I recently added an overview of one of the earliest Bomber Man games, for the MZ-700. Today I have an overview of the same game for the Multi8. The biggest difference by far is that the Multi8 has proper graphics modes and can shuffle its (fairly limited) palette anywhere it wants on the screen, as opposed to the MZ-700s 8x8 pre-defined, single-color characters on top of a global background color.

I am not knocking the MZ-700, it has ended up with one of the most unique set of games of all the computers in my collection. If anything, the Multi8 just sort of follows in the footsteps of the PC-8801, FM-7, etc. with most of its games, in my experience, looking identical on other platforms. But this well-known game is a good example to compare the difference between what the MZ-700 lacked that others had.

Something I likely wouldn't have noticed had I not been paying particular attention to the MZ-700 limitations is just how much work they put into the explosion effect. On the Multi8 (and probably most other platforms of the time), it had 12 distinct frames that I could capture. The below is just a sample to give an idea of the progression of the explosion animation. I didn't check specifically how many frames the MZ-700 had, it may be 12 as well, just to keep the timing consistent, but with its limitations, I don't think it would have been 12 *unique* frames. For the record, the first frame, pre-explosion, is not one of the 12 frames.