Bomber Raid
Eternal Cuddly Game #8
Type of Game
The best interactive show about World War II ever. It blows all the Discovery Channel documentaries out of the water.
Release date on our machines
June 1989: the end of the Master System era in Japan—sob, sob.
Developer
Sanritsu Denki Co., Ltd., a studio affiliated with SEGA, which made its mark in the 1980s before fading from the scene with Fantasy Zone on the Game Gear.
Publisher
SEGA Enterprises Ltd.—the very same people who abandoned the Master System in Japan. COWARDS!
Bomber Raid: available on nothing at all except the original console. Just another nostalgic game that’s fading into obscurity, met with general indifference. Farewell.
I was four or five years old when I first laid eyes on that cartridge. I have a vague memory of holding the box in my hands on the streets of Rouen, right after we’d bought it at a store with bins of games spilling out onto the sidewalk. But maybe I’m confusing it with another game that has nothing to do with it, like Alex Kidd in Shinobi World or Dynamite Düx. Who knows—my memory at that age hadn’t really kicked in yet. I’m probably mixing them up, actually, since I consider this video game one of the very first I ever played. I think Bomber Raid actually showed up around the same time as Psycho Fox at my dad’s place—that is, before I can remember my trips to the store to drool over the crazy new games I’d never get to play. For Dad, it was the airplane game where you go to war alone against the whole world; for me, the game with crazy animals that, um… go on a crusade against one of their own. In the end, we played both to the max together, the first one in super-serious mode, and the second one, um, well, same thing. In any case, we were still playing them when the swan song of that brave Master System sounded.
Boomer Raid
Not bad for a console that stuck with us well into 1997, right up until the PlayStation showed up at our place. With such a great run with SEGA’s 8-bit console, surely there’s a way I can apply for Brazilian citizenship, right? Why? To work at Tec Toy, of course.
Lies, bullets, and cameras
OK, this isn't the ugliest Master System cover out there, but it's definitely one of the most misleading. While we're promised we'll be piloting a super high-tech stealth bomber (at least for the time), what a surprise to find that, in reality, we have to save the world at the controls of an old twin-engine prop plane straight out of World War II! Well, honestly, I didn’t care; I didn’t even feel betrayed until around 2013. To me, the box just represented one of the types of enemies you have to take out—nothing more. In fact, that reasoning makes a certain amount of sense when you draw a parallel with the crazy black fighter jets that come barreling at you to warn of a boss’s arrival. Anyway, we came across so many mind-blowing vehicles during a single playthrough that seeing the crappy plane drawn on the box didn’t really matter. Yeah, we might be flying a WWII-era plane, but the developers had a hard time agreeing on a specific timeline for the enemies.
We get plenty of crappy old planes to shoot down, but also much more modern craft (which look a lot like the beast on the cover—keep taunting us, yeah), not to mention bosses like the tank that’s bigger than the screen, or the ten-kilometer-long destroyer. Even the capsules containing the bonuses, for instance; capsules that look like they came straight out of a very, very old alien movie. Oh, and those other unidentified objects clustered together in tight groups over there. Black and white on the sides, and glowing red in the middle; I used to call them cameras. Obviously, we’re not facing real cameras—I wonder how they could have damaged our fuselage, even though we’re struggling in a fifty-year-old thing. But hey, it still looks more like one than our ancient clunker looks like the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird on the cover.
And anyway, our own Bomber—you’ve got to see what it can do once it’s gobbled up a few weapon power-ups! Its super-powerful shots? They don’t exactly seem like they belong in the same era as Panzer III tanks and V2 rockets. Well, once again, I didn’t care about any of that. When I hit max power, full speed, and had my two little buddies with me, I felt like a total beast. By the way, I always set my baby planes to position 2—that is, on either side, but slightly ahead, firing diagonally. I found they blew up way less often that way. You could also position them in front of us in single file so they’d fire to the sides (super stupid), the same thing but behind our own craft (even more idiotic), or straight out from our wings, firing straight ahead (not too dumb, but not exactly brilliant either).
Hey, maybe I should have tried placing them differently to see if I missed some kind of hidden strategy to survive longer, or something? Otherwise, we just keep firing the machine gun nonstop, right? But what’s in the term “Bomber Raid”? Bomber, yeah. And we’ve got plenty of bombs to drop! But only as a last resort, not often, for very limited use, and very questionable. Even if it vaporizes a third of the screen if you do it right, there’s no point in basing the game’s title around this feature when we barely use it. Yet another misleading claim on the box, for sure! They would have been better off calling it Brolom-brolom Raid, or Batman Launcher Raid—then I would have understood. I’d love to be able to rave about the game’s graphics, but I have to admit that in terms of art direction and variety of settings, Bomber Raid doesn’t make much of a scorch… uh, splash, sorry. Because as for ships, well, it blows up quite a few of them. Hey, was there a sale on blue textures or something?
