I've always liked bombs in videogames.
Back in 1999 I'd sneak up on guards in Metal Gear Solid and plant C4s on everyone's backs. It was as deadly as it was hilarious. In the earlier 90s I'd laugh manically in front of my Amiga as I dropped torpedos in Wings of Fury, tossed grenades in Cannon Fodder, sent missiles in Frontier: Elite II and chopped heads off in Crazy Football. Okay, fine, so it wasn't all bombs, but explosives were the highlight for me in a lot of the games where you could use them.
The point where I started really liking Fallout 3 was after a mission where you sneak into the camp of an old squatter in a tall building, trying to snipe down intruders going through his minefield. I snuck into the minefield, disarmed every single bottlecap bomb there and carried them with me. There were a lot of them! I wasn't quite sure what to do with them at first, but in a later mission I completely ran out of ammo for my weapons and used the only means I had left: I backpedaled into hiding places while dropping a breadcrumb trail of bottlecap bombs.
This would be the only way I fought for the next dozen hours of playtime or so until I ran out of bottlecap bombs.
My favourite videogame where you can use bombs (and really just my favourite videogame at all) is Earth Defense Force 2017. It's a cheesy third-person shooter in which you fight aliens invading earth with robots and mutated giant insects. The smallest enemy is about twice the size of a double-decker bus. The assault rifle you start with takes seconds of continuous fire to bring down one ant, and you're fighting dozens of them at a time! You also have infinite hand grenades. The infinite hand grenades instantly kills them on Hard difficulty. The infinite hand grenades also instantly kills you if you screw up.
Much later in the game you'll have so much health and so strong weapons that Hard difficulty is more like Easy difficulty and you'll be going for the big fish: clearing Inferno difficulty where even the strongest of rifles needs a good third of a second to take down one ant, and this time you're fighting something like a hundred of them at a time! At this point, you'll have infinite remotely detonated bombs (where you can place 10 at a time before detonating them all and reloading from your infinite supply). The infinite remotely detonated bombs instantly kills anything smaller than a three-story building caught within it's 20 meter blast radius; including yourself! I would use these bombs and a set of turrets almost exclusively for every stage in the game.
There was a rhythm you had to get into to use these bombs as your primary weapon in close combat. My typical maneuver would consist of running right up to the enemy's face, plant a bomb and start dodge-rolling in a straight line while counting the rolls. "One.. two... three.... FOUR", then hit the detonator and watch on the radar as every enemy between my position and forty meters back blipped away, then look up to the sky and see that the sheer power of my weapon send bus-sized ants flying into the stratosphere. It had a great use as a way of bypassing fights entirely. If you knew where a wave was coming, you could cover the entire spawn point in bombs and hit the detonator just as they do. Maybe something that took as many as three bombs would spawn, then you'd have to stack them up and maybe not cover as much area. I make the game sound easy, but I can assure you it's anything but. These techniques could hardly be called exploits; they were fully necessary to stand a fighting chance without grinding for hours.
You can also fight Godzilla with a grenade launcher that shoots 30 grenades at once. The game can be downloaded on X-box Live Arcade, and if you enjoy split-screen co-op and missiles launchers where the missile is approximately a trillion zillion times larger than the weapon that fired it let alone the man holding the weapon that fired it and the missile also flies slower than the man who fired it can run, you might want to check it out.
EDF2017 saw a pseudo-sequel made by different developers later called Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon. Everyone's favourite features were nerfed to hell and back. You could only place out one turret at a time instead of 6 or 20 if you used the right ones previously. You could place 10 bombs at a time but the explosions were tiny and acted as contact mines instead of being remotely detonated. The bombs didn't one-shot-kill anything larger than a mailbox. Enemies were just smaller. The guy with the jetpack could only land on top of three-storied buildings rather than skyscrapers and he no longer had the laser-sword that did over 60,000 damage per second (the instakill bomb did 10,000 damage).
Bombing was different, but if you did it right there was a lot to be found in it! You weren't using it to instakill dozens of things anymore, but it had versatility. You could place them out and just let them act as mines. Spread the mines out behind you and you know bugs won't run up and bite you in the butt. If you were daring, you could crank up the difficulty way before you were ready for it, gather five bombs in spot and detonate them with a grenade launcher as a cluster of bugs waltzed on top of it to instantly kill them. It's not as fantastic as the previous game was, but still definitely good. The game can be found on Steam.
Why am I writing this wall of text? Mostly because it's hot as Vog's balls outside and I can't sleep like this, but also because I want to find more games where one can use bombs as a primary, or at least frequent weapon. Any recommendations?
cool story bro, i tl;dr and left a note.