135 · BLASTER MASTER
Ranked #2 in our Top 10 NES Games of 1988 →
The New York sewers were never like this!
You've fallen down a hidden manhole into a world of creatures so terrifying they’d scare the rats away. You can panic and perish, or blast your way through an endless maze of tunnels, searching for the secret passages to your escape. And that’s the easy part. Because the Masters of the Caverns lay waiting - prehistoric creatures so powerful, so gigantic, they literally fill your screen! So load your arsenal and get ready for Blaster Master.
SHOW NOTES
Blaster Master NES Gameplay
Blaster Master 2
Blaster Master Boy
Blaster Master: Blasting Again
Blaster Master: Overdrive
Blaster Master Zero
Blaster Master & Scholastic
April Fools!
Yoshiaki Iwata Interview
Blaster Master has a bad name, a worse box (a CRT photo glued onto clip art, promising an "Authentic Arcade Edition" of a game that never saw an arcade), and a manual about a runaway pet frog that makes the plot less clear. Then the cutscene starts, the tank drops down the hole, and it turns out to be one of the best games we have played so far. Mike, Sean and Joe were on this one.
Why we kept playing
- It looks better than anything before it. We called it the best-looking NES game yet, with cohesive art, sprites big enough for real detail, and the best bosses we have seen. Sean loved the tank's suspension and turning wheels.
- The controls are tight. Joe put Sophia the Third just below Mario for 2D feel. It has weight, and the pause screen's blank slots make you want to earn upgrades.
- The world remembers. Park the tank, climb out, go through a door, and the tank is where you left it. Enemies you killed stay dead. After so many games that reset on every screen change, this amazed us.
- Getting out of the tank flips a switch. Jason has his own health bar, and climbing back in refills the tank's, which turned into a cheese.
- Upgrades that change how you play. Hover, wall climbing, the dive engine and the hyper beam change what you can reach, not just what you can shoot. The underwater section is frustrating enough that the dive engine feels earned, like getting the airship in Final Fantasy.
- Three modes that fit together. The top-down rooms work like Zelda dungeons for the tank game, with bosses and powerups inside. Health is generous and refills drop freely, so mistakes get forgiven.
What doesn't work
- Joe's three problems. Lives are limited, the game has to be finished in one sitting with no save or password, and you can get stuck outside the tank, where fall damage means dying on purpose. With no score in the game, we wanted unlimited continues.
- A thin map. We argued over whether it is mostly hallways with no puzzles or secrets in the top-down rooms. Others felt agency while playing. The manual's maps proved useful.
- Underused ideas. You can usually just jump over what you can't hit, and Jason's gun sits on his right side, which gets awkward along walls.
Beyond the game
Art designer Yoshiaki Iwata said the goal was the best graphics on the NES, and for players to feel the excitement of finding something after a hard search. Blaster Master sold poorly in Japan and well here, which led to a Genesis sequel, a Game Boy spinoff with no tank, and Blaster Master Zero on Switch.
The bottom line
Essential. Mike voted first and said it takes two or three hours to win you over, but he would have been impressed with it on the Super Nintendo. Sean said it felt like someone had hidden it from him and gave it a "raving essential." Joe's three complaints gave him a moment's pause, then he voted yes. Three for three.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
- Mega Graphics! Mega Action!
- Introductions
- Blaster Master - are you not expecting a shmup?
- What even is the boxart?
- Overview
- A side-scrolling Run and Gun in which you traverse the world in your tank and as the main character. As you explore the world you find many power ups and upgrades that allow you to continue to make progress towards the end of the game. In some ways that makes this a metroidvania
- Story
- ENGLISH
- The game starts with a person named Jason who has a pet frog named Fred who, one day, decides to leap out of his fish bowl, out the door, and down a hole in the backyard. Fred then touches a radioactive chest, and he grows to an enormous size; Fred and the chest then fall deeper into the hole in the earth.[4] Jason chases Fred down the hole, which leads to a large cavern.[4][5] While most sources say that Jason chased Fred down the hole, the game's instruction manual says that Jason fell into the hole while trying to reach for Fred.[4] There, he finds an armored tank named SOPHIA THE 3RD – a vehicle designed to battle radioactive mutants that live inside the earth.[4][5] Jason mounts SOPHIA to find the whereabouts of Fred and to destroy the mutants and their leader – the Plutonium Boss.
- JAPANESE
- The game takes place on the planet Sophia the 3rd, located near the center of the Epsilon Galaxy, in which an advanced civilization flourished. In the year 2052 of the space age calendar, the Invem Dark Star Army, led by the universe's most feared tyrant Goez, invade and conquer Sophia the 3rd. The Science Academy of NORA, a satellite orbiting near Sophia the 3rd that somehow managed to avoid the invasion, built a weapon, an all-purpose tank called the "Metal Attacker", in a last-ditch effort to defeat Goez's army. A young soldier named Kane Gardner is chosen as the pilot of this weapon. The game's opening sequence shows Metal Attacker dropped into the battlefield.
- ENGLISH
- Gameplay
- THE START OF THIS GAME
- Inside the tank
- Outside the tank
- Top Down Perspective
- Exploration/Progression
- Power-Ups
- Boss Fights
- Drop one grenade on the boss so that it flashes, indicating damage. Then pause the game. While the game is paused, the boss will accumulate damage. Wait at least 30 seconds to be sure that the boss has taken enough damage before unpausing the game, and the boss will be defeated. Be careful, this same pause trick works on Jason as well, leading to a quick death. Make sure you're not being injured when you pause the game!
- Lack of a Map
- You have to complete in one sitting
- Development
- Created by Kenji Sada
- The Wing of Madoola
- The player must progress through 16 stages, collecting items which increase the main character Lucia's power, and defeat the boss of each stage in order to gain entrance to the next stage.
- He created the top-down portions to allow Jason to shoot in all directions and to enable the team to "express large bosses that really had an impact".
- The Wing of Madoola
- Yoshiaki Iwata - Art Designer
- "the goal was really to try to pull off the best graphics on the NES to date. Simple graphics were more or less the standard on the NES at the time but I had this firm belief that it was possible to do something better, something prettier. I feel like we pulled it off and were able to show people what could be done [on the NES]. It left an impression around the office, and from what I've heard [the visuals] influenced the work of other games that were later made by other NES developers as well."
- We also didn’t want to make a game where the player just proceeds forward. We wanted the player to experience the feeling of excitement that comes from discovering something after endeavoring through a difficult search, which is why we composed a map that allowed the player to move freely between different areas. We really put a great deal of thought into that element of the game design and, I mean this in the best possible way, but we wanted the player to have to struggle.
- Created by Kenji Sada
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- No sequel was originally planned due to the game's poor sales, BUT that changed when the NA release sold really well
- Blaster Master 2 - Genesis only in North America 1993
- There are now 8 levels to play through, and each level containing a power-up or new obtainable weapon in which Jason or SOPHIA can use throughout the game.
- Blaster Master Jr. or Boy - GameBoy 1992
- No Sophia this time
- Blaster Master: Enemy Below - GameBoy Color 2000
- Plays a lot like the NES game
- Blaster Master: Blasting Again - PSX 2001
- third-person 3D platformer
- Blaster Master: Overdrive - Wii 2010
- NES games becoming ugly 2.5d games
- On April Fools' Day on April 1, 2010, Sunsoft announced that a sequel to the game would be released on the Virtual Console titled Blaster Master: Destination Fred.
- Blaster Master Zero and Blaster Master Zero 2 - On Switch
- Scholastic Books published a novelization of Blaster Master, written by Peter Lerangis under the pen name "A.L. Singer".
- As with the other books in the series, all acts of violence portrayed in the games, including any death scenes, were removed. As a result, the bosses were portrayed in the book as "holographic projections placed over formless blobs."
- EGL
- Next week - Bubble Bobble
Found automatically from the transcript and checked, but it can miss things or pick the wrong page. Spot a mistake? Tell us.
Games
- Blaster Master mentioned at
The episode's game: a tank-and-on-foot action adventure by Sunsoft.
- Math Blaster mentioned at
Educational game series the title reminded the hosts of.
- The Legend of Zelda mentioned at
Game whose top-down views and dungeons were compared to the on-foot sections.
- Super Mario Bros. mentioned at
Mentioned as the ideal of 2D game controls and for no-damage challenge runs.
- Final Fantasy mentioned at
Original game where getting the airship changes travel, used as an upgrade-reward example.
- Blaster Master 2 mentioned at
The 1993 Genesis sequel, released only in North America.
- Blaster Master Jr. mentioned at
Game Boy spinoff with no Sophia, known as Blaster Master Boy in Japan.
- Blaster Master: Enemy Below mentioned at
2000 Game Boy Color remake-style sequel.
- Metroid II: Return of Samus mentioned at
Game Boy game compared for its zoomed-in screen.
