amiga.democrat

The story of

Dyna Blaster

1992 · Ubi Soft · Action · 1-5 players

Released (Amiga)	1991 or early 1992 (sources differ); reviewed from February 1992 ^[13]
Original game	Bomberman, Hudson Soft, PC Engine, 7 December 1990 ^[1]
Amiga publisher	Ubi Soft ^[2]
Amiga conversion	Actionamics ^[13]
Amiga code	Florian Strauch, Michael Kleps, Mathias Reichert, Armin Sander, Jörg Puls ^[16]
Amiga graphics	Florian Strauch, Alexander Meyer ^[16]
Amiga music / sound effects	Eike Steffen / Sadik Domlu ^[16]
Original design / music	Tsukasa Kuwahara / Jun Chikuma ^[1]
Launch price (UK)	£30.99 (C+VG listed £25.99) ^[2]
Players	1-5, with the bundled parallel-port adaptor ^[2]
Amiga Action	93% ^[6]
Amiga Format	87% ^[8]
Amiga Power	83% ^[3]
CU Amiga	84% ^[2]
Sales	Not known ^[1]

The idea

Dyna Blaster is the European name for Hudson Soft's Bomberman, first released on the PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16) in 1990 ^[1]. You walk a little bomb-dropper around a maze of blocks. You blow up the blocks to open a path, blow up the monsters, and then find the exit hidden under one of the blocks ^[1]^[2]. Each stage hides one power-up. Some give you more bombs or bigger blasts, some let you set your bombs off by remote control or walk through blocks ^[2].

The story asks you to rescue a kidnapped girl from an evil wizard. To do it you play through 64 stages spread over eight levels, with a four-minute limit on each stage ^[2]. As CU Amiga said, though, the game "really comes into its own" once a second player joins in ^[2].

Five players on one Amiga

The battle mode is what people remember. The box came with a small joystick adaptor that plugs into the Amiga's parallel port. Together with the Amiga's own two joystick ports and the keyboard, it lets up to five players fight in the same maze ^[2]^[3]^[11]. Each player tries to trap the others with well-placed bombs, and the last one standing wins. Wikipedia notes that this five-player mode became a favourite in computer clubs ^[1]. Amiga Power picked the multiplayer game as the highlight of the whole package ^[3].

Who made it

The game itself is Hudson Soft's. On the PC Engine original, Tsukasa Kuwahara was the sole designer and Jun Chikuma composed the music ^[1]. Ubi Soft brought it to the Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS in Europe ^[1]^[13].

The Amiga conversion was done by a team called Actionamics. MobyGames lists it as the porting studio, and ExoticA names it as the team behind the game's music ^[13]^[15]. The UK magazines simply credited Hudson Soft as developer ^[4]^[6]. The Hall of Light and Lemon Amiga name the people involved: Florian Strauch, Michael Kleps, Mathias Reichert, Armin Sander and Jörg Puls wrote the code; Florian Strauch and Alexander Meyer drew the graphics; Eike Steffen wrote the music and Sadik Domlu the sound effects ^[16]^[17]. Lemon Amiga also credits Axel Bialke with coordination, and Florian Welsch and Tobias Strauch with direction ^[17]. Wikipedia credits a team called Hurricane with the MS-DOS version, but gives no source ^[1].

Why the new name? An unsourced line on Wikipedia says European media linked the word "Bomberman" with terrorist bombings ^[18]. In 1992, CU Amiga called the change "a mystery" ^[2].

Release and price

The sources disagree on the date. Wikipedia says the Amiga version came out in France in January 1992 and in the rest of Europe in April 1992 ^[1]. MobyGames, ExoticA and Lemon Amiga give 1991 ^[13]^[15]^[17]. The German Amiga Joker reviewed it in its February 1992 issue, and British magazines from March 1992 ^[2]^[9]^[10].

It was not cheap. Most UK reviews list a price of £30.99 ^[2]^[4]^[6]^[7]^[8]^[9]. Computer + Video Games printed £25.99 ^[5], and the German Amiga Joker listed DM 84 ^[10]. Amiga Power blamed the joystick adaptor in the box for the high price ^[3]. How many copies it sold is not known: we found no sales figure in any source.

