There was a time when I spent many a day playing Super Bomberman 2 on the Super Nintendo. And it was good. Years later, during a new generation of consoles, I was to spend even more time with another Bomberman title, Saturn Bomberman on Sega's Saturn. After flirting with a few of the subsequent GameCube releases, I was ready for the series to return to form in this new, Live-heavy world. I received this generation's first Bomberman, Bomberman: Act Zero, and this, friends, is not Bomberman.

Gone are the super-deformed characters, vibrant graphics, imaginative levels, sweaty palms and huddled friends around a television. Instead, Hudson has given the gaming community the equivalent to a shovelware title with a $50 price tag. The wacky creatures and characters of the previous titles have been replaced by robots. Robots. Menacing-looking robots. Robots that lay bombs in warehouses. A world that had been fanciful has become bland, with black and gray dominating the humdrum landscape.

Horribly generic characters and levels aren't the only new additions, though. New to the series is a character creation mode. Now you can select whether you want a male or (well-endowed) female robot, then you can pick from a handful of colors. Enjoy the revolution.

Some additional, though not very substantial, inclusions are a version of the game with a zoomed-up camera that makes it a pain to navigate (called first-person mode for some reason) with characters having health bars (sacrilege); a standard game mode with the zoomed-out character and one-hit kill policy; and an online mode. In case you missed the absence of its mentioning, please let me point something out to you: There is no way to play multiplayer on one system. My head hurts trying to do the mental gymnastics necessary to understand why a multiplayer-focused game would lack one of the most basic tenets of multiplayer. I also have a heavy heart in conveying that message to you. There’s nothing pretty about this situation, for anyone involved.

The only true addition to the series is the ability to stack power-ups and carry them over to the next level. The explosions come in two colored versions, corresponding to the power of the blast, and can make the dull levels look slightly less so as purple flames shoot through and around the breakable and indestructible blocks, with the more apocalyptic sites coming with several power-ups stacked. There are items for health, speed, bigger explosions, etc. The power-ups are lost whenever you die. Actually, whenever you die, you're booted back to the main menu – no continuing is fine, but is asking for a Restart or Play Again option too much? Not especially, particularly for the price; but apparently very much so, here. Such a display of a lack of basic consideration is indicative of the entire experience. This isn’t even really one for the fans.

Overall: 2.5/10

The fundamentals of the series are still enjoyable in Bomberman: Act Zero, but for the asking price you would be much better off buying a Super Nintendo with a copy of Super Bomberman 2 or a Sega Saturn with a copy of Saturn Bomberman. Both titles are superior in every particular way, not to mention that you can actually play with more than one person on the same system – what a novel idea. Bad, Hudson. Bad. Wait for this one to hit $10.