- Blaster Master: Blasting Again mentioned at
2000 PlayStation 3D platformer entry in the series.
- Blaster Master Overdrive mentioned at
2010 WiiWare 2.5D entry in the series.
- Blaster Master Zero mentioned at
2017 Switch game that updates the original with NES-style graphics.
- Blaster Master Zero 2 mentioned at
The Switch sequel to Blaster Master Zero.
- Shovel Knight mentioned at
Indie game whose retro style the Zero games were compared to.
- The Binding of Isaac mentioned at
Indie game one host chose over Blaster Master Zero for the Switch.
- Super Mario Bros. 2 mentioned at
Previous episode's game, another recent essential pick.
- Spy vs. Spy (NES) mentioned at
Earlier essential-list game from two episodes before.
- Castlevania II: Simon's Quest mentioned at
Upcoming big NES release of the 1988 holiday season.
- Zelda II: The Adventure of Link mentioned at
Upcoming big NES release of the 1988 holiday season.
- Color a Dinosaur mentioned at
Educational NES coloring game one host is looking forward to.
Hardware
- Sega Genesis mentioned at
Console that got Blaster Master 2; known as the Mega Drive in Japan.
- Game Boy mentioned at
Handheld that got Blaster Master Jr. in 1992.
- Nintendo Switch mentioned at
Console where the Zero games launched.
Companies
- Sunsoft mentioned at
The developer and publisher of Blaster Master.
Terms and events
- Metroidvania mentioned at
Genre of exploration games gated by upgrades, which Blaster Master resembles.
- Nuzlocke Challenge mentioned at
Self-imposed Pokémon rule set where fainted Pokémon can no longer be used.
- WiiWare mentioned at
Wii download service where Blaster Master Overdrive was sold.
Articles, videos and sites
- Famitsu mentioned at
Japanese games magazine whose cover collages the box art resembled.
Other
- Mega Man mentioned at
Platformer series the repeated word Mega brought to mind.
- Metroid mentioned at
Exploration game the tank's controls and upgrades were compared to.
- NEStalgia Essential Games List mentioned at
The show's list of essential NES games; this game earned a spot.
- Bubble Bobble mentioned at
Next week's episode game.
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Blaster Master Mega Graphics Mega Action
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. And, you know, I don't know about you guys, but when I hear Mega as a description for anything, I'm thinking about the Sega Master System or like Sega in general, Sega Mega.
That just doesn't seem like the right words to attribute to a game like Blaster Master. Well, it made me think of Mega Man, but you're right. The way they said it twice like that was there. It was like what you would say if it was in the title or something. Like I had to stop and think it's not Mega Blaster. Yeah. Why are they so hung up on Mega? When it seems to like lack any context in terms of the title, I just think it's just lazy copywriting, which it probably was in this case. Yeah, you'd have to think that they would say Master Graphics and Master Action.
Or Blaster Graphics. Yeah, Blaster Graphics is great. Blaster Graphics sounds good. Speaking of blasting, were you guys, you know, I don't know how well you knew this game beforehand, but that title, awful, doesn't it sound like a shmup to you? To me, it sounds like an old educational game that I played in elementary school called Math Blaster. Math Blaster. Yeah, that's what I know too. Yeah. And before I played this, I could not get the image, even though I knew it wasn't the same game. I just imagined when I booted up, you were going to be that little green guy in space. I was just like, it's gotta be that.
Yeah. Yeah, I had no exposure to this game before we played this game, so I also thought of Math Blaster. Got it. Okay, well that's something. I will say this is a pretty terrible name for a game. You know, it's just like the most generic thing we might have touched since that game that sounded like Star Wars and Star Trek built together. But, you know, you can't judge a game on its name, but you might be able to judge it on its cover, which this game's, I don't know if you guys have the box art pulled up, but it's also a pretty awful cover. Like, what's happening? Okay. I pulled it up, Mike. I just called it up too. It's, yeah, this is some interesting design work. So, this is what you would call a mixed media piece.
You've got some, you've got some copy for the Blaster Master logo and, you know, a little bit of clip art in the background. And then you just take a picture of a CRT monitor and you just, because, you know, I'm sure Photoshop wasn't really a thing yet. So, you would just sort of cut that picture out and get some Elmer's glue and put it on the rest. Yeah, really, the alien in this looks like it has that CRT screen over it. Oh, it 100% does.
It also just, this whole thing looks like, it simultaneously looks like it would be like the cover to some, like, what's that Japanese magazine that always, like, leaks Kingdom Hearts? Not leaks, but shows new Kingdom Hearts. Famitsu. I feel like when I see, like, covers of that, it just looks like it's like a bunch of things kind of thrown together in there. So, you're also just insulting Famitsu, right? Scans of it. I mean, you think they're listening?
Scans of it or something. It's just always, like, pictures all over the place. But simultaneously, it also looks like they took a magazine and cut pieces out of it and pasted them, like, in weird ways. Oh, man, you have a lot to say. Yeah. This is the first time I've seen this, too. This is all coming at me right now. There's no filter. Well, guys, what does authentic arcade edition mean to you, since that's on the box art and this game never came to arcades?
It's also strange because in the manual for this game, they distance themselves from the arcade experience. Like, they come out and say, you're not going to find any scores here. So, I don't know.
I think their marketing department was just out of sync, you know? Definitely, because there's also nothing involving, like, crosshairs. And I don't think you ever see – well, maybe you see that guy straight on like that at some point in the top-down perspective. But I don't remember it. So, let's move on because there's more to this game than just a box. And you can't judge a game by its box.
That's what we're saying here, right? You said that you could, actually. That's what you said. Oh, okay. Well, now we're saying you can't because instead we're going to talk about the game. Oh, okay. Brief overview here for the uninformed for Blaster Master. I'm going to describe this as like a side-scrolling run-and-gun in which you traverse a series of areas in a Metroidvania-like style.
You do this both in a tank, which is referred to as Sophia the Third. And you can get out of the tank and explore as the main character whose name is like either Jason or Fred. I didn't catch which one was the frog and which one was the person.
But that's weird that they named a frog also a human name. And you've got to like explore the various overworlds and go into these doors that lead to like top-down perspective battles. And as you explore it, you gain new power-ups and upgrades that allow you to continue making progress to new areas, ultimately tracking down the final boss. The plutonium boss. I'd say that's a pretty good assessment.
Yeah, I feel like the story in the manual gives you both like clarifies and makes you a little more confused to the story that you see at the beginning of the game. I don't know if we wanted to jump into this right away, but you were talking a little bit about the plot there. Joe, go ahead and read it. Well, before I even read it, I want to describe what you see when you open it up. It's actually like a pretty nice little cinematic when you actually open up the game or turn on the game.
You have this like nice music. You have a pet frog that apparently escapes your garage and you chase it to this giant box of apparently radioactive material that it gets into. It jumps down some hole as it grows into, I guess, a monster. And then you're like, oh no, my frog. You jump down after it. Find this conveniently placed like motorized super bike or whatever, whatever you want to call it, tank or whatever it is. And then you're like, I guess I'm going to get my frog. And then like the rest of the game, it's almost nothing to do with your frog. Like, I don't know. Is your goal, do you have to kill the frog? Do you have to save the frog? I mean, I think his goal, like just to clarify something that I need to be clear for the audience.
The hole wasn't like just, like the frog didn't cause the hole. The radioactive canister, I'm sorry, the radioactive chest caused the hole when the additional weight of the frog jumped onto it.
And that's sort of what caused the hole. And then you're, it's not really, I think you're just trying to find the frog. It's not up to you yet whether your intentions are to kill it. Like, I don't know if Jason's intentions were to kill the frog from the very beginning. It may have evolved. I agree. I wasn't sure about that either. But then, then yeah, the manual kind of gives, you know, clarifies a little bit about that story.
And I mean, do you want me to read the actual copy word for word here? I don't think we need word for word, but we would love to spark that. So let's get into a little, uh, little story time here. So the, the, the manual gives you the context that your pet frog, whose name is Fred, your name is Jason, your pet frog has grown tired of being kept in its tiny fishbowl, uh, and made a dash for the door. So it actually sounds like it is seeking freedom. It no longer wants to be your pet. Uh, and you jumped down this hole after it and you find this, this vehicle that is apparently designed for the ultimate challenge against radioactive mutants living under the earth's crust.
I don't know how you know that, but apparently you're like, well, these mutants need to be stopped and are controlled by the plutonium boss. So like it clarifies things without really clarifying it. It just kind of throws context at you where, where you're still kind of wondering like, well, wait, what, why does my character need to defeat the plutonium boss? Will he get his frog back if he does that? Is his frog now a bad guy? Yeah. So he ever be able to get out. I think it's funny to nitpick at this very basic story. So it's, you know, it's not super important, but, uh, I did think that that was interesting.
Well, Joe, if you, if you want a real problem, the, the Japanese version of the game makes everything a lot more complicated because there's nothing to do with a frog and a kid named, uh, Jason. Instead, the game takes place on the planet Sophia the third. Yeah. No, it just, it makes just as little sense. But no, think about that. The tank was named Sophia the third in the American version, but that's actually just the name of the planet they were on in the Japanese one. I think the, uh, I think also the tank is also called that. No, I think it actually has a tank sounding name in the Japanese version. Yeah. It's definitely a different name because I don't have the whole story here in front of me, but, oh, it's actually called the metal attacker.
That makes more sense. Yeah. And the science Academy of Nora, it has a satellite orbiting near Sophia the third that somehow managed to avoid an invasion. And then they built a weapon, which wound up becoming the metal attacker. And then they send this guy goes is no, they send you to defeat goes his army. And you're a young soldier named Kane Gardner, who is going to try and take down the goes army.
In the year. Honestly, they had two acts at it. They had two acts at this story. And all they could come up with was gibberish on both counts. Like usually one of the localizations makes sense to some degree, but no, they couldn't here. Yeah. It's not even like there's some weird translation problem going on or it's just, they were just like, let's just make a cool game and just throw a story at it. The Japanese one does have one thing though, that really helps it out here. And that's the clarification that they're talking about the year 2052 of the space age calendar. So the space age calendar has nothing to do with ours. Yeah. It's not the common era.
It's a different galaxy. Yep. Yeah. Well, I like to see it the way that I saw it before I opened up the manual, which is your frog escapes. You're like, what the heck's going on? You look down this hole, you find this giant mech and you're like, wow, I'm just very curious. And he just starts exploring and then slowly gets in over his head. And by the end, he's like, I need to defeat these evil things I discovered. Like the frog escaping was just what kickstarted this whole thing. And then you went down the quote unquote rabbit hole. And just by the end, you're invested in defeating the evil villains below the earth. It really is just a really good cautionary tale of owning frogs as a pet. Because then you just get in over your head and all that.
Right. So if we're talking game now, when you actually start the game, you know, there still is like a cut scene, so to speak, of just the Sophia the third going down this hole and then you start gameplay. But I actually just think like right away, I was blown away by the graphical presentation of all of that. It seems way better than most, if any, NES games we've played so far. What were you guys thinking about the graphics? Oh, well, a little bit of a preface. So not really hearing much about this game before and then reading that mess of a manual.
I was actually very pleasantly surprised when I saw that just the art in like the cut scene prior to this and the cut scene of like the back end of the Sophia going down the hole and then just opening up into the game itself. Like this is one of the best looking games we've played, I think. I agree. Yeah, I think even just before you even get into the game, just the presentation, you know,
as silly and, you know, nonsensical as the story itself is, the presentation of the way they present it kind of like really gets you invested in what you're about to play. I'm serious. No, like, you know, I'm not invested in like the story actually itself, but the music and, you know, the frames of your character like going into this hole. I'm just like, oh, this is great cinematography.
Yeah, you know, for the time, I think it was great. Yeah. And, you know, it's funny there too is like it doesn't stop with just the cut scene. I think we've seen some games that have had like some pretty good cut scene art. I'm thinking of a Golgo 13 and then like and then it goes to the game and the game is like kind of shit and, you know, or like, you know, forget about the quality of the game,
but just the graphics in the actual game aren't like that well designed or anything. And then here, I actually thought that the, you know, everything had like a design decision to it that it all looked good and it didn't ever look like, oh, well, what the heck is that thing? That doesn't belong in this area, you know, like everything looks cohesive. Yes, there we go. Cohesive. We timed it up. Yeah.
I think part of that, I mean, granted, I know we haven't talked about the different like types of levels yet, but like on the on the overworld, if you're walking as a character, you're just a tiny little like spec or whatever. But in like the main top down levels, I think part of it is that, you know, this is a lot of times when you see those like Legend of Zelda, you've got like, I don't know, like one tile by one tile character. And this guy's got to be like what? Like, what is he like four by four? He's a big boy. Yeah. There's plenty of room for detail and all of in, you know, in all of the sprites.
So let's just talk about the other thing. Let's talk about controlling Sophia the third and navigating these like, I call them overworlds, but I think they're described as like areas like so there's area one area two, and then there's little sub rooms inside these areas. What did you guys think about the gameplay inside Sophia the third and the idea that you're controlling like a tank in the way that you controlled Samus when you were playing Metroid? Very tight. It's a it's one of the, you know, you know, Mario is the platonic ideal of game controls in a 2D medium. And I think that this is like right below there. It feels very fluid. It feels like you control it and you're not like there's no stickiness to platforming.
You can shoot in the directions that you're trying to shoot in except for one, but it just feels natural. Yeah, it definitely has weight to it. And it's it's cool when you first even when you first pause the game and and see that like there are all these like blank attributes to the tank when you realize like this already feels cool, but it looks like I'm going to like earn more abilities for this tank to do. So you're also kind of like excited to continue exploring. It's also kind of neat that you can get out of the tank and have a different health bar and like it sometimes can help you in some cases actually fight things that you couldn't hit with the tank or reach spaces that you couldn't get.
Yeah. So so that's a that's a mechanic that I that the manual didn't really make clear to me how it would work. Like I thought that when you're driving around your car, you would get to these little areas that would trigger like, oh, now you're getting out of your car and you're going to play this level outside of your car.
I had no idea that I could get out of the tank at any point. And when I finally hit select and did it, it blew my mind. I that's what's the moment where I was like, oh, this isn't like I was expecting a a very cookie cutter experience. And then that just flipped a switch in my head of like, oh, this is something else.
Yeah, I think it says something that when you get out to that, you're a different size, right? You're a smaller thing. It would be kind of weird if you were the same size as the ship and that you can kind of fit into certain situations, at least early on that that Sophia the third can't handle yet. Like the swimming portion, you don't have the dive power up yet. So you have to get out. That's kind of like the aha moment, I think, for most players of like, oh, I have to get out of the ship at points to do things.
And then there's also like when you leave the ship, wherever you left it, even if you go into another room and and do the top down perspective part of the level, when you go back, the ship is like right where it was. And I just think there's something really neat about that, that it didn't just like, you know, like load up a spawn point next to the door or something, even though that's not where you left it. It felt like the world was alive in that respect.
Right. That even extends to like enemies you kill. Exactly. There's persistence that you just don't. I did not expect to see because every game we've played, there's no such thing as persistence. Like you if you go off screen a little bit and come back, that enemy you just killed is going to be magically there again. But between the car being still there and the enemy still being dead like that, that's the thing so simple that it just like was amazing to me. And the thing I was talking about earlier in respect to Samus from Metroid is just what did you guys think though, as you're, as you're playing mostly as the tank, what was that like in terms of exploration and just like using that as your main character?
Like does, does that feel weird? Or I know Sean, you really liked the mechanics of the car itself. So did it just feel weird to be a car as your character? I think that once you kind of got out of your head about the fact that you're a car and usually, you know, in a game like this, you're a person, it didn't bother me at all. Like, you know, it didn't feel like usually in a game like this, if you were to get into a car, it would be like to get to be faster and to be a little more powerful, but then you can't fit through tight spaces and things like that.
But the whole, the levels are designed to kind of like fit the tank. And it really is kind of designed basically like it would be if you, if you weren't in the vehicle. And then it just gives you options or sometimes the necessity to get out, which I thought, you know, it was pretty welcome because there was no, it first of all felt like it gave context
to all the power ups and, you know, you might, you get missiles and you get other things and it just didn't feel like it's just like, oh, this is all stuff on your, you know, in your hands. It's like, no, this, you're actually upgrading this machine. Yeah, Joe, I think for sure, once you get, you know, you mentioned missiles, which are clear things that like a tank would have that necessarily like a person wouldn't have, although Samus does get missiles.
I think it's once you get those, like the dive engine and the wall upgrades that you're able to like take the traction of the wheels and go like climbing up vertically on the walls. And I forget what the second one lets you do it. I think you can hang on the ceiling or something that like gives context to the tank. So it really is those power ups that help a lot more to sell the idea of why they chose to have you control the tank. Granted, you know, because the Japanese story is so different, it just makes sense to be in a tank, I suppose, instead of when you're trying to save a frog.
It's basically the opposite reaction that I had to the movie Cars, because when I saw Cars, I'm like, this doesn't make sense. I can't accept that these are cars talking and doing things and, you know, constructing buildings and all, like I could not accept that. But all you needed to do was give me the context of a, of a person getting into and out of said car. And I'm on, I'm on your side. There should be a special cut of the movie Cars, or at the very beginning, a guy just gets into the car.
And then you know that the whole movie is controlling the car. Yes. That would make everything feel much better for me. I do want to mention one thing that we, that we didn't talk about with the, with the getting in and out of the tank is that as much as I think it was a cool mechanic, I think it was maybe a little underused. I didn't, I, there were maybe one or two times where I was shooting over something and I could get out of the car and like kind of go prone and shoot something that's low to the ground.
And otherwise there were a couple of times where it makes you get out. But I think for the most part, the fact that you can get stuck when you get out of the car, like the first time I got out of the car was where, where it's, I keep calling it a car. The tank is where it's prompting you to, like we were talking about before, when you have to go underwater.
But I got out of the tank and jumped from the top platform into the water because I wasn't sure I'd be able to get the tank back up there thinking, oh, well, there's a ladder on the other side. I'm sure there's some way to get back around.
But to my knowledge, there's no way to get back up to where I left the tank from there. I was just stuck as the person trying to jump up there. And the other problem with being a person is there's an absurd, well, realistically, it's not absurd, but for a video game, an absurd level of fall damage where even just jumping a little higher, like landing on a platform a little lower than what you jumped on will automatically kill you. So I found myself completely stuck. Yeah. And I had to just die in order to get back to my tank and lose one of one of your lives, which are not infinite.
Yeah. I never was separated from my car like that. I also didn't have this. Like, I guess the aha moment for me happened somewhere else because I don't remember a moment in the water that made that I felt like a prompt that like, oh, you got to get out of your car now. It was somewhere entirely different. Like I was able to just maneuver in the water fine with the car or the truck, the tank. Make up your mind.
But I guess I just never felt like I like the mechanic, but I guess I just used it even less than you guys did because I if it was too low to the ground, I just sort of jumped over them. So I only got out of the car when I had to go into a into one of the sub sub rooms. Yeah, I think what you did is honestly probably the smarter way to deal with that anyways. I kind of just more was like testing it like, well, if I can't hit him now, could I hit him as a person? But I don't think there's ever like a reason why I would like, well, I need to kill that guy rather than just go around him.
Yeah. Which is just another reason why like as cool as as cool as that mechanic is, they didn't put enough reason for me to use it. It's definitely missing a puzzle mechanic to the world in the sense of like reasons to explore and leave your ship that like you have to then like later after solving the puzzle, you're able to like retrieve your ship from like a ship, whatever. We're calling this thing all sorts of things. Yeah. This is why they want you to call it Sophia.
It would be so much easier if we all just called it Sophia. Okay, Sophia. You know, but if you have to do it that way, that would be like a good excuse to get out. I actually used it for a different reason. And that's because when you are the main character, Jason, you have a separate health bar. And once you get back into Sophia, you gain all your health again. So it is kind of a cheese mechanic there, if you will, that you can get out, fight as a full health character and then get back in the car.
And this is assuming you're low on health or whatever in the tank for a reason to get out of it. But I thought that was neat that they're able to keep track of first off, like so many different things, the position of your tank, the health of your tank, the health of you, the enemies you've killed, but also that, you know, there's like a reason to be out of the car for lack of any other reasons, like there's no puzzles or progression moments outside of the fact that, you know, and we haven't talked about this yet and we probably should, that there are doors you have to go through to get to these top-down perspectives to make progress through the different areas. Do you guys want to talk about that?
Yeah. So usually there's a boss or some just power-ups will be hidden behind these doors that you can only go into if you are in pedestrian mode. And then you get, you know, like that sort of zoomed in Zelda shooter experience.
Um, and, uh, I mean, that, that's pretty much it. Like you, you go in there for power-ups, you go in there for bosses. Yeah. And it has like this interesting mechanic though, too, of two different forms of attack. Uh, and, and I really couldn't, and maybe this was just like my failure to understand, but I was mostly just using my regular attack because it seems like the special attack has like a certain, it has to hit a certain sweet spot for it to register as a hit. Is it a grenade? Is that why it's like? I think it's a grenade. Yeah. Got it. Okay. It's just going to be damage at the end of that, like shoot tail thing. It's not going to be like a, like a, the equivalent to like a hit scan.
Right. Go ahead. Well, the only time I found myself using that grenade or whatever it was, was when there's sometimes when you're, when your gun is powered up, it's not powered up at all. The game pays a little too much attention to the fact that your character is right-handed. Have you guys had this problem?
Yes. Yeah. Like, I get that. It's like, it wouldn't be realistic if the bullet came out from like the center of him or anything, but like there were times where I had to be up against a wall shooting like along the wall and something else up against the wall wouldn't get hit because like my right hand was like too far out and you couldn't like aim. So there was just no way of hitting it unless you went around it, went on the other side.
So your right arm would be up against the wall. That's one of the most noticeable quirks for me of this mode. Uh, I, I had this, I had to like trick some enemies into going in a certain direction so that I could shoot them safely. Yeah. It was fun. Yeah. Let, let me ask you this. Does it feel unnecessary to have this mode? I don't think so at all. I think that this, this mode kind of, to me, feels really important to the game because
it gives like that much more, I don't want to say meaning, but like it just gives that much more reason for you to be doing all the exploring you're doing in the ship because you're looking for these moments where you can get out and go through this. Like, it's almost like, it's almost like the, the legend of Zelda has dungeons, but then getting to the next dungeon is just like a different kind of dungeon instead of an overworld. You know what I mean? So to me, I think, I think it was really cool to like get to this point and be like, all right, now I get to get out and like kind of do my like on foot exploring through this sort of maze.
I mean, granted, they're probably less confusing than the, than the overworld, but it was just a cool change of pace and it never felt with like the three kind of ways to play the game. It never felt like they were like, uh, in like contrast to each other. They always felt like they fit together so well, even like the, the top down levels would have like themes and elements and music that fit with the, the section you were in on the side scrolling tank levels.
Yeah. I think it enriches, it enriches both modes, uh, because like whether, whether you enjoy playing as Sophia, um, or not like the fact that there is something to, to break it up a bit in these sub rooms slash boss battles. Uh, I think it, uh, it doesn't allow you to get as bored as you would otherwise.
Yeah, it definitely breaks the game up. As you said, Sean, I just, you know, and I, I'm not critiquing it. I'm asking the question of if it needed to exist. I don't, it's almost another problem with, with the game. And maybe this is just itself in the, in the Metroidvania world of things that there usually are some sorts of puzzles or, uh, reasons for exploring outside of areas that you normally would. And in this one, it's kind of the same thing where when you go through one of these doors and you enter this new thing, you're really just trying to get to the end of the area.
Uh, there's no like secret rooms or, um, or puzzles you have to solve or like move this rock or, you know, and sometimes that can get annoying. So move this rock is not something I'm a fan of. It's just an example. Uh, sometimes it's getting annoying, but I think this game is just missing a, a puzzle or strategy element to it. And it's just more of a, a action run and gun game at the end of the day. Yeah. I mean, I agree that it, you know, it would never hurt to add a puzzle element to it, but I think that it's just does so well at just being the action run and gun game that I I'm okay with it.
Like the way it is. I think that there is something really cool about, uh, you know, going through one of these like top down dungeons, if you will, getting, defeating the boss, getting out and being like, all right, let's get the heck out of here and like get back in your, in your vehicle. And like, I don't know, there's something very like action movie bad-ass about it. That's like a little wish fulfillment.
I agree. I think when it comes to games like this, where, where there's like upgrades that you have to get, um, just the whole Metroidvania thing when it's done poorly, like the upgrades just feel like keys, like the, like, Oh, you got this key and I can open that door. But in a game like this, where there is some creativity to the design of the, uh, uh, of the upgrades you're getting and there's enough variety in level design and enemy placement that they're not just keys to move forward, but they're also allowing you to have more expressive play.
Like you don't need to use all the, you don't need to use hover when you're fighting some enemies, but it like, it's, it could be, it could be helpful in the way that you're playing. Um, whereas somebody might stay on the ground, like when it's something, when it, when it adds, uh, when it adds decisions to how you could just play the game normally, I think that they've done that well. I would just like to see a, a giant map of Blaster Master with all five areas and see what that looks like as a, you know, just a beginning to end of the game, getting only the necessary,
um, power-ups you need and stuff like that. And then also having a map of Metroid side by side with that. And I just wonder how much more complex the Metroid one would be in a meaningful way, not just complex for the sake of being difficult in a meaningful way, because a lot of this game in, in a different sections of the areas as, as they're broken up between the rooms, a lot of it is just kind of, you know, a vertical or horizontal through like hallway, like, and, you know, we, we joke about that being a problem in today's games, these hallway games, but this, this game does suffer from that same problem.
There's, there's very little, uh, platforming outside of just, you know, oh, well, if I start at the bottom of this level, I have to move up to the top. Or if I started on the left side, I got to get to the right.
I don't know. I thought that there were, I definitely found plenty of times where I was like a little lost or trying to, trying to retrace my steps to figure out how I got here, especially later when you start backtracking, which I know was something I think we, we debated about during Metroid, whether backtracking is, is okay, or if it's kind of annoying. And I, and I don't even remember where I landed in terms of Metroid, but I think in this game, at least granted, I only got about a little more than halfway through this game. So maybe I would have gotten more annoyed with the backtracking, but, uh, in this game, I felt like I didn't mind it. It felt like, like an organic way.
Like I'm, I'm getting to the next level. It's not just like, it made travel feel like, I don't know. I had some agency of like deciding, okay, how do I get here? And where do I go next? There's enough branching. Like, I mean, obviously the branches meet up again most of the time, but there, there are enough like different ways that you can traverse that like, yeah, maybe the general direction you're going is to the right, but it's like, there, there are like those very short halt, like hallway, like, uh, zones that you'll go through a door, hop over two screens and go through another door. But that's also broken up by much larger environments throughout these levels.
Sure. I would just argue that I'm not, I'm not certain that anything meaningful happens between those. I mean, I'm just, I'm cheating now and I'm pulling up these maps and I'm looking at them and it really is kind of like you, you know, these are maps that a three-year-old could solve with a pen to, you know, to find the exits between them. It's not like there's these diverging paths where like, oh, well, you know, you got to go this way first because there's a thing over here and then you go down because you couldn't have gone straight there first because you don't have this yet. You know? I guess I just don't know what it's harming.
Okay. Yeah. It's maybe they're simple when you're zoomed out. Um, but if it's, if the environment is conducive to the gameplay experience that, uh, that the game is, um, is supplying to you, like, is it, is this bad? Like, is it, um, I guess I'm not sure what the actual, like, what the harm is here.
Well, it's a game about exploration, right? What? It's a game about exploration. Like you're trying to explore this brand new underground world that Jason's just found. And it's just, it's a little empty and you find these power-ups and yeah, there's, there's backtracking, but it's nothing, you know, to get back to the point of like exploration, there's not a lot to actually explore rather than just moving forward.
I don't know. Maybe I just was much worse at navigating, but I felt like even if it is like, there's not that many other ways you can go, I did feel like I, you know, I was having a lot of agency. If you know, it was probably an illusion, but it felt like I had agency in, in deciding where to go next. And like, should I go this way or that way? And like you said, somebody said, like, maybe you'd end up just in the same place no matter what, but there were like sometimes where this was something I didn't care for at first, but there were some times where you'd, you'd find a top down section where you're like, oh, this is where I'm supposed to go next. And it turns out there's just a bunch of like power-ups and pickups in there.
So I don't know, maybe again, I'd have to play more of it. And then I'd be thinking like, well, yeah, this is getting like a little too linear, but I never felt like the game was saying like, you have to, I don't know. I never felt like it was like, I have to really like the game was about searching and finding. It just felt like it was about navigating these, these different levels and, you know, exploration in a story sense, but it didn't feel like I needed to be like, I never thought that the game was trying to put me in a maze. It didn't feel like hallways to me. It didn't feel like Final Fantasy 10 hallways. It felt like there was more to it.
But I mean, zooming out, I'm looking at it as well. Yeah, they're simple. But when I was playing the game, it didn't feel that way. Totally. And again, I keep saying I didn't get further than level four or five, but, but, you know, there was the one level when you get the hover ability and you have to kind of go back to level one and you got to sort of remember like, wait, there were platforms that I couldn't reach at the beginning of the game. I bet I can get back there and find those. To me, it just felt more about like unlocking the new paths and, you know, remembering where to go next and trying to figure, you know, that kind of thing out. But I think that kind of thing. Thank you.
Thank you.
So that's exploration. But in terms of just progression as you're getting these upgrades and you're going along in the game, I mean, we always love good power-ups in our games. And I think we briefly touched upon this already. But I think that the power-ups in this game for Sophia the Third and also for your blaster are really meaningful. And you feel powerful assuming you collect everything. I don't think you actually have to collect everything to get to Area 8.
Yeah, I mean, I agree on the uniqueness of the power-ups that you get and the feeling of power that you have when you're using them. I guess I don't know if you need everything because I don't think that I've explored the entire game and I may have missed things. But yeah, I mean, that's sort of what I... I guess I very much want some complexity to level design. But again, when the core experience is using these upgrades and they did that well, I guess that's where I see that differently.
And I can confirm now that you actually do need all of the Sophia upgrades in order to get to the end. Gotcha. It was just... I guess I was... I didn't even know about... Because I didn't get past Area 5 either, Joe. I didn't know about the key that gets you to Area 5. That's what your frog drops, right? I never saw it. So I can only debate.
Okay. But, you know, I think that these power-ups are really cool. And the fact that it's not just like, you know, the hyper beam and the crusher beam. If that was like the whole game of just... And even those are cool for the record. I'm just... You know, the fact that you can destroy blocks that you've seen before, but now without that upgrade, you couldn't do it. That's also very Metroid-like. I just appreciate that they actually changed maneuverability of Sophia as well. The hover one working really well.
And, you know, the dive engine being something that... I just assumed that, like, oh, because of Area 1, water's always going to suck in this game with Sophia. And it's nice that they actually, like, do that to reward you later. You know, much later, apparently. I wanted to talk about the water engine because I feel like it's this bittersweet thing in game design that I like in theory when I'm thinking about it.
And sometimes when I'm playing it. But where the game almost, like, goes out of its way to put a whole level of just really frustrating gameplay in there. I don't know how you guys felt, but I felt like that whole underwater part was very, very frustrating. But then the... Getting the power-up that suddenly makes that easier is, like, the most satisfying thing in the world because you've spent so much time being frustrated.
So it is, like, this kind of K-22 where it's like, well, you have to frustrate your player before you can, like, give them a reward this great. And I think that it's actually maybe, like, a little bit of a less common thing now than, like, when we were kids playing, like, really any... I'm trying to even think of a good example. Like, you know, any of these... I mean, even, like... Nah, I can't think of a good example. But, like, any of these, like, older games that we played that were, like, difficult... And Final Fantasy is a great example where, like, you get the airship and suddenly, like, traversal... You have to trudge through... Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
And... But that wouldn't be as significant if you started out with the airship. You just... You would just not have the appreciation for the size of the world. And I think it's kind of a similar thing here, too. You really appreciate that power-up you got because, really, you're only going to use it a couple more times when you're in the water. But you have the context of how hard it was to get through the water and you're just like, thank God my life has gotten so much easier now because I... Because I earned it, you know? Yeah. I agree. Saying it right now, I don't even have anything bad to say about it. But sometimes when I'm playing, I'm like, just give me the freaking thing.
It's the fact that, you know, Joe, that each of these power-ups does something meaningful to the environment as well, you know? So I think besides just the fact that they, you know, the hover might make it easier for you to dodge enemies, it's also, like, required movement to get around things in the same sense that, like, that hyper beam that you get early on, like, that's the only way to destroy the Guardian that is blocking area, too, you know?
Yeah. Things like that are cool because they have, like, this two-fold thing of you can see the reason why you can't progress further, but you need the power-up in order to do that. And I think that goes back to that exploration thing I was talking about earlier of, I was just really posing the question of, does this game need more exploration? Because a game like Metroid, where you would just keep, if you just kept moving forward and
getting the power-up that you needed and then immediately moving on, wouldn't feel as good of, like, a lost-in-space kind of journey. And this is no different. I mean, in the English one, we're not in space. But in the Japanese version of the game, you're in space. And so you have this feeling of exploration. And I just wondered if they could have pushed that a little further.
Yeah, I think they could have. But I just think it would have been a totally different creative decision. You know, like, it would have been a different... Yeah, to me, it just didn't feel like that's what they were going for. Like, that lost-in-space. And it was more just, like, go through this adventure. And, you know, there's a little bit of find-your-way. But it never felt like it was... Like, Metroid, I remember it feeling like, oh, they want you to feel scared and lost. And this is almost horror.
Where this was like, ah, you're just going and you're shooting... You know, you're shooting these mutants and you're trying to get to the bottom of this. And this felt a little more light-hearted to me. There's another thing, too, with a lack of a map and having to complete this game in one sitting. There's no save feature like there was in Metroid. Does that bother you guys? The map thing actually doesn't bother me here because of the straightforwardness of it. But the completing in one sitting feels like a big ask for Master Blaster. No, that is a big problem. It needed either passwords or a save function.
I mean, I also don't mind there not being a map because, yeah, they all have like a... There's sameness to it in some regards. But there's still... Like, these maps are memorizable. Like, there's still landmark-ish things that you can, like, put in a mental map. Or if you truly needed to, you could just draw your own map. You know, I think, like, for games that are this basic, that's actually a little fun. It wouldn't be fun in a 3D game to draw a map. But in these kinds of games, it is fun.
Yeah. And not to mention that I do think the maps that are provided in the manual, while not super detailed... When I first looked at them, I was like, that's ridiculous. Like, how is that even helpful? But then throughout the game, it actually was pretty helpful. Like, especially because, like... I think if they hadn't included those maps in the manual, I would have been, like, a little more frustrated with the fact that, like, the door to... I don't remember exactly, but, like, the door to stage 7 is in stage 1. But then the door... Like, it's not chronological, and there's really no way in the game of having any idea.
So it was nice to be able to check, okay, at least I know I need to get back to stage 3 in order to move on, or whatever it was. So that I was okay with. But to your first question, like, yeah, that's... I hate the idea of, like, that they made this so you have to go through in one sitting.
That's one thing that I think is just, like, the... It was just not, like, the norm at the time. And, like, I think that that and, like, the idea of having a set number of lives are just two things that I could completely, almost all the time, no matter what, do without. And, yeah, they also... They do give you continues. And they start at the beginning of whichever level you are on or whichever, like, area you are in. And so it's not quite a wipeout of progress. But they still... I think they should have given you unlimited continues if they were going to do it that way. Because, again, there's no scoring. They brag about there not being any scoring.
So why not just give us unlimited continues? Yeah, and a third thing, just because we're talking about it, and I feel like all these complaints go hand in hand, is what we talked about earlier, how you can actually get stuck and you are forced to kill yourself, to lose a life. One of your precious lives in this game that only has a set amount of lives that you have to finish in one sitting. Like, all compounding at each other just, like, really kind of hurt the experience, in my opinion.
You know, you did make me think, though, Joe, that we didn't really talk about the health meter, and I think that's important in a game that wants you to complete it in one sitting. Did you guys think that was enough health? I actually found it pretty generous. This game would suck if you were, like, one or two hits and you were dead.
I like that. And the health itself is given out pretty freely by the enemies. Yeah, I agree. It is generous, and refills are also generous. I think that you're right. I wouldn't enjoy this game as much if it didn't have some forgiveness for your very common, I mean, sorry, very frequent mistakes, at least for me. Yeah, I agree. I think it was, you know, it wasn't like, it wasn't, they didn't make it too easy, but they definitely made it comfortable compared to a lot of games. Like, you know, I never felt like I was just going to die on my way to the next stage unless it was really getting difficult. Like, I never felt like it was cheap or anything.
A little off topic here, but this got me thinking. On NES games, do you think you're just more likely to enjoy a game that might be a little easier in the sense that it's not a one-hit kill, you know, does that help your enjoyment of the game? Or do you think you could like a game where it's one hit and you're out? It at least makes it more accessible. Like, it makes it easier for me to like it. So, that's why I kind of would prefer a game that has, like, a difficulty curve where, you know, I feel comfortable for a good amount of time so that I can accept the challenge that it plays, that it puts before me later.
So, like, in games that are hard right off the bat, like, aside from, like, more modern games, like, it's easier for me to get into. But in old games that are hard right off the bat, I just have a hard time getting into them.
Yeah, I think I need to be in a very specific mindset where, like, if I sit down with a friend, I'm like, hey, let's try and beat this crazy hard game that, you know, everyone tries to beat. You know, let's try and beat, I would say Ghosts and Goblins, but that didn't turn out to be quite as hard as we thought it was going to be. But, you know, just like any of these quintessential games, you know, the Japanese Super Mario Brothers 2. Like, let's try and beat that tonight because that's supposed to be really hard and, like, that's supposed to be, like, a big challenge.
And I know it's not the same thing, but, like, maybe I would like to play, like, a game that's one hit kill if I'm, like, just in a particularly, like, really challenge myself mood. But I'd say, like, nine times out of ten when I sit down and play a video game, I want to be moderately challenged, but also not to the point where, like, I have to do the same thing a hundred times before I can, like, become skilled.
Like, I need to actually, like, gain a new, like, life skill of playing this game in order to, like, even comfortably play it. Yeah, it's kind of like winter games is how I imagine it, where there was that ice skating minigame that, like, it didn't matter what you did, your button inputs did nothing, and we all scored, like, zeros. And there's just no reason to keep trying that after, like, three times of being like, well, this is just dumb.
Right, yeah, you'd have to, like, really, really want to commit to, like, learning the language of that. But, um, or, or for me, it's almost like, I know it's, this is different, but, like, the analogy being, like, I love Pokemon, and once in a while, I might be like, oh, you know, it'd be really cool to do a Nuzlocke challenge, where when a Pokemon dies, I can't use it ever again. Like, I would hate if the game was like that, but, like, once in a while, I'm like, oh, that's fun because it's such a hard challenge.
Uh, but for the most part, I like the kind of, like, medium level of difficulty. I actually see that a lot in, uh, really good NES players on, on Twitter will post a lot about, like, them adding challenges to NES games they're very good at, where they try to beat, like, Super Mario Bros. 1 without ever taking damage. Oh, okay, so this isn't just, like, take a shot if you take damage. No, no, no, it's just, like, you, you, you reset the game if you take damage.
Damn. Yeah, and I think that's, I think that's great. You know, there's other people who do, like, no mushroom ever, you know, so you can't even, uh, allow yourself to, uh, take a hit because you'll start back at the, uh, at the beginning of the level. I, I like challenges like that. I will say that I'm starting to notice, as a personal bias, that I appreciate games like this a lot more than games that are one-hit KOs.
And I don't know if that means that easier games are likely to be received better by me. I wouldn't say that as, like, a, as a, as a be-all, end-all statement, but I appreciate a game that is willing to, uh, accept mistakes than a game that expects you to play perfect. I mean, I'll admit that the only reason I've never played Ninja Gaiden is because I never wanted to deal with one-hit kill.
And that was, like, the idea in my head of, that's a one-hit kill game, and, I mean, I'm going to have to play it for this. All three of them. Yeah, but, yeah, all three.
Uh, but I, I guess it'll be, it'll be interesting confronting that. Yeah, I think, I think, like, for me, it comes down to, like, just the fact that there's, it's hard to quantify because there's really, like, an art to making things that challenging. I think it's really easy to make things incredibly difficult and not fun, you know, like, just by making things, like, almost unfairly difficult. And maybe, like, a lot of NES games might have. I think that's, that whole NES hard thing a lot of times is talking about that, where it's, like, it's hard because, because it's not perfect, it's not really well designed.
Or, like, that, like, that kind of thing is where most of my frustration comes from. If something is designed to be hard and it's still designed well and it's satisfying, I've never played a Dark Souls game, but from what I hear, that's, like, the perfect example. Uh, that, uh, you know, I welcome that. I just might not always be in the mood for it. Exactly. We haven't talked at all about the bosses in this game, and I think that, you know, it's, it's interesting that they're locked to the top-down perspective. Were you guys ever expecting, like, a bigger fight with Sophia the Third as your main helm?
Um, I may have thought that when I started the game, but when they sort of, when I played the first one, I kind of got the idea that this is just how it was going to be. Um, yeah. And, uh, real quick sidebar, I'm surprised that you didn't recognize, uh, the, uh, the creature on the final. It's so funny that you say that because I was, while, uh, while you guys were going on your rant earlier, I was watching the ending of the game and I was like, wow, he is the final boss. So you do get to see him that way. Yeah. Um, and also in the manual, they say, we can't show you the final boss.
Um, but then it's just right on the cover of the game. Anyway. No, but, but the, the, that, that guy transforms into, like, something else that they're talking about. I see. It transforms into, like, Lord Zed from Power Rangers. It's pretty cool. Um, but anyway, regarding the bosses, I thought that they were fantastic to look at. Um, and there, there was enough variety in their behavior that I enjoyed, at least fighting the ones that I did fight.
Um, uh, and it's kind of weird that you kind of fight them on a black background, but I imagine that's for technical reasons. I think that has to do with the fact of how good they look. They probably dedicated all the graphics to the boss. These are definitely the best looking bosses I've ever seen in an NES game. Yeah. So I, I, I found them very enjoyable. Yeah, I did, I did too. And as far as fighting bosses as Sophia the third, I don't think that really crossed my mind. And just because I think I'm, like, conditioned to just think that, like, there's a format to these, you know, that would be like in Legend of Zelda, if all of a sudden there was a boss, like, outside of a dungeon.
Like, just on the outside map. Ganon just settles things outside. Yeah. He just, like, came looking for you. Well, I mean, in, in the, uh, history of video games, there are many examples of, uh, like, uh, non, non-standard bosses. Like, you know, in modern, in modern games, there's, like, quick time event bosses and all that kind of stuff. So, and I imagine in retro games that I can't just think of off the top of my head, there are, uh, bosses that you fight in modes of play that it hasn't been established.
But I guess it's safe to assume that if the bosses you fought, the first, if the first boss you fight is in this kind of way, then that's just how you're going to keep fighting them. Sure. And I would argue that the, the Legend of Zelda example is actually, uh, a little different because that, that overworld is still the same type of layout. Like, you fight as Link the same way that you do.
Here, it was just more like, I would have, you know, imagined seeing you have, being a fully powered up Sophia the Third and having to use your different beams and the hover and the wall mechanics for, like, tackling a, a giant, uh, cave-like creature. That would have been cool. Yeah. You know, I, and I'm not arguing that I think that that would have been a bad idea. In fact, when you put it like that, you've, you've pretty much sold me on, on, that would be a pretty cool idea.
