Month of Mario: Mario’s Bombs Away (Game & Watch)
While Mario is frequently called a plumber, the most famous man in video games has actually worked an impressive number of jobs. Even looking past the many sports he plays professionally and his prolific career as a go-kart driver, Mario’s been a doctor, a referee, a factory worker, a chef, and quite a lot more. Out of all the professions this happy-go-lucky hero has had though, the strangest of all might just be his time spent serving as a soldier, and based on the way it’s portrayed in the Game & Watch title Mario’s Bombs Away, he may have even served in the Vietnam War.
Mario’s Bombs Away sees Mario dressed in green army fatigues, and while he seems to be participating in some actual warfare, he’s not picking up a rifle to fight this battle. Instead, Mario serves as more of a deliveryman for the bombs his fellow soldiers are deploying against enemies entrenched in the jungle. On the far left, one of Mario’s fellow servicemen drops him a bomb that he needs to carry over to a soldier on the far right, the safe delivery complicated by the fact that the men lying in wait in the jungle all have torches perfect for lighting a bomb’s fuse. Mario must quickly scramble over to his ally who can then put the bomb up in the tree, but they’ll only be activated if you can safely deliver five in a row. After they’re lined up, the bombs will go off, flushing out the soldiers behind the trees before you repeat the process all over again. However, there is one more complication, an accidental bit of sabotage possible thanks to the bad habits of a soldier known as the Heavy Smoker.
The Heavy Smoker is lazily taking drags on his cigars while Mario and the other two soldiers are working to fight the enemy, but what makes his idle recreation actually dangerous is his decision to rest beside a tipped over barrel of oil. When he’s done with a cigarette, he’ll toss it backwards, a small flame traveling across an oil spill that just so happens to cover the entire walking space Mario has available to him. Luckily, you’re not at risk of burning up if you walk over the flame, but the main way you’ll keep your bomb from being lit by the enemy combatants is by holding it low to the ground. If the flame on the oil happens to travel towards your bomb while it’s lowered, it will ignite, leading to one of only three Misses you can afford before this high score run is over. Curiously, the manual for Mario’s Bombs Away characterizes the Heavy Smoker as actively trying to light the bombs despite seeming almost unaware of the danger he presents in game. For some reason, when Mario’s bomb is lit, he deems it best to scramble back to the man who normally hands him the explosives, the two both getting caught in the blast but thankfully good to go for more rounds so long as it’s not your third loss.
One element might irritate first time players when they start Mario’s Bombs Away, that being the soldier who you’re meant to hand the bombs to. While he’s waiting there to take the explosives you’re delivering, he’s not always going to be ready to take it off your hands. This means there will be times you’re standing directly next to him, arms outstretched, bomb right next to him, and yet he’s not going to take it. You’re left at his whims for when it comes to completing the delivery. Your goal is to earn a high score and a bomb delivery grants you five points, so you might at first worry you won’t be racking up too many points thanks to this uncooperative partner. However, each step you move towards him grants you a point, there being five standing spaces Mario can travel between. Going backwards won’t grant you any points, but interestingly enough, any forward step towards the righthand side will always grant a point. What this means is that you can actually earn a good deal of points just by shuffling about in the middle area, a delivery not technically necessary to rack up a huge score as you can do so just by dancing back and forth.
Five points for a delivery is still helpful of course and you’ll likely spend a good deal of time closer to the right so you might as well do the hand-off it’s available, and you do get ten points for a full set of five deliveries as a further incentive. However, one reason Mario’s Bombs Away doesn’t descend just to bouncing back and forth between two spots to rack up points is the tenacity of the enemy soldiers. Even early on in the easier Game A, it’s pretty common to find all five soldiers lowering their torches around the same time, the player needing to identify the safe standing space as they make their movements. Game A has the enemy soldiers lower their torches and then need to lift them back up afterwards before another attack, but Game B makes them even quicker to strike as they only lower the torch and then can do it again soon after. This is where keeping the bomb low can help in case you find the soldiers have you trapped, but the fire traveling across the oil can serve as a hard barrier to moving forward since it will keep traveling along the spill until it reaches its end at the far left. Make the wrong movements in a greedy hunt for quick points and you can box yourself in with no way to escape, but it doesn’t feel like the game unfairly forced you into such a situation because you were given the freedom to choose whether to press forward and deliver that bomb or linger and risk your life to earn a higher score.
Like many Game & Watch titles, Mario’s Bombs Away also rewards you for managing to reaching a certain score. At 300 points, any Misses you might have earned along the way will be wiped out, making it easier to make an even deeper run. However, if you avoided having any of your bombs blown up before you reach 300 points, you instead get double points for every action taken until your next Miss. The bomb delivery and blowing up the jungle in general should have probably already been worth 10 and 20 points respectively to incentivize them a bit more, but adding more stakes to an already energetic and sometimes hectic challenge is a simple way to up the ante if you manage to make it fairly far without any errors.
THE VERDICT: Mario’s Bombs Away is rather intelligently designed because it knew how to make earning points sound easy yet it requires a good deal of attention and quick action to survive. The fire below is a hard limit on where you can move with the bomb held low, but the soldiers behind the trees are so active that you’ll need to watch closely and move swiftly to get around their constant attacks. Delivering bombs may be the goal technically, but the ability to earn points through simply moving forward does a lot to keep the action consistently rewarding and allows the player to decide when to take risks while leaving room for different approaches to earning high scores. There’s very little to find fault with in its design, even that soldier not always being ready to grab the bomb just a way to make you realize there’s more at play than just the bomb hand off.
And so, I give Mario’s Bombs Away for Game & Watch…
A GOOD rating. If all you had to do was dodge the enemies in the trees to deliver the bombs, Mario’s Bombs Away wouldn’t be quite so dynamic, but that little addition of being able to keep the bomb low leads to this score chaser being surprisingly thrilling. The men behind the trees are able to be a lot more aggressive since you have such a reliable way to avoid their efforts, but the fire that moves across the oil spill is like a moving wall that means to pressure you if you try to keep your bomb low too often. The soldier at the end being unreliable could maybe have been accounted for a little better in terms of the points you earn for a delivery, and the full five only granting you an extra ten on top feels a little small for the difficulty involved. However, by keeping points flowing by rewarding you for dangerous forward movement even after you’ve moved backwards, Mario’s Bombs Away can stay lively and you can achieve high scoring games without frustration. Of the Game & Watch games I’ve played thus far, it’s the closest to earning a Great rating, and if it were on something besides a dedicated handheld, perhaps it could throw in an extra area or two that would help it get there. The dangerous dance between the trees still stays exciting for quite a while because of the mix of there being plenty of fire to avoid while also being incentivized to move constantly to earn more points, so even though it can’t progress beyond its starting design due to being a Game & Watch LCD handheld, it at least comes out being one of the best on offer.
While this turn towards being a grunt on the ground in a war is certainly strange one for Mario, it is definitely an entertaining one. It is possible too it might not take place in Vietnam, this Game & Watch handheld’s alarm featuring a mandrill so it could be this is some conflict in Africa. Whatever lead to Mario fighting for his country though, he was at least handed a more cartoony way of doing so. Mario’s Bombs Away ends up a guilt-free and well-realized score challenge because its way of earning points meant the game didn’t need to hold back when it came to challenging your efforts.