destroying me from the inside. Who sounds like Michael Cera now?!

And what a freaking thing to find when you come into work feeling like crap...a Wii minigame

collection. See, what I’m really saying is a lot of Wii minigame collections come

off an assembly line of suck. Playing them—plus being sick—basically meets international

standards for torture.

Fortunately, such is not the case with Bomberman.

Released to the Wii back in the glory days of 2008, Bomberman Land is a minigame collection.

I’ll wait for you to sigh before I tell you...it’s not that bad. In fact, as awful

as these things sometimes got on Wii, this is manna from minigame freaking heaven. It’s

not often one of these games is worth playing alone, but this one comes close.

You play as a Bomberman who’s on vacation. There’s some tournament up in the sky, he

goes to participate, and the minigames commence. The entire game is set up like a tournament

of sorts, with the top players moving on to the next rounds.

The advantage here is that, because of the structure, I actually kind of cared about

doing well in the minigames. And that’s something you don’t often say about the

solo components of these games. The drawback, on the other hand, is that the game has lots

of lobbies and hubs...areas that are basically just wasting your time. There’s no reason

to walk around looking for a minigame when a menu would suffice.

Of course, what makes or breaks a minigame collection are the minigames. And in Bomberman

Land, they’re sort of representative of the overall product—they’re far from mind-blowing

or even original, but they’re done very well. I may have been familiar with most of

their ideas, but I didn’t come across a single minigame in this collection that didn’t

play well. And in fact, a good deal of them were actually fun.

But with the single-player focus comes a pretty serious drawback. For some reason, Bomberman

Land doesn’t offer many of the minigames for multiplayer use at all. The game does

include a retro Bomberman mode, but if you’re looking for multiplayer minigames, this one

is actually kind of a terrible choice.

Bomberman Land is an interesting piece of Wii minigame history. If you enjoy these games

alone, this is a tremendous one to check out. But if you’re hosting a minigame party,

don’t invite Bomberman. He’s just a...selfish prick.

He’d probably put bombs in the coat pile, anyway. What a party pooper!