Uh, I just think that the, the, the, so far the language of these NES games has not conditioned me to even have, like, considered that once I was just like, oh, this is the way these games are. Like, the bosses are in these worlds, the traversals in this part. And yeah, it would have been interesting though to see, especially because it's side-scrolling versus top-down.
Would have been fun. I lament the loss. I'm sure you do. But. I have I have some quotes here from a different Iwata, not the Iwata of Nintendo fame. Yoshiaki Iwata, let's go with that. He was the art designer for Blaster Master, and I pulled two quotes from him. I know, Sean, you're always loving to hear what these game designers have to say about their games. I do. So here we go. The goal was really to try and pull off the best graphics on the NES to date. Simple graphics were more or less the standard on the NES at the time, but I had this firm belief that it was possible to do something better, something prettier. I feel like we pulled it off, and we were able to show people what could be done on the NES.
It left an impression around the office, and from what I've heard, the visuals influenced the work of other games that were later made by other NES developers as well. We also didn't want to make a game where the player just proceeds forward. We wanted to make the player experience the feeling of excitement that comes from discovering something after endeavoring through a difficult search, which is why we composed a map that allows players to move freely between different areas. We really put a great deal of thought into that element of the game design, and I mean this in the best way possible, but we wanted the player to have a struggle. To have a struggle. They mean that in the best way possible.
Oh, yeah, exactly. No hard feelings. I mean he was definitely right on the graphic side, right? As the art designer, he did a great job. Yeah, I'm hopeful that he was telling the truth about how much influence it's had on more NES games, because again, this is the best looking NES game so far, and I'm looking forward to more of those. It's a beautiful art style. Yeah, I can't imagine any licensed games like Back to the Future or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles looking that good,
but I could see other games even from Sunsoft, who made this one. I could see them, if they're releasing other games, using this information to their benefit, and bringing out more pretty games. Oh, he does look like Lord Zed. Right? I thought that was good. And then, you know, I don't know if you guys know this, but Blaster Master has a lot of sequels and spinoffs.
I've recently learned of many of them, yes. Okay, okay, that's good. You cheated this time. Yeah, I cheated this time. Will you keep your reactions as genuine? I'll try. Okay, that's good. Joe, did you know that Blaster Master is like a franchise? You know, it's funny. I assumed because I had heard of, you know, Blaster Master seemed to have this, like, B level of, like, popularity.
I mean, it's not as popular as things like Castlevania and stuff, but I had definitely heard of it. Yeah, it's like a cult classic. This is based on just my perception. Maybe I'm wrong. Is it a cult classic? I would say so. I think a lot of NES fans know about this game and would be shocked to hear people, like, discovering it. Like, what do you mean you never played Blaster Master?
That's actually why I was surprised that I, like I said, I've heard of it, but I was surprised that I never have seen gameplay and it's not talked about as much as the other ones because it just seems so, I don't know, I don't want to say revolutionary, but, like, compared to, like, the NES game so far, it just seems like it's, like, quite a step for NES games. So, yeah. So, to answer your question, I expected that there were sequels and spinoffs.
Great. Okay. And originally there was no sequel planned for Blaster Master because the game sold really poorly, but that changed when the North American release of Blaster Master came and sold really well, which is surprising that it didn't do as well in Japan, but we wouldn't see another Blaster Master game on the NES. It was actually Blaster Master 2 came to Sega Genesis in 1993 only for North America, so there was no, um,
what was it called? Mega Drive? I think it was called Mega Drive in Japan. Uh, there was no, uh, Blaster Master 2 of Mega Drive. The difference is that there are eight levels to play through, and each level, uh, contains a power-up or a new obtainable weapon in which Jason or Sophia can use throughout the game. So... I think I was going to say, or Fred.
Right, that would be interesting. You finally get... This time you're Fred searching for Jason. Yeah, he jumps down a hole. Jason jumps down a hole and Fred's going to find him. Yeah, and if you get a chance, you should check out the, the look of this one because I feel like, for some reason, the graphics aren't really, like, that much more stepped up for the Genesis version, and they're actually a little ugly. Uh, maybe it's just, like, the palette, but I wasn't a, I wasn't a fan of the way this one looked.
And, and then we have Blaster Master Jr. or Blaster Master Boy, depending on which region you're in, and that came out... I like Blaster Master Boy. Yeah, I like Blaster Master Boy 2 because it's the, if you look at the box arts for the two, Boy is spaced out really nicely.
And that came out on Game Boy in 1992, and that's part of that whole, like, weird trend of, you know, like, NES, successful NES games getting Game Boy ports that have nothing to do with the original game. And this time there's no Sophia, so it's really just, like, Bomberman. Oof. Yeah. I don't like that. I don't like that either. I don't know why you would get rid of Sophia the Third, but they did, and nobody ever played that game. That's a fact.
Blaster Master Enemy Below on Game Boy Color in 2000. It pretty much is just like the NES game, just a whole new game, but very little has changed from the NES one. That's the one that just looks like it's super zoomed in. Yes, because of the... I don't really understand graphics on how that works with, like, the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color, but it just has to do with the limitation of how many sprites you can have on screen and stuff like that. It's the same problem with Metroid 2 Samus Returns on the Game Boy. That one is like, the whole screen is just Samus.
And then there's Blaster Master blasting again on the PlayStation. Sean, did you ever see this in the stores while you were searching for PlayStation games? I very well may have. I watched a little bit of footage of the game, and I don't recall anything like it before, so I can tell you for sure that I never played it. Got it. Yeah, it's a third-person 3D platformer. I don't know if, you know... I mean, I'm sure at the time
that's where this kind of game needed to go, right? That would have been the right direction at the time. Was this PlayStation 1 or 2? PlayStation 1. I think it was released when the PS2 was already out, so it's weird that it just didn't get released on that. Yeah, that is strange, actually. You bring that up. 2001, so I think the PS2 was out, correct? Or was that 2002? It was out, yeah. Yeah, 2000, I think, yeah.
Blaster Master Overdrive on the Wii in 2010. It's just that another trend for NES games where they become ugly 2.5D WiiWare games on the Wii. And the WiiWare was like this separate thing on the Wii eShop that you had to like... You just paid more money for those games because they were WiiWare, whatever that meant. So this follows up with all those other
like Konami-style NES revival games on Wii, and I didn't like the look of this one either. It looks atrocious. Yeah. Something's just wrong with Wii games. There's just something about them. Remember that centipede one? Yeah. A lot of the art in this game looks like it was designed for like a knockoff cell phone game. I don't know if you can kind of see that. I don't know. Yeah, well, I'll post a link in the show notes so everybody can see how these games play.
On April Fool's Day 2010, Sunsoft announced that a sequel to the original Blaster Master called Blaster Master Destination Fred would be released on the virtual console.
And people were... Yeah, they were genuinely distraught. They didn't know if it was an April Fool's prank or not because that's just so random that you would announce that it's coming to virtual console and that it's for like a game that came out in 1988, but it was just a joke. Destination Fred is such a great name, though. Yeah, it doesn't end there, though, because Scholastic Books also published a novelization of Blaster Master, the original game, written by a guy named Peter. I'm not even going to try to attend his last name, but everybody knows Peter.
But unfortunately, nobody knows Peter because he wrote all these under the pen name A.L. Singer. And as with all the other books in the series, all acts of violence portrayed in the games, including any death scenes, were removed. And as a result, the bosses were portrayed in this book as holographic projections placed over formless blobs. Okay. Then you just have to blow up the blob. Like, I just think it's funny that the author has to specify that every time. Like, this is just a holographic projection on a formless blob. It's not, you know, like, the guts aren't real.
Is it saying that, like, the formless blob is, like, not alive or something? Is there, like, something where they're like, oh, it's okay that we're killing this. Okay, so it's just like gelatin that happens. It's just really inconveniently placed gelatin
with ugly demons projected onto them. Randomly, without any consciousness, is, like, attacking. Yeah. That's fun, though. I want to read some of that prose. And now, Blaster Master has seen a lot of publicity because Blaster Master Zero was, like, practically a Switch launch game. And then Blaster Master Zero Two, which is not good enough to get its own Wikipedia page. It's also just not Blaster Master One or something weird. Blaster Master Zero Two. Zero Two. And these games actually take the time to look like an NES game. Like, they have that Shovel Knight style to them, if that makes sense. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Yeah.
And they add, like, a lot of dialogue and story exposition and stuff like that. But otherwise, it pretty much is the NES game again. So, if I'm going to take any bets on which one Joe's going to play, it's going to be these Blaster Master Zero games because they definitely... Those would be for me. Yeah. They seem like they're for you. They weebified that a little too much for me, but I'll probably give it a play. Yeah. I remember considering Zero because the Switch just had very few games at launch. And I went with The Binding of Isaac instead,
which was a good guess, I guess. Yeah. I don't know. So, you enjoyed that game or you didn't? No, I enjoyed that game a lot. I just don't know if that... Like, is that also the idea of, like, an ideal Switch launch game? Like, I don't know. It's an indie game. It's been out forever. It's on everything. So, I guess so. But we're going to have to talk about our ideal essential NES games during the Essential Games list.
