A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1988 action-platformer for the NES, Blaster Master.
Blaster Master is one of the more fondly remembered games on the NES, and its popularity only seems to grow with each passing year. I certainly loved it as a kid.
The game casts you as Jason, a boy whose pet frog (Fred) manages to escape into the back yard where he leaps into a container of radioactive waste. Then, just as Fred mutates into a mutant mega frog, a gaping hole opens up in the ground and swallows him. Jason, good friend that he is, chases his pet into the hole and lands next to a giant armored tank named Sophia. Apparently Sophia was designed to combat the hordes of evil radioactive monsters that live beneath the Earth's surface, and if Jason ever hopes to see his pal and his home once more, he'll have to take up command of Sophia and destroy this evil.
What were they smoking when they came up with this?!
Jason's adventure is an early example of the genre now popularly known as Metroidvania, with the game being split across eight areas packed with nooks and crannies to explore, and the bosses hold items and abilities that you'll need to clear the way to the next area.
The exploration bits are presented as semi-open ended 2D platformer stages that link together like in Castlevania II: Simon's Quest or The Battle of Olympus, and in these areas you will usually be driving Sophia around. She can take some solid hits, lob missiles, shoot lightning, and jump straight up in the air, all just as you'd expect of any mobile heavy weapons platform worth its salt. Jason can also hop out to navigate tight passages on foot, though since he's a much squishier target, a couple direct hits or a nasty fall is all it takes to do him in.
These stages are dotted with doors that only Jason can fit through, and these doors all lead to areas that play in the style of a top-down run-and-gun (like The Guardian Legend or Mission: Impossible). Most of the areas provide opportunities for powering up your weapon, but the most important door in each area is the one that leads to the boss battle. Once you've beaten the boss and claimed your prize, you need to figure out how to use the item to get to the next main area.
The general structure feels similar to games like Rygar, but Blaster Master has a unique feel and flair that's all its own. The goofy premise, the non-linear level design, and the amazing graphics all lend it a lot of personality, and in many ways, it feels much more polished than just about anything else that was on the Nintendo when it first came out. For 1988, this was super impressive - there are moments when it could pass as a 16-bit game - and it set the tone for pretty much every Sunsoft NES game that followed.
I know that many people will disagree with me here, but for as much as I adored it back in the late 80s, and for as much as I still respect its accomplishments, I can't say that I find it much fun to play nowadays. The controls are lousy - you constantly slide and skid about, strafing prevents you from using grenades, and the wall-grip power-ups interfere with jumping, making the last few stages a platforming nightmare - and the control problems compound the thoroughly obnoxious level of difficulty. Enemies fly into you constantly with little warning, each hit you absorb in the top-down stages weakens your gun, the regular bouts of slowdown mess with your timing, there are limited continues, and there's no password system. It's brutal in a way that I was able to appreciate when I was eight years old, but it's something that I have little patience for as an adult.
I don't think it's a bad game - far from it, in fact - but it is a game that I seem to have completely lost my taste for. The controls and mechanics lack the balance and the polish of Sunsoft's later NES games (like Batman, Gremlins 2, Super Spy Hunter, Fester's Quest, and Mr. Gimmick!), and the beautiful graphics and sweet soundtrack just aren't enough to save it for me.
Oh well. I know a lot of you guys absolutely love the game going by the number of requests I've gotten for a video over the years, so after months of practicing and drawing maps, here it finally is!
Very thanks for watching!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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