Hey,

allow me to introduce myself. I'm Oerg866 and I am part of the scene group that created Dynablaster Revenge (albeit not a developer :P). I am a software engineer and musician. I do a lot of homebrew work on the good old Sega Mega Drive and am the main programmer of the scene demo "Overdrive".

Back to why I'm here...

I am no stranger to the Bomberman franchise. Back in 2003, a buddy and I used to duke it out on Generations on the Gamecube, which was tons of fun. Of course we did not know at the time that we sucked, hard (much like the game...). I ultimately came to the conclusion that all of the most remembered classics have either bad controls, tons of level gimmicks and items that ruin the game by making it essentially random and uncontrollable, or both. All Super Nintendo versions suffer from this infidelity, and so do many of the newer ones (although I have of course not played every single one of them).

During the last year a good friend and I have developed an intense liking towards the Mega Drive rendition of Bomberman (appropriately named Mega Bomberman), which is a (in some aspects way too direct) port of Bomberman '94 on the Turbografx 16. This version got it right.

It has a stage that opens up tons of strategic possibilities without being too random. I am talking of course about Stage 7, with the warp doors. You can play it safe, lock people out, develop escape routes or outright rush the guy, it's all possible here.

It has louies. They are basically an extra life, so to say, and in addition to that, they have different abilities that can give you an edge, but also can end up killing you if you're doing it wrong. Except for the pink one. That one doesn't do jack shit. They sure went out of their way to try and make it seem that way,though. Quoting the manual: "The pink louie can dance!"

It only contains a limited set of items: Kickers, bombs, fires, bomb chain and the good ol' skull.

The control is crisp. Just perfect. The controller has only three buttons anyway. Each one has one, and only one function to it.

For about a year now we have been playing each other in sometimes several hour long daily sessions, clocking up over 2500 games since we started (of which ~2/3 are logged in an excel sheet... yes, I'm pedantic.).

We started encountering some oversights and bugs, one of which completely broke the game for us (you could end up invincible in some situations). As I am not adverse to debuggers and disassemblers, I reverse-engineered large parts of the game and ultimately fixed this. At the same time, I injected some custom code that made the game directly boot to the battle menu. You can read all about that here:

http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?27697-Mega-Bomberman-Fixing-a-bug-in-a-20-year-old-game

Based on my notes I also created an overlay to use for streaming or recording games (which has not happened yet, because the audience would likely not exceed 5 people.)

It can be seen in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYsSpt03FS4

Anyway, we started wondering how we compare to the rest of the people (if there are any) who have devoted large portions of their free time to a bomberman game. We checked on youtube, and... it is full of wannabes who actually completely suck at the game. So we googled and found this place. Hello!

You ask, what do you need to play this online?

You need Kega Fusion 3.64, obtainable here: http://eidolons-inn.net
And you need the game, in this case my bugfixed "touranment" edition.

To host, all you need to forward is UDP Port 5394.

So, would any of you like to play a few games against me and/or my colleague?

Cheers,
Oerg866