Bombuzal is a Puzzle Game designed by Anthony Crowther and David Bishop. The game was published by Image Works in 1988 for the Amiga, Atari ST, and Commodore 64, with additional versions coming to MS-DOS in 1989, and the Super Famicom in 1990. The Super Famicom version would be localized to the North American Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1992, under the altered title of Ka-Blooey.
The game is divided into many stages where you move a character across a series of tiles with bombs littered around, The objective in each stage is to detonate all the bombs while avoiding being caught in the blasts or falling off the stage. The player character can move in the four cardinal directions to move between tiles, and activate a bomb by standing on its tile and holding the action button until a three-second countdown finishes. Once they step off that bomb's tile, it will explode, and any other bombs on tiles adjacent to the blast will detonate in a chain reaction.
Across the game's 130 stages, the game gradually introduces new items to interact with the stages in different ways, such as teleporters, landmines, droids the player can control separately from their character, switches, and even enemies that get in the way.
PLAYER 1, GET READY:
- 1-Up: You gain one extra life every time you clear a stage.
- Contain the Kaboom: The power field is an item that stops any explosions that reach it. Even if a big bomb explodes right next to it, the explosion won't reach any other tiles.
- Covers Always Lie: The cover art for the Commodore 64 version of the game depicts a character who doesn't look anything like the one you control in the game, being a human with a large chin rather than the blobby Cartoon Creature with a big red nose that appears in the game.
- Frictionless Ice: When you step on an ice tile, your character will uncontrollably slide forward until they reach another non-ice tile. If there is no non-ice tile at the end of their path, however...
- Isometric Projection: The game is playable in both 2D mode, which gives an overhead view of the stage and the character as the player moves around, and 3D mode, which turns the world on a 45 degree angle and moves the vertical axis to provide a three-dimensional bird's eye view of the game world.
- Kaizo Trap: Even after all the bombs have been detonated, the player can still fail the stage unless their character survives the final chain reaction and remains on a safe tile.
- Made of Indestructium: The armor plate tiles, which are represented by rivets on the corners, cannot be destroyed by bomb blasts.
- Meaningless Lives: In the SNES version, the lives system is somewhat redundant, as you are given a password for every stage you clear. They serve a bit more of a purpose in the older versions, where you needed to clear eight stages in order to get a new password.
- Password Save: The player can start the game at different levels by entering a four-digit password. The game provides passwords every eight stages in the C64 version, and after every stage in the SNES port.
- Shout-Out: Level 29 has you detonating bombs and mines with the tiles left behind forming the shape of letters that spell out "ZZAP64", referring to Zzap!64, a computer games magazine that was popular when the game came out and focused largely on Commodore 64 games.
- Stuff Blowing Up: Each stage is covered in lots of explosives, and the objective is to detonate them all without getting caught in the blast yourself.
- Temporary Platform: Cracked tiles will break apart after you step off of them.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: The teleporters have no indication of what tile they move you to until you step on them, so if they move you to a space that will kill you, there's no way to know until you've died to it once.
- Unwinnable by Design: As most tiles are destroyed when they are caught in explosions, many levels can potetntially leave you with no way to finish them if you do things in the wrong order. The only option is to lose a life and try again.
