OMGJeremy

Game Review: Blaster Master Overdrive

I’m sure like most of you, I more or less grew up playing hours upon hours of Nintendo. Yes, I had an Atari or Intellivision beforehand that I played, but it was the NES that really overtook my childhood in probably an unhealthy way. After the age of 10 or so, I would be willing to bet I played 4-6 hours of NES on any given day until I went to college and discovered that you could drink beer at any time of day. And from 10-17, I played countless NES games, beating a lot of them–because what else are you going to do at 10 other than bang your head against the wall on level 3 of Battletoads? Nothing. It’s not like at 10 you’ve got hot girls banging down your doors…  not that I’ve had that problem since then anyway. Even in the summers when I was actually pretty active, I still spent the evening hours or rainy days locked in my room staring at the screen until I either stood triumphant over the forces of evil, or threw the controller in a fit of rage and then sat angrily watching reruns of Mister Ed on Nick at Nite.

So now it’s a good 20 years since I got my NES and I’m still playing an unhealthy amount of games. The problem now is there are more games available, and most of these games are far, far longer than the average NES game. In fact, it’s gotten to the point however where I have way too many unfinished games laying around on the current systems that I have started a Backlog Clearing project that I will link right here that you should check out. Since I am trying to clear essentially 50 games in 2010, I have been very selective on buying new games. For example, I really want Mass Effect 2, but I am waiting until I finish about 10 of the games on my list to pick that one up. I also really want No More Heroes 2 and am looking forward to Final Fantasy XIII, but again – those games are going to have to wait until I clear out some of the old stuff. But I will always have a weakness that I can’t resist: Retro gaming DLC is not only constantly calling to me, it’s way too cheap and easy to grab. Honestly, if every new game coming out right now was just a prettier version of an NES game, I would buy every single one of them.

So why did I just waste your time with that long drawn out intro? Was it simply to whore out my own blog? (yes) No, this matters because last week Wiiware quietly pushed out one of the best Retro releases yet, by putting out Blaster Master Overdrive for a mere 1000 wii points (That’s $10).

No… that’s “Master Blaster,” and he runs Bartertown.

The original Blaster Master was released in 1988, and in case you somehow didn’t play it (or because people in college now might actually not have played a lot of NES like an ancient nerdy dinosaur like me) it was an action shooter with two specific pieces. There was a main overworld map that was laid out like a standard Metroidvania map, and for 99% of this part of the game you were in the SOPHIA, a jumping tank-like vehicle that would get upgrades from the bosses you beat that would allow you to access new parts of the map. You know – like a drill addon that allowed you to break the blocks that walled off a section of your map. The other piece of the game was as Alexander (driver of SOPHIA) on foot, and took place on an overhead view area. This overhead section was where you’d fight the area bosses that dropped the upgrades and allowed you to access the rest of the map. It was an amazing game, one that I spent hours on – and also one of the hardest games I owned. Much like a lot of games on the NES, there were no saves or passwords– you just had to finish the game from start to finish in one sitting. To add difficulty to this game, you also had a limited number of continues. When you factor in the attention span of a 10 year old with a drawer of other more forgiving NES games, you can see why I never got past World 6.

There we go, Blaster Master circa 1988 in all its glorious 8-bit NES glory.

Even with the extreme difficulty, everyone had this game or knew someone who had it, and is highly regarded as a classic . Yet there have been only a handful of sequels. There were two original Game Boy titles that came out, and there was a Genesis sequel that came out in 1993 that wasn’t half bad but went largely unnoticed, and then nothing for 17 years. Well, that’s not entirely true…  in 2001 there was a value priced Playstation game released with the Blaster Master name on it, but it was an ugly 3-D abortion that played badly and is better left forgotten. So never mention it again or I will make you actually play it, which is actually worse than any torture I could come up with. That 17 year period came to an end last week, when Blaster Master Overdrive arrived.

Blaster Master Overdrive is a 2d reimagining of the original game. This means it’s not the same game with new graphics like Bionic Commando : Rearmed, or a new game with the same graphics like Mega Man 9. This is also not some terrifying genre destroying reimagining of the game putting it in a 3D shooter and making me die a little inside. No, this is classic Blaster Master gameplay with better graphics and all new maps and a few new abilities. While I think both the other styles are welcome, this is exactly what I want out of my retro-gaming.

SOPHIA and Jason in vibrant 16bit-ish color in 2010. How much the world has changed.

Look at that! It’s exactly what I thought of when someone said the words “Blaster Master Remake,” but it’s even better since it’s all new maps. And the music is a variant on the original level 1 theme. And the game starts with a “cinematic” of the SOPHIA vehicle powering up and driving out of (or into I suppose) a cave – just like the original. I can’t really explain how happy I was for the first few minutes of playing this game. It was like I turned into myself at 12, except with the knowledge that I would be able to have sex in the immediate future instead of having to watch porn through the lines on channels we didn’t actually have at my parents’ house. And this time the game has better graphics. Imagine winning an Olympic gold medal and immediately getting blown while skydiving and then eating a pizza. THAT is how happy I was.

