it's the same thing as that cone sea creature from SB3, same name too)
スケルトン - Skeleton

[page 50]
Snow Man (Yeti)
Sea Lion
Ice Tower
Pygmy

[page 55]
シャドー - Shadow
ボーガンナイツ - Bowgun Knight
ペラン - Flip ("Peran", the card soldier; "Pera" means "flip" or "thin")
ガールゴイル - Gargoyle

[page 62]
Rockun
ドグマ - Dogma (?!... this is that ant lion pit monster)
バトー - Bat
Pharaoh

[page 68]
マミー - Mummy
クラウド - Cloud
デスパイダ - Despider (Death Spider?)
Sandi (hand)

[page 77]
クリスタルデ-モン - Crystal Demon (yep, same one as in Bomberman Quest, and same name)
戦闘員 - Combatant (Gun-wielding Hige Hige Bandit)
ヌウ - Nuu (Yellow guy)
サーチロボ - Search Robo
クローラ - Crawler (worm)
メガドン - Megaboom (bomb)
Crash ("Gashin"; rock bomb eater)
ゴーレム - Golem

Also, here's something interesting about some of the enemies from Bomberman Tournament/Story. This is copypasted from Duke Serkol some time ago (hope you don't mind):

(2/17/09)


So. Yeah. I'll pause for a moment while you recover.

...

Ok. So here's the page with both games' maps: http://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/TG16/

Anyway, I find it interesting how some of these monsters are almost exactly like monsters that appear in other Bomberman games (and are indeed named as such in Bomberman Tournament). So were those monsters taken from Neutopia, or was the similarity just noted? Also:

(2/18/09)

Hey cool, charabom combined Golem Bomber turns light blue (both his head and the flame on his forehead). I would have been hardpressed to notice this in the middle of a fight on an old GBA screen.
I see his hands are apparently yellow also.


Figures... good thing we both saw it coming.
Anyway, thanks!


Of course not, I'm always up for a good serving of copypasta  

You know, I've been thinking that maybe they didn't make Tournament as a gift to Neutopia fans. Maybe they simply canned Neutopia III after a good chunk of the game had already been completed (namely most of the overworld, dungeond and enemies... hey Nintendo did it with StarFox2) so rather than throwing it all away they figured they'd re-use it for their new Bomberman RPG game.

...oh and you may want to note that the last dungeon of the first Neutopia was a castle in the clouds.


As for Fantasy Race, I'd say the most interesting page so far ought to be 9. Might shed some light on those egg shaped thingies.

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Metroid: Other M - As in "There's the good Metroid games... we chose to do one of some Other Make altogether."

What the heck are those "eggy loking thigns" [sic]? Seriously though, I don't recall ever seeing them. But I never actually owned the game, so.


Side service race support characters

They are named

レスキュー1
レスキュー2

And so on, which means "Rescue 1" and so on...

With Tibo/Teebo at the end for some reason (oddly named "ケポ" or "Kepo").

Do you remember what they did in the game? I'm not going to bother with translating the body of text tonight because my neck is kind of hurting at the moment.

Wow! I always had a feeling there was something about Tournament that didn't feel quite right, whether it was the nonsensical ending or something else, but that's a pretty awesome discovery! The similarity of area themes is pretty obvious, but the underwater section is nigh-identical to the BigOcean map. That's... that's quite something! I'm curious to see now if any Neutopia staff worked on Tournament or not.

The "egg looking things" in Fantasy Race are what hold up the item panels and rescue you if you fall off the course. They've got a lot more artwork than I realised - more than the player characters! Seriously, every player but White Bomber only have one image, the same one that shows up in the English manual. There ain't no justice.
Just to keep you all up to date, I've scanned the whole Fantasy Race guide (except for one page which I just noticed now), it's just a matter of rotating and cropping them all. I'm about halfway done, so it should be ready by Monday or Tuesday, hopefully.

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Yeah... We probably should have said something about this, say, a year ago, shouldn't we have, Serkol?...  

The ending for Tournament is pretty self-explanatory...

To be honest, I kinda expected this disclosure to be met with a public outcry of "duh"s.
Of course I tend to forget that not everyone who's obsessed with Bomberman is also obsessed with Zelda and its clones, so this expectation clearly was way off the mark.

Anyway, isn't it pretty much implied that Brain Bomber is directly responsible for Max changing into a cyborg? Or is that utter speculation?

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Metroid: Other M - As in "There's the good Metroid games... we chose to do one of some Other Make altogether."

Well, it's implied that Brain Bomber damaged Max to the point that he needed to be rebuilt as a cyborg (kind of like Vader). I think it logically follows that Brain Bomber did personally turn him into a Bomber-cyborg, given the following:

- Brain Bomber has been known to work on himself. He created the Remote Bomb, which he is seen to be using. And likely, the abilities that he displays in Tournament are his own modifications. Also, he is clearly a technician and a weapons specialist (Remote Bomb, Ultimate Weapon...). And, of course, he himself is a Bomber-cyborg.

- Max disappeared after he was defeated. No one on Phantarion knew what happened to him, and it's safe to assume that no one there would have had the technology to turn him into what he is now. And I honestly doubt that Max would have the know-how to repair himself, not to mention the fact that he was so damaged in the first place.

- Brain Bomber brainwashes Max and uses him to build the Ultimate Weapon. So probably, he would have rebuilt Max with the intention of using such a capable fighter as his personal soldier.

So yeah, in summation, I agree with you. It's not explicitly stated, but it's the only logical conclusion to draw, and I doubt that Hudson is going to give us any more info dumps on this backstory. I'll look into the Japanese text some day and see if there's anything missing, but from what I've seen the English translation looks pretty faithful. Only thing I can think of is that "he and Max stabbed each other" line, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

Oh, how I missed these discussions.

Clearly it's you guys who should be running a frighteningly comprehensive Bomberman site, as I didn't pay a lick of attention to any of the background story told by the NPCs. =P

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