Konami has turned a classic party game into an arcade gambling nightmare

An eight-player Bomberman arcade game sounds like an absolute dream, massively increasing the scale of one of the best party games ever made. But be careful if you see one because it sounds like publisher Konami has turned that dream into a nightmare.

Earlier this week, indie dev Brandon Sheffield posted a few images of a new arcade installation, saying, "We used to joke about this when it came to micro-transactions but they finally did it. Konami made a Bomberman game where you pay for bombs with real money. Once you run out (after like three bombs) the game yells at you to insert money while you walk around helplessly. Eventually, it stops letting you walk. I might be late to the party in this but it actually made me mad that anyone would actually think to make this?"

Since I ran across this tweet, I've been fascinated by the idea of this game, and I've been down an absolutely brain-melting rabbit hole trying to figure out what the deal with it is. As one comment notes, this is actually a localization of a Japanese medal game, called Bomberman: The Medal. Konami announced Bomberman: The Medal back in 2018 ahead of its release in Japanese arcades.

Medal games, similar to pachinko, are a way to simulate the questionable thrill of gambling in a country with restrictive gambling laws. Basically, you buy a pool of arcade-specific tokens (often represented digitally on something like a credit card) and slowly spend those tokens to play games until you either hit a jackpot or, more likely, run out of currency. Sometimes you can redeem leftover tokens for prizes.

Bomberman: The Medal works pretty much like a standard Bomberman game, except for the fact that you spend medals to place bombs. Two medals, for example, will let you place a normal bomb, while you can spend 10 medals to drop a massive AOE blast. Catching enemies in those blasts will get you more medals that you can use to continue playing.

This is the point where I have to stop and acknowledge the fact that arcade games have always been exploitative. In modern terms, these are typically absurdly difficult games that ask you to make a microtransaction every time you run out of lives. With that in mind, Bomberman: The Medal doesn't sound so bad. You put some money in, and the better you play, the longer you get to keep playing. I'd certainly rather play traditional Bomberman, but if I've got an afternoon to waste at an arcade? Sure, I'll see how long I can make my medals last.

But that's not how this localized version works. Information about it online is pretty limited, but I've seen various spottings of the machine in America dating back to 2020. The English version appears to be exclusive to Round1, a Japan-based amusement chain with numerous locations in the US. Most pertinently, this version is not a medal game - it's a ticket game.

Yes, the localized Bomberman arcade machine is basically a glorified skeeball setup, just with far more pernicious hooks to keep you playing. You pump money in, drop your limited amount of bombs, and get your payout in prize redemption tickets. With no tokens to earn, you can't get additional playtime by playing. Instead, your little Bomberman character literally starts telling you to "swipe the card."

The best demonstration I've found is in the video below, which I had to dig deep (and I mean deep) into YouTube to find. The grossest part is how the big enemies with the big jackpot payouts take tons of bombs to destroy. If you hit one, it sets off a blazing chain of flashing lights and encouragement to keep attacking, but with no health bar, you have no idea how much money you've got to drop in order to have enough bombs to destroy it. The only solution? "Swipe the card." 

The other curious bit from that video is that you don't actually control a Bomberman character, just a cursor that shows where you're placing your bombs. It's the same in the images hosted by the 2020 article above. Sometime in the past three years, the localized machines switched from cursors to controllable characters, just like you had in the original Bomberman: The Medal. I guess the "swipe the card" message means more if it's coming from a little cartoon character rather than a piece of UI.

The English Bomberman arcade game has drawn a lot of comparisons to those fishing-themed ticket redemption games you often see at modern arcades. Those games are basically glorified slot machines, offering a thin veneer of skill-based play to distract from the fact that you're continually dropping cash for a minuscule shot at a jackpot of minimal value. Sadly, it looks like this Bomberman game is not much different.

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