And the smile on my face pretty much has stayed on my face for the full time I’ve played this game. It’s still got the same two basic parts. Overworld metroidvania? Check. Overhead shooter on-foot parts? Check. And that is it. There’s no ridiculous racing sections, there’s not an unnecessary RPG-style leveling system implemented, they’ve just added graphic improvements, and thankfully a saving mechanism has been added. This singlehandedly removed about 50% of the difficulty of the old game, which is good because it’s still hard as hell in some parts. It’s got everything that can turn an enjoyable gaming afternoon into you screaming in your dogs face for 10 minutes with your wiimote stuck firmly in a fresh hole in your drywall. I’m glad I was buried under 40 feet of snow, because here’s a few of the things that made me calmly walk away from the remote and furiously shovel random parts of my yard while muttering profanities.

This is the drill upgrade to SOPHIA- yes it looks like I glued a dildo to it.

1) Pretty much every screen has spike pits that there’s no way you can find until you are falling into them. Almost every game now allows you to look around so you can see shit like this before you are plunging headfirst into them. This sort of thing was a staple of 2d platformers, and I don’t miss this. The same thing applies to lava pits or spikes on the ceiling that you wont see until you have already pressed your jump button. At least it’s not an insta-kill like in the Mega Man series. Instead, you will just take damage over and over until you die while you yell “no no no NO NO NO NOOOOOO!” and continue to miss whatever jump you were trying to make to escape. In some ways this is far more infuriating, but for the most part it’s the lesser of the two systems.

2) Save points, while a welcome addition are spread far enough apart that sometimes I would lose 10-15 minutes of difficult platform gaming. This is especially true in some of the later levels, where I ended up just starting the level and then searching fruitlessly for a save point just to die horribly to something stupid like a bat that doesn’t even shoot. It just sits there, and I’d manage to hit it. And all I can do is sit there in silence as my anger builds to the point where I snap and just turn off the game and sit in silence. And then turn the Wii back on in 2 minutes and die again in the exact same place. Lather, rinse, repeat.

3) You control like a bag of turds while you are in the water. I know this is intentional, since you get a swimming option that is used for all of 15 seconds later for your vehicle, but Alex swims outside of the vehicle somehow even worse. Now I know that I’m wearing some sort of power armor and realistically I can’t expect that I’m going to be Michael Phelps, but there’s one specific spot where I had to die and reload like 20 times just to get back to the SOPHIA because it wasn’t physically possible to swim past one enemy. Jason himself never gets a swimming upgrade, so just avoid the water if you can. Apparently I can take on an army of killer bugs but 4 feet of water will kill you.

An example of the overhead screens, here I fight an evil scorpion and what look like furry snotballs.

4) The difficulty of the on-foot overhead sections is dramatically worse than the vehicle sections. There’s a lot of monsters in the overhead sections that fire at you as soon as they’re on the screen, giving you almost no reaction time. In the overhead sections, you can upgrade your gun from “near worthless” to “God-like destructive beam,” but everytime you are hit your gun loses power. Meaning that within a few seconds on a level, you’ll go from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Kevin Arnold. There- I’ve filled the OMGJeremy Wonder Years joke quota for 2010. Wait until I find a clever way to compare Q-Bert to Dennis Blunden– that will be a day that children will speak of reverently for generations to come.

5) This sort of ties to the previous section, but it’s pretty much a necessity to strafe around one direction while firing another in the overhead mode. Not doing this would make this game impossible. Thankfully Sunsoft has provided us with a strafing button- but it’s the B button, the worst button possible for this function. Let’s do an exercise really quick. Hold your remote control sideways, like an old NES style controller. Good, one thumb on the directional pad, one thumb on the 1 or 2 button. Now, find some way to hold the B button down on your remote. I had to use my left hand middle finger since it’s located completely under the remote, and since most of the overhead areas require you to constantly strafe around, using the B button where it is located actually caused my hands physical pain. Why didn’t they pick the 2 button? I know I’ve got fat thumbs, but I think anyone over the age of 4 could easily hit 1 and 2 at the same time. And notice that 2 is used to drop your grenade, which you only get one of at a time and fairly infrequently. You push the 2 button about 7 times in a regular game, while I might as well have B taped down. Instead I have to take breaks to essentially stretch out my fingers. And no – you can’t remap the keys or else I would have done that. Smartass.

The trick to this boss is not just dodging bullets while you shoot him, but also beating him before your hand cramps up and you drop your wiimote in the toilet. What, don't you all play this in the bathroom?

Really though, those complaints are minor. I love this game. It’s long, but not too long– I’m at almost 7 hours played and I’m at the last boss. There are 8 areas, much like the first game, each with a different theme. The upgrades to your vehicle actually make sense to unlock the new areas, and it’s difficult enough that I feel accomplished after beating most of the levels. The graphics and sound aren’t current generation by any standard, but they’re far better than NES-style graphics. It’s sort of Super Nintendo or Genesis level, but I think the most accurate descriptor is that this game feels like a TurboGrafx 16 game. If you had a TG16, try this game and tell me that statement is wrong. If you didn’t have one, I’ll try and explain it: the graphics are sort of grainy and the colors aren’t super bright like SNES, and the animations are very TG16 feeling, like how Alexander’s legs move well but the upper half of his body only moves when he fires. It could also be that I only really download TG16 games on my Wii and so everything I play on it feels like a TurboGrafx game.

If you have a Wii and you liked the original at all, I can’t recommend this game any more highly. This would have been the best thing I’ve played on the Wii, except that the new Super Mario Brothers game might be the best game of the last ten years. Coincidentally, it’s pretty much the exact same situation as this game: a prettier version of a classic without a whole bunch of unnecessary additions. This is what I want, although I understand a 30+ year old man might not be the target audience anymore.