Ignominious Mummies of the NES/SNES #2: Adjectivey Noun Firstname!

Welcome back to week two of October 2015's Ignominius Mummy Month! Last week we saw the Pirate-and-Wizard-'em-up, Skull and Crossbones, which featured mummies as their first-screen fall-guy.

This week, it's up, up and a WTF with...

Mighty Bomb Jack

You know, I've never really understood this game.

There's several reasons behind my confusion:

The Game's Name. — Are you a "Bomb Jack", and are we to assume that's something like a lumberjack or steeplejack? Is your name "Jack", and you have an affinity for bombs? Why are you called "Mighty" when you die in one hit?
The fact you never USE bombs — Like Quattro Adventure's Boomerang Kid, you spend the whole game basically unarmed, even while COLLECTING hundreds of your namesake weapons.

The weird "collect Mighty Coins and use them to power up to for various states/costume changes" — it's your only portable offensive maneuver, so you better learn what each coin-use does to you!

The weird "inverse platformer" jumping — you leap extremely high any time you press the A button. You then have to quickly tap the A button again to STOP rising. Alternately, you can use the UNDERSIDE of platforms to stop your ascent. This is made worse by the fact that...

You know how you open all those treasure chests? — you have to jump on top of them, THEN jump again WHILE standing on top of them.
Each of these jumps will send you rocketting upwards at least 1/3rd of the screen; you're likely to spend more time drifting downwards from jumps here than you did in Legend of Kage...but at least in that game, jumping is usually optional, rather than the key mechanic for collecting power-ups.
The mysterious "GDV" — On the "Game Over" screen, you're shown your final GDV. This was Temco's way of revolutionizing games by replacing the trite concept of a "Score" with a mind-meltingly obscure "GDV".

Those who have the manual will know this stands for "Game Deviation Value", and is supposed to measure how well you played. Of course, it would have been handy if they indicated if Higher or Lower GDVs were better.

moreover, the only other game I've seen with a GDV is the byzantine puzzler, Solomon's Key. Given that this game has you fight your way through puzzle-room after puzzle-room, trying to overcome both monsters and a timer, it's much easier to imagine how it can say one play-through was Better than another.

But in Mighty Bomb Jack, I estimate that you spend 10% of your time collecting bombs, 11% of the game racing to the exit, 7.9% of your time dodging enemies (more on this soon!), and a whopping 71.1% of your time floating down after your goofy flighty jumps...how could they calculate how well or poorly you did?
And finally, the biggest factor in me never investing time in this game is the odd rumor (which I can't be bothered to check on) that the "bonus bomb-gathering levels" at the end of each "platformer" level are like the original Mighty Bomb Jack arcade game. That's all well and good, but rumor has it, if you do well enough in these bonus screens, you can skip more and more of the actual game itself.

I...I'm not even sure where to start with this. Imagine if Super Mario Bros 3's player-vs-player version of Mario Bros could be used to skip entire levels.

That's some weighty baggage of nonsense; and I'm not about to figure out Mighty Bomb Jack now, given that my only goal is just to gawk at the way in which it under-employs death-challenged Egyptian cadavers. But perhaps the mummies in this game are the weirdest thing of all, because...

The Mummies appear to be the LARVAL FORM of all enemies!

As you explore the Mighty Bomb Pyramids, mummies pop out, wander towards you for a few seconds, then transform into one of any number of different, bizarre beings, like dyspeptic Hagamemnons:

Bronze Age Mutant Mummy-Parrots!

...and it's not just inoffensive brightly colored tropical birds, this game's mummies end up mutating in to all kinds of different things,

airborne lobsters and headless hovering turtles,

sometimes even conventional things like Fireballs or Skulls,

but usually more zany things -- like these flying bunny critters.

Poor Mr. Mummy!

Even though this game has many confusion elements, I think the mummies have a strong case for the "most aggrieved person" award. The designers of this game decided that the Mummy himself is not good enough to menace Mr. B. Jack, and have instead given the job to THESE beasts: