265 · Roadblasters
RoadBlasters is a futuristic racing action game. The goal is to reach the finish line in one piece throughout each of 50 levels. Numerous enemies are out on the road to try and stop you, including armored cars, motorcycles, cannons on the side of the road, landmines, and more.
- High Speed Action Direct from the Arcade Smash!
- NES Longplay
- Introductions
- Been a minute since we’ve had a racing game where you drive on a road and shoot enemy cars while navigating twisty turns
- Overview
- Navigate an armed sports car through 50 different rally races, blowing up enemy cars and getting to the finish line before running out of fuel.
- Gameplay
- What’s different here than Spy Hunter, Mach Rider or Bump N Jump
- Score Multiplier
- Control of the car (more accessible turning?)
- Plane drops a special ability onto the track
- I thought this was a bad guy at first and was avoiding it. Read your manuals kids
- What’s different here than Spy Hunter, Mach Rider or Bump N Jump
- A promotional giveaway was accessible on the original arcade version, where players could send in their name and "personalized secret code" after completing rally 50 and receive a free RoadBlasters T-shirt. The promotion ended August 31, 1987.
- This is the game that created the evil villain Turbo (from Wreck it Ralph) in the movie, turbo’s game is deemed old once Roadblasters gets put into the arcade. So he travels to the roadblasters game via the surge protector they are both plugged into and then proceeds to crash into the Roadblaster car. Causing both games to be shut off.
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- None
- EGL
- Next week - Rock 'n' Ball
- NEStalgia Byte - Captain Tsubasa II: Super Striker
- 1. UZ Cannon - Rapid fire gun, doesn't affect multiplier, lasts a while
- 2. Nitro Inject - Very high speed for a short time, 3 uses
- 3. Cruise Missile - Destroy everything on screen (good and bad), 3 uses
- 4. Electro Shield - Makes the car invincible for about 5 seconds, 3 uses
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Road Blasters. High speed action, direct from the Arcade Smash.
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. I just like the way he said, Road Blasters. Oh, okay. I get it now. No, we need to extend this episode as long as possible. So, Sean, if you could just speak at that duration or length or... The cadence? Cadence. There you go. That's the word I was looking for. If you could speak at that, that... I can do that. Thank you. Because this is otherwise gonna be a short... No, I'm joking. It's gonna be a fine episode because it's been a minute since we've had a racing game where you drive on the road and shoot enemy cars while navigating twisty turns.
Racing, huh? Yeah, well, you know, I don't know. Racing games are synonymous for a bunch of things, right? But I feel like that at least tells you that you're gonna be in a car. And surprise, you're in a car. You are in a car. I'd say it's more just a car game. Cool. There's a car game, according to Sean. Yeah. Are you in the car or are you in the car? Not a mechanic simulator game. We're not having this conversation again, Joe.
You are navigating an armed car through 50 different rally races. So I do think that's where it becomes a racing game, Sean. There's a checkered flag and everything at the end of each stage. So can you just like... Can you actually just sit out for the next five minutes because of what you said earlier about this not being a racing game? Yeah. No, I put the timer on. Okay, cool. And you will. He will be back. So if you were like, oh, I only listen to these episodes for Sean. Don't worry. You know, he will be back in five minutes.
Joe, it's a you're going through these rally races. You're blowing up enemy cars. You got to get to the finish line. All of this, of course, before you guessed it, you run out of fuel. The thing that we usually say isn't that exciting of a thing to do managing fuel is back in this game. What's different here than Spy Hunter, Mach Rider, Bump and Jump? I don't even think you were on that episode. Knight Rider. What is different here for this game?
I mean, in Knight Rider, you are managing your fuel, but isn't there also a time limit in Knight Rider? Yeah, it's like, it's like, can you just choose one method of limiting my gameplay? Yeah, I mean, I guess in that sense, that's a little oversaturated too, but like at least the time limit feels a little more like a race. I mean, I don't know. It's all, it's all like leads to like a similar result.
But like that was a big thing that made a difference for me was just the fuel thing. Like I'm in control of the fuel, but it's like there's really never any reason to, I mean, even I still can't tell when you let go of the up on the D pad. Are you wasting less fuel? Because you go a little, you like rev up when you're going forward. Now, now here's the thing that I want to talk about, like some, some brass tacks mechanics real quick.
Uh, you are not in control of the fuel. The fuel ticks down from the moment the, the race starts. You cannot be moving. It's a timer. Um, basically because you start these, these races like standing still, and then you have to press up to accelerate and then you start moving. But your fuel ticks down, even if you haven't started accelerating and the up and down really are just like acceleration buttons. If you just hold up until you reach your top speed of like two 12, then you don't have to, you don't have to do that anymore. You're just going to go that speed, but you're probably going to run into stuff or end up on the shoulder once in a while. So you, you should probably like stay on top of it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so this becomes the kind of game where it's less about how fast you get there or how many cars you destroy, but about collecting fuel throughout the stage. In a lot of other games, you manage the fuel based on your acceleration and making sure that you save enough to get to the end. They don't just keep giving you fuel all the time in this game. You, you get plenty of fuel. You just have to make sure you're actually collecting it as you navigate the course.
Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes getting that fuel is a lot of, a lot of times that fuel comes from cars that you blow up. So like there's your incentive to blow up cars, but only certain cars. Well, so there's a couple of different things like this at the base level, this game is incredibly simple. And that's why we were making jokes about how much we could even talk about it. But yeah, like the cars, they do drop fuel. A lot of it is just like stationary pickups that you're going to drive over. But the thing that is, that's unique about this game is it's also got a fuel reserve. And how much you have in your reserve is a fucking, God, mother. But that one was okay. I like the sound of that one.
We're keeping that one in. Let's roll with it. Okay. We're doing it live. The thing about the reserve is that it's dependent on how many points you scored in the previous round. And so that's like extra time. So you get extra time by scoring points. Now, the points that you score are mostly based on how many enemies you destroy. And the, there's a score multiplier that you have to keep up by being accurate while you're shooting at these cars. So every time you miss, your multiplier goes down. Every time you hit, multiplier goes up.
With a maximum of 10. I think a minimum of one. So it behooves you to still try and fight these things. You're not just drive around them because then you get extra reserve fuel in the next match or the next race.
Sure. So there's some like interesting interplay going on. Like some might say that maybe you don't need the reserve fuel. So just drive cleanly and you've simplified the game. But like, I, I don't know. That's, that's just less fun. No, you bring up a good point about the score multiplier being the unique thing here. Cause we didn't see that in the other games that coupled with the reserves is great. One interesting thing about the score multiplier though, is that it's not about how accurate you are overall. It's not like, oh, you got 88% of your shots. So your score multiplier is this. It just counts up every time you successfully hit one. And then it counts down every time you miss one.
So once you get 10 shots in a row, right? Let's say you get the first 10 cars out of the way. You were very careful. You get your 10 score multiplier. It's almost no incentive to ever shoot again, provided that you have the fuel and then eventually the reserves, which spoiler alert, you would have the reserves. If you had your 10 score multiplier from the previous round built up and then just held onto that. There's kind of this, uh, look, it's not a cheat, but there in a way, like there is a gaming, the system here about using the score multiplier to just take the appropriate amount of shots. Don't, don't shoot everything. Shoot what you know you can hit.
Only, only target that what you know. There is still, there is still like room on the high end, like after those first 10, uh, vehicles that you've destroyed. Like you're not going to get the max reserve. If you waited, you, if you hit the first 10 perfectly and didn't hit another one after that, like it is still, there is still incentive to keep getting more. Right. I'm just saying once you have 10, it's like only take the shots you think you can make.
Don't like risk it on a, on a twisty turn. Don't, you know, like you don't want anything to lose your reserves because that will only help you. Uh, because again, it doesn't matter how fast or slow you're going. You just need the fuel to get it done. It's the only real thing that you need to think about for beating this game is making sure that one, you don't go fast enough that you crash into something or, or don't, uh, notice that you're about to crash into something. And then two, that you have enough fuel to get through it.
So with that in mind, it's, it is a little bit like it's less of a driving game and more of, uh, like it's not a thinking man's game by any means, but, but you have to, you know, you do have to think about your scores, your score more than you would in a regular game like this. Like in another game, the score is just an accessory component. Yeah. It actually, I do appreciate that that makes you think about it.
Yeah. It gives you some, we always talk about, I think all three of us, like how the score is. The score really doesn't usually matter to us in a game that keeps a score in this sense, but this, yeah, this gives, gives me a reason to like pay attention to that.
And it also like the multiplier and like the reserve function kind of helps the, like in this, it compliments the fact that there are so many courses and you have to like, it, it becomes like this incentive to like, I want to keep this up, keep chaining this to kind of help me in the next course, help me in the next course, help me in the next course. Like it gives you this like, um, sort of like management task to do throughout the, the whole game. Yeah. Honestly, I think road blasters requires like more high level thought process than something like chess.
Yeah. Well, until, well, that's because there's only one board in chess. There's 50, there's 50 different courses in road blasters and we can get into whether or not they, you know, become exceedingly more challenging or whatever. Uh, it's just different amounts of enemies, different kinds of enemies, uh, different groups of enemies, how littered the stage is. Yeah, exactly.
That, you know, the, the typical tropes that we see in these games, I actually just wanted to talk about the control of the car for a second, because this is maybe the most accessible version of like turning on, on the like pseudo 3d tracks that we've had so far. Uh, if you remember a mock rider, like the turns were really extreme and you would more than likely hit something on the outside of the road, then run into another, uh, enemy vehicle. And this one, the car like almost looks like it's drifting a little bit too on the turn. So like, it also has like this cool factor to it. Uh, that coupled with the interesting fake 3d graphics of turning, uh, you know, I'm, I'm here for it. I like the control of this car.
Yeah. It feels really like sharp because they're games that are rendered like this, that they're kind of fooling you. And we know this and, but it just seems that in this one there there's, there's less, uh, like drift of your own character to sell that you're going fast on a road. I actually think it's to its detriment that it's so easy to, to, to turn in this. Uh, it, it feels a lot like there's less challenge in the actual driving, but I guess that's also to say that the driving is sort of secondary to kind of this, uh, shoot them up gallery that you're also playing at the same time.
And then there's a plane that drops a special ability onto the track that you can collect. You know, I actually thought this was a bad guy at first and I was avoiding what they were dropping on the tracks thinking like, Oh, better not get that. So, uh, if you're like me and Sean, read your manuals, kids, this will help you in the long run and you will be able to actually do cooler things.
Uh, like use a, uh, a cannon or get some, uh, nitro fuel for your, uh, which isn't like a separate tank. You don't have to worry about it or whatever. You just get to go faster, uh, for, for a split second or so. Uh, cruise missiles. Yeah. Cruise missiles. All that stuff's great. I was missing it for a really long time because I thought like a better, better dodge, whatever that, uh, thing is. I thought it looked like a spider or something.
Yeah. Those cruise missiles though, they are, uh, they're, they're very helpful. I don't know if they work in the way that I would expect the cruise missile to actually work or it just destroys anything you can see in a flash of light. But, uh, but those, those are functional. Uh, I don't know. You're missing, you're missing the part where the cruise missile opens up into the other like 18 cruise missiles that make it just make it hit everything.
You're just firing the main cruise missile. Yeah. And then it opens up the cruise missile to reveal the other cruise missiles. You're both wrong. It's not, it's not like a cruise missile launcher attached to your, to your car. You are calling in a Patriot missile strike from off screen. Oh, yeah. And it just like looks like, yeah, it's just a huge explosion. Well, thank God you're driving a Patriot armored car.
I would have liked to see these missiles hit these cars. Cause it can't just be an explosion. Cause then I would explode also. It can't just be like a, no, you've got an explosion through padding. What? Oh, that's right. That's right. Um, but what did you guys think about the other, uh, power ups? I felt like they were kind of lackluster to be honest. Yeah. The Uzi, it was weird that like the first one that I got was like the Uzi cannon and it's just a faster version of your regular gun, but it's a different button. So I guess it's cool that you could be like shooting two guns at once.
Oh, but Sean, the, the Uzi doesn't affect your multiplier. Oh, it doesn't? No. So if you're using the rapid fire gun during that, I guess that makes sense. That's like, you know, go for it, like shoot wherever you want because your multiplier is not going down. Yeah. It just has the limited ammunition. So that's, yeah, that's fine. Yeah. I, I think, look, I'm not praising. There's only four, right? They could have done a lot more. Heck make the car fly. Give me a power up. It just makes the car fly or makes it or makes the, what were you saying, Joe? I said open world. Yeah. You can go off road. You can go into the city you see in the background, the bubble.
