Bombuzal
Bombuzal is a puzzle game designed by Antony Crowther and David Bishop, originally released on Commodore 64 in December 1988, with subsequent ports to Amiga, Atari ST, and DOS in 1989. The Super Famicom version released in Japan in December 1990, notable as the first third-party game published for the Super Famicom/SNES platform. The North American SNES release came in August 1992 under the retitled name "Ka-Blooey," making it only the third game overall released for the SNES in North America, after *Super Mario World* and *F-Zero*.
Availability: Nintendo Switch Online — Super Nintendo Entertainment System app (Nintendo Classics)
This is a systems/mechanics guide rather than a linear walkthrough — a fixed step-by-step route isn't the useful format for a puzzle-action title.
Controls
The player character moves in the four cardinal directions between tiles on a gridded, isometric island-style stage. The player primes a bomb by standing on its tile and holding the action button until a countdown (roughly three seconds) finishes; the bomb detonates once the player steps off its tile. The SNES version supports switching between a main isometric gameplay view and a top-down overview/map view via the SELECT button.
Rules and Systems
The objective of each stage is to detonate or otherwise eliminate every bomb present on the stage without being caught in a blast or falling off the stage's edge. Bombs vary in size; generally only the smallest bombs can be safely detonated by the player directly, since the player has time to move away before they explode. Medium and large bombs must be set off remotely, via chain reaction from a nearby detonation, rather than being manually primed and survived. When a bomb explodes, any other bombs on adjacent tiles within the blast radius also detonate in a chain reaction. The game includes hazard types beyond bombs: Mines, which are lethal if stepped on and do not trigger adjacent bombs; A-Bombs, which detonate all other A-Bombs on the stage when one explodes; and hazard tiles such as Ice (slippery footing) and Dissolver tiles (which break down under weight). Enemies named Sinister and Dexter move around the stage in predictable patterns and must be avoided. The game spans 130 stages across its C64/DOS/SNES versions, with complexity increasing over the course of the game.
Practical Strategy
Since medium and large bombs can only be safely detonated via chain reaction from a nearby explosion, planning a stage's bomb-clearing order to start with directly-primable small bombs positioned near larger ones is the central puzzle-solving technique implied by the detonation rules. Because later stages are described as demanding careful planning due to limited on-screen visibility, switching to the top-down map view before committing to a route is a reasonable general technique given the two-view-mode structure, though no specific stage walkthrough was consulted to confirm this for individual levels.
Still confirming
- The exact blast radius and adjacency rules for chain-reaction detonation (e.g., whether diagonal tiles count as "adjacent") were not confirmed in the sources reviewed.
- Whether the SNES/Ka-Blooey version differs mechanically from the Super Famicom Japanese release beyond the title change and any localization was not confirmed.
- Level-by-level layout details and any password/continue system for progressing through the 130 stages were not found.