What the press said

Most reviewers loved it, especially with friends round ^[12]^[17]:

Amiga Action: 93% (Jason Simmons) ^[6]
Computer + Video Games: 93% (Frank O'Connor) ^[5]
Amiga Computing: 92% (Daniel Whitehead) ^[7]
Zero: 88% (Martin Pond) ^[17]
Amiga Format: 87% (Linda Barker) ^[8]
The One: 87% (Sarah Hibbert) ^[9]
CU Amiga: 84% (Dan Slingsby) ^[2]
Amiga Mania: 84% (Ashley Cotter-Cairns) ^[17]
Amiga Power: 83% (Matt Bielby) ^[3]
Amiga Joker: 70% (Peter Braun) ^[10]
Datormagazin (Sweden): 60% (Christer Bau) ^[17]

The complaints were also much the same from one magazine to the next. CU Amiga found the random single-player mazes became boring after a while, but felt the multiplayer games more than made up for it ^[2]. Amiga Mania thought it wouldn't hold one player's attention for long ^[1]. Amiga Power's main gripe was the price ^[3].

Legacy

Bomberman went on to become a long-running series, and on the Amiga this conversion was popular above all for its five-player battle mode ^[1]. Amiga Joker's readers voted it the third-best dexterity game of 1992 ^[14]. Wikipedia describes the 1990 Bomberman as the first video game with "last man standing" (battle royale) play ^[1]. It is a fitting title for a game that has five people crowded round one Amiga until only one of them is left.

Sources

Drafted by Claude from the sources listed; fact-checked by Claude, not yet reviewed by a person.

Dyna Blaster

The story of the game

Bombers in a maze: blow up the walls, collect power-ups, catch the other bomber in a blast. First round won takes the match.

Play it yourself

Your name

Against

Your side (practice)

Keyboard: arrows or WASD, Space or Ctrl to fire, Shift second fire, P pause. Gamepad: stick or d-pad, A fire, B second fire, Back pause.

Ranked: a hidden start and a side drawn at random, and your rating moves (Players and Everyone boards).

Watch a match

Side A Side B

Ranked: a hidden start, sides drawn at random, ratings move. Practice: the public start, side A is White bomber (top left, port 2).

Upload a bot

Bot name (or NAME in the script)

Your name

Lua source (or pick a file)

Rankings

#	Name	Author	Rating	Played	W	L	D
1	reference ✓ tested	the arena	1200?	0	0	0	0	source
1	reference ✓ tested	the arena	1200?	0	0	0	0	source
Nobody yet.

One rating per game for everyone; "?" marks a rating from fewer than 10 ranked games. Human players join the rankings soon.

Recent matches

When	Side A	Side B	Result	Length
	reference	reference	reference won	0:13	practice replay

Writing a bot

A bot is Lua 5.4 text. frame(n) is called once a frame and returns the joystick lines to hold; init(port, players) runs once first; NAME = "..." names it on the picture.

NAME = "superbot"
function init(port, players) me = port end
function frame(n)
  local v = ram.u8(0x1234)        -- the game's memory, read only
  return bits.UP + bits.FIRE      -- UP 1, DOWN 2, LEFT 4, RIGHT 8, FIRE 16, FIRE2 32
end

Available: ram.u8/u16/u32(addr), ram.bytes(addr, len), bits.*, print, say(text), and Lua's base, string, table and math. No io, os, load or debug; 16 MB of memory.

Thinking out loud: say("going for the ladder") shows what the bot is thinking under the match picture, its last three thoughts per side. Only a change shows, so it is fine to call it every frame with the current plan.

Time: a frame is 20 ms and the emulator needs about 11 of them, so each frame() call has a cap of 700,000 units: a unit is one Lua instruction, and each ram.* read costs 3 more (plus one per 64 bytes). That is about 7 ms in a fast browser. A call that goes over is stopped and presses nothing that frame. A new bot is untested until a practice match of a minute or more (the "Test it now" button after an upload) shows it never goes over; only tested bots play ranked, and going over in any match untests it. The match screen shows each bot's cost as a share of the cap.

Sides: A is White bomber (top left, port 2); B is Black bomber (bottom right, port 3). A match ends when the game's results say so, or after 3 minutes.

Start from the reference bot, the results plugin, and the public start state (load it in WinUAE or FS-UAE with the AROS ROM).