A stage with quite a bit of water, one with a lot of dirt but still some water, another with tons of water, the next one with EVEN more water, and the last one with clouds everywhere to hide the fact that, well, there’s still water under our two sputtering engines. Plus, since the difficulty isn’t too overwhelming, we sometimes let our guard down—and then we quickly realize there’s too much water. Luckily, I made up for it with the weapons! Or rather, the upgrades to the basic missile, which gave me a nice sense of progress. I know all shooter games have this kind of feature, but I was just discovering it, you know. Calm down. I’d given all of them a name, these upgrades. The Dash, the Big Dash, the Candy Cane (or the Scratch, because it made a sound like Velcro being ripped off), the moon, the “brolom-brolom” (because of the sound of a rock avalanche it makes—what else?), the double candy (but not double scratch, because consistency has been missing from this game for a while), and finally the Batman.
Nope, the Batman doesn’t talk like the vigilante; its shape vaguely resembles that of a winged creature. This is the ultimate weapon you can use starting in the second half of the second level—provided you haven’t missed too many power-ups along the way. Pretty early on, actually, well before the halfway point of the game. The Batman lets you take out pretty much anything that attacks you pretty easily. Plus, it stops most enemy projectiles. The basic stuff, I mean—not the more powerful rounds. Do enemies fire more powerful rounds? Uh, actually no, so there you go. The Batman stops everything, period. Too bad—I actually preferred the moon. I would have loved for it to be the ultimate attack. Why didn’t I do the same with the weapons from U.N. Squadron or R-Type Delta? That would have been awesome. Be careful, because just like in many other shooters, losing a life sends you straight back to the start.
And the minimum speed. And it robs us of our little planes. Please, not them—I thought they were so cute, with their lack of animation and their 3x2-pixel sprites. Those single-engine planes that aren’t quite fully formed yet—A-DO-RABLE! The enemies’ faces? I’ve already mentioned this, but it really has nothing to do with anything. Twin-engine planes a bit sharper than ours, rubbing shoulders with self-propelled multicolored pills, ageless turrets flown over by prehistoric helicopters. Unless the design comes straight out of the eighth millennium, in mega-retro mode. Aircraft carriers fossilized into volcanic islands, ships plucked straight from a plastic battleship game… I think the graphic designer(s)’ motto was to avoid creating any sense of harmony whatsoever. Well done, mission accomplished. That might actually be harder to pull off than I think.
Banger Rough
For once, I’m not going to say that the O.S.T. saves the rest—it’s actually the other way around. Aside from the main menu music, which lasts ten seconds, there’s only one track that plays throughout the first four levels. Same goes for the bosses; they all use the same theme, come on! The final stage gets its own track, and so does the final boss. That said, the term “moderate variation on the melody” would be more accurate than “own track.” It seems like the soundtrack suffered from the same “watered-down” syndrome as the rest of the game. A bland uniformity tinged with insincerity, more or less. Sorry, but you’ve got to call it what it is. Anyway, no obligation to do anything, but still. It doesn’t exactly knock your socks off either. Without the help of nostalgia, I wonder what I’d make of these tracks. The intro fits the military vibe well, though. And for the bosses, we’re served up something alarmist, though not super pleasant. If you played the music from the levels in a blind test, I don’t think anyone would guess it’s from a flight simulator. Personally, I would’ve guessed something like mushroom picking in the forest. But a not-so-clean forest, with tire scraps and broken beer bottles scattered everywhere, and mushrooms that aren’t very tasty. And you’d even be playing the basic bum in Moktar. In that case, the Psycho Fox O.S.T. really got to me. But hey, nostalgia worked wonders.
Bombastic Raid
As much as I think I loved Psycho Fox beyond all reason, I could say the same thing about Bomber Raid. If I stick to the Master System, the total time I spent playing those two titles must easily surpass the combined time spent on all the others. And yet, there was plenty to enjoy with the rest as well, since I was lucky enough to get my hands on Rocky, Asterix, Castle of Illusion, and After Burner, among others. But while we played through one cartridge after another on that console, my father and I never bought a single other shooter—vertical or horizontal, it didn’t matter. It just goes to show, Bomber Raid was enough on its own. Unless my dad secretly wanted to get more, but always let me give in to my kid’s obsession with platformers. That would’ve been nice of him, and a little selfish of me; then again, I was the kid, and besides, we didn’t see each other every weekend. Maybe it was simply that the difficulty level of Bomber Raid was perfectly suited to my little hands, covered in crumbs from Dinosaurus cookies. I managed to beat it several times, starting when I was six or seven.
A game far too easy for the average person, and one that, for most video game historians, holds only symbolic value as the very last Master System game released in Japan. For me, it creates a cozy bubble of nostalgia where I tuck away the cartoon Heathcliff and the Catillac Cats, my bike crashes in the wild boar-infested forest near Rouen, Mecano’s “Hijo de la Luna,” and my grandmother laughing as she says she can’t keep up with technological progress anymore, while she watches me drop bombs on my enemies, the Master System plugged into the TV in her bedroom. Yeah, we used to take the Master System to our grandparents’ house—is there a problem with that? I dream of hearing one day that this console blows someone’s mind, just because it seems so futuristic. That would mean we’ve found a way to bring back the nineties. I’m going to summon Grandma with a Ouija board, actually.
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