Enjoy Bomberman's most obscure outing with an afternoon live stream
I will once again be taking to the virtual airwaves this afternoon for another Gintendo livestream, this time at 5 p.m. ET (2 p.m. PT). I'll be playing another pick-up from my trip to Japan, generously donated to the cause by Eric Klein of Kyde and Eric. It's a little thing called "SameGame."
That's sah-meh gah-meh, not same game.
I discovered SameGame the same way I did Puzzle Bobble: By way of a shareware Mac-based ripoff on my university newspaper's production computers. The real game is much more interesting than that simple clone, though.
Hudson's SameGame only ever shipped in Japan, for Super Famicom. It came in an unusually oversized cartridge... yet it looks curiously reminiscent of something else. Specifically, if you're familiar with the Japanese version of the Super Game Boy, it looks almost exactly identical to that cartridge.
And for good reason: Like Super Game Boy, SameGame is a cart within a cart. You can plug expansion packs into the top slot to switch up game elements. By default, it shipped with a Hudson mascot pack, and apparently this standard combo is not particularly in demand — overpriced Akihabara game shop Super Potato was selling this entire setup for a mere ¥180. That's about a buck-fifty. They did have a couple of expansion packs as well, but those were selling for around $20 apiece... so I decided to go with just the basic pack, thank you very much. Apparently all the expansions really do is allow you to switch graphic to different tile sets, which is not really worth the premium. Besides, the default pak contains Bomberman and Bonk, so they kinda gave away the premium set…
I haven't been able to find much concrete documentation for SameGame in English, so I have no idea how many jumper paks Hudson created, or what characters and properties they contained. I do know that SameGame was somehow able to connect to Nintendo's Japan-only Super Famicom online service via the Satellaview, which I think allowed you to upload rankings to a leaderboard.
So, it's a pretty neat 16-bit curio. It's also not really that much of a game, so my guess is that I'll play this for a while and then switch to something more exciting midway through the stream. I have no idea what that'll be, but I'll fish something fun out of my fairly respectable Super NES/Super Famicom collection to make it worth your while.
As always, you can witness the stream live and in person on my YouTube channel, or you can watch it later via the stream archive. See you there!