Okay, I'm going to switch things up here for a minute and I'm going to vote first. I don't like this, Mike. I'm sorry, but it must happen. I feel like you deserve it once in a while. Thank you. I don't know the last time I've ever voted first, actually. Oh, I could probably trace it back. Go ahead, Mike. Yeah, I know. You keep a record of just the things that happened during the Essential Games list. I do. You have someone transcribe them for you and you use that against us during the Best Of episodes. I do that. I actually do. Yeah. Anyway, so, here's the thing with Blaster Master for me is despite any criticisms I might have given during this episode,
I was really just being hard on the exploration part because Iwata talked so much about how he, like, put a lot of thought into that and, you know, like, they wanted it to feel like you were progressing. So, I was just, I was really just questioning that. Like, did they do enough? To be honest, for me, they, I think they did enough because ultimately,
this game is just a run-and-gun slash platformer slash metroidvania slash top-down Zelda-like game. You know, it's a lot of different things and the variety really shakes things up often enough that I'm having a good time while playing this game. I will say that if you haven't played this game before and you find yourself aligning with my tastes, this is the type of game that you don't fall in love with right away. It's not, it's not the most accessible thing, but the more time you give to it, the more you kind of,
like, learn to love it. And I really learned to love this game as I continued to see the various, like, different mechanics and play styles and going through the each areas and backtracking. I think that's really what made the whole game come together. This isn't a game that, like, I was sold on right away, despite the awesome cutscene at the start. I was like, hey, it's a nice start, but what do you got else for me? And it really took about,
you know, maybe two, three hours before I was like, yeah, this is a game I would definitely see myself playing more of. So Blaster Master is one of the best games we've played on the NES so far. I think it's also one of the games that manages to, like, tackle multiple genres of games correctly. Yeah, well, you know, like, that's just, it's just amazing how forward-thinking this game is right now. And I would have been
impressed with this game as a Super Nintendo game, to be honest. So, yeah, it's definitely on my essential games list. Sean? Yeah, I had the same experience where I had never heard of this game for the most part. I've heard the game, but I'd never played it and didn't really think too much about it. And now I just feel like someone was hiding this game from me this whole time because I love it. I had a similar experience in that it took me about an hour to change my first assumption of, like, oh, this is just a shovelware game. This manual sucks. I judge every game by its manual. And until I was like, oh, no, this has ideas. This is fun. This is well-made.
And another little thing I want to just be excited about is just the animation in your tank is crazy. Like, there's a suspension system and the wheels move and all that. It's really fun. And this is, I agree, one of the best games we've played on the NES. So I am giving it a raving essential. All right. And now, Joe, even though it is an essential game, I hardly doubt you're going to get in the way of us here. So go ahead. I'm going to give it two non-essentials just to take it down. Can't do that. You speak for Sam, huh? Yes, yeah. He texted me.
Now, the only thing for me that this game had going against it, well, three things, is that kind of trifecta of problems that I mentioned earlier of the fact that you can't, that you don't have unlimited, that you can actually, like, have to restart the game if you die too much. You have to do it in one sitting, and you can get stuck and be forced to die in order to progress. Those, like, I know those, maybe when I say them out loud, don't sound that big, but like, while you're playing it, those are pretty big deals. And it actually did, for a split second, like, have me thinking, like, well, does a game with all those problems deserve to be on the essential game list?
And I think that despite those problems, yes, it still does. Because it, the quality of the game otherwise is so good that, I mean, I can overlook those little issues. And for the most part, like, this is, I mentioned in, I think, Super Mario Bros. 2 that it was the first time in a long time that I felt like I was thinking about this game not just, like, with, oh, I gotta put it in context of, like, it's an NES game, but, oh, this is actually just a good game today. It feels like a game I would play today. And Blaster Master does that too with those couple of exceptions.
So, I mean, I don't have too much more. I feel like I'm kind of rambling. You guys kind of said it all. I think this game is fantastic. I think that everyone should play it, honestly. I think it's a, it's definitely essential. All right. Three for three.
We had a four for four with Super Mario Bros. 2, but I could imagine that if Sam played this game, he would have also given that essential. But, you know, I think it's just time to talk about the last four episodes. Yeah. And how we have three essential games out of the last four episodes. I really thought anticipation was going to pull it off for a minute. I thought it was going to make it, yeah. You know? And then I played it.
Yeah. So that, that was the problem there. But this is really like, this is a great holiday season for Nintendo because this is all October and November of 88. And if you like video games, I think right now, these, you know, especially Super Mario Bros. 2, Blaster Master, and we have big ones coming up like Castlevania 2 and Zelda 2. It's clear that like Nintendo was pushing these games to get a hot, or maybe not Nintendo, but just like a lot of developers were thinking about putting their best games forward during Christmas with a lot of people already owning or planning to buy
Nintendo Entertainment Systems. Yeah, I think that this is actually like, this is an exciting and also slightly dangerous time for us because I think our hopes are getting so high for the future because everything has been so good and I just gotta imagine that they, like how long can this be kept up is my question. I mean, there's like, we still have like, what, like 580 games to go or something like this? Yeah, I still have hype for Color of Dinosaur. You can't talk me out of that. I think that there's still going to be exciting times ahead. Yeah, and I mean, for what it's worth out of the,
all the different games that we've played, I think we, I think we're on episode 135. Uh, that means that 70% are just absolute garbage still. So it's not like we, you know, even though we're getting this high of like three new essential games in four episodes, it's not like the bad stuff isn't overwhelming, you know, isn't overwhelming us. It still stinks a lot in here. Yeah, and statistically speaking, we should have about
502 bad games total based on that 70%. So, we'll see how that checks out. But, but I will say, I think that these last three essential games for me personally have been on my, my higher end of my essential games list. I'd have to really do the math to figure it out. And I, and I'm not sure if you guys felt exactly the same about Spy vs. Spy, but I think all three of these for me are like, are like higher tier.
Joe, don't introduce a new tier of the essential games. It can't be happening. So, you know what I mean? If I had to rank my essential games list, I think these would be, these would be up there. These are platinum emerald tier, not just platinum tier. Yeah, it's actually, it's a, it's a small micro transaction of $5.99 a month to find out which essential games we think are better. Which are the golden essential games. Yes, just, you could find out if you just unlock that DLC.
Yeah. Next week, we have another big game, Bubble Bobble. Bubble Bobble! And that game, I know, you're looking forward to color a dinosaur, but I think those guys are dinosaurs. I, you know what? I don't even know. I don't even know what Bubble Bobble looks like. That's funny. All I know about Bubble Bobble is Bubble Bobble, Double Dragon. I know Bubble Bobble. I love Bubble Bobble. I forgot what Bubble Bobble was. All I know about Bubble Bobble is Bubble Bobble, Double Dribble, Double Dragon F-Zero.
That's very true, Joe. Well said. Google it. I actually think, yeah, with that, we should close out the show. Thanks for, so much for listening, and thanks, Joe, for giving us a clear exit. If you want to hear more NostalgiaCast, just, you know, do the thing where you're on your app right now. You must be listening to us on a podcast app, so just continue to find us on that podcast app. We have 134 episodes by my math, plus some specials, so a whole episode on Sonic the Hedgehog, if you can believe it. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, we did that. And then if you want... I don't remember doing that. Yeah, I was saying, when was this? Oh, sorry, guys. Yeah, that was alternate universe, Sean and Joe. But it was real universe me. Universe one, Espo, but with universe two, Sean and Joe. How come you get to cross... That's where he goes on Mike's Without Mike. Yeah, that was me with the Sean who laughs.
That's who that was, and that was also with the Russian Joe instead of the Joe we have today. I don't know, you know, it's like there was a Russian, there was the Red Sun, Superman, and I don't know if you... We all have your teeth. Yeah, do you know about the Batman who laughs? I've heard of the Batman who laughs. Okay, I just, it's so ridiculous, it's so stupid. We don't do stupid stuff like that on our show. Instead, we bring education right to you, the people, on our Twitter,
at NostalgiaCast. I'm always providing images of, um, what I like to think are thoughtful things with educative facts to them. Did you know that Spy vs Spy debuted in Mad Magazine number 60, which congratulated both Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy for winning the election depending on which way you read the issue?
Well, you would if you listened to that episode or if you just went on the Twitter and got the Sparknotes versions of the episodes. Something like that. If you need to homeschool your kids, just put them in front of our Twitter. There you go. Yeah, and as of August 12th, 2020, Final Fantasy 7 is on Xbox Game Pass, so stop listening to this episode and go play that. Whoa, I wasn't aware of that. It just happened 20 minutes ago. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