Cause otherwise, when you look at this game, when you look at this game and you think about the 50 different races, there's a reason why we're not going into like, but you know, race 11, that, that did something really cool where it did like, no, we're not going to be talking like that because the game doesn't do stuff like that.
Instead, it just does what we've seen in all the games that we mentioned at the beginning in this episode where they managed to like, you know, maybe every five or every 10 or so they, they throw us a new background or they, um, they introduce more of the same enemy that we've seen. There's not even that many enemies in the game. I think by like stage 10 or 15, you've seen most of them. You just haven't seen them all like in tandem.
Yeah. My favorite enemy, uh, was, I didn't want to hit them because I thought that they were just bicyclists just sharing the road with you, uh, and not the grizzled motorcycle soldier that I'm sure that they meant for me to parse that as, but it just looks like kids on bikes, but you get points for killing them. So, uh, that was my favorite. Well, it's funny because now that you mentioned it, really none of the other cars on the road do anything to you.
You're just shooting cars that are in front of you. They're not shooting back. They're like some turrets and stuff that shoot back. Turrets on the side of the road. Yeah. You're right though. There's no cars that shoot back at you. Unlike the ones in Knight Rider that did. So, uh, in this game, there are though different color cars that, uh, like, I forget which one it is, but like they're blue or they're purple and you just can't blow those ones up. Yeah. Like with, at least not with your special, without your special. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Without your special weapons, then you can blow them up, but like you just have to dodge them. And that's, I guess the, the game hook in a nutshell is that this game is about, it's like a racing shmup in the sense of, you know, we always talk about with shmups. It's more about like what you dodge versus what you kill.
This game's kind of like that, especially once you include the score multiplier thing, because it's less about just killing everything in your way and getting to the finish line and more just about like making sure you get to the finish line safely and with a great score multiplier. So you are, if you're like me, I was doing just a lot of weaving and being like, um, they were harmless. Yeah. Pretty much. You're just an evil dude.
Yeah. The turrets are probably like set up by like the, like, by like the government to get rid of you. Cause you're the menace that's just taking out. It's like citizens. It's like the highway patrol set up these, uh, these turrets. Well, you are a road blaster. That's true. Which is probably a gang. The turrets are the most annoying part of the possible enemies that you can encounter
because the way that they shoot, they shoot like not rapid fire, but they shoot like three. So it's like equally spaced out. So if you're like, you're in a bad turn or you're just not like in the right place when they shot, you're just going to get hit by those. It's not really like something you're able to avoid. Like, Oh, if I just would have went to the right, it's like, yeah, maybe just a little bit to the right, but if you go to the right, there's a good chance you're going to hit the other bullet that the gun turret shot out. Like they're not spread out enough.
I mean, you can also end up not getting hit by any of them because they also like that. They don't, they don't, they travel so fast. Yeah. They don't aim. And it's not like other, like in shmups where they get like slow bullets and you like it just, they become obstacles in themselves, uh, that you have to figure out how to drive around. Like you can just speed like right past them. I even noticed that sometimes sometimes. Yeah. Like I felt like I couldn't avoid them. Sometimes they just didn't shoot. Do you guys have that? Yeah. Go buy them and they just weren't firing. Yeah. I did notice that.
There was a promotional giveaway, uh, for road blasters, the arcade version, at least where players could send in their name and, uh, the personalized secret code that they would receive after, uh, completing the final race race 50. And they would receive a free road blasters t-shirt, but that promotion is over. So don't try to do it now. You can't, you can't get that anymore. You can't get that t-shirt, but maybe you can find it on eBay and just pay for the t-shirt.
Uh, I know Josh on sounds like he's itching for this road blasters. Really? I just didn't expect you to say that. Like, oh, the promotion's over. Like, just finding a, uh, uh, finding a poster for a concert that happened 20 years ago and getting really excited for it. Like, it's sort of the same thing. Well, think about it. It's like when you open up like a pack of old baseball cards now and you find out like you won, uh, two tickets to the 1993 all-star game. Yeah. You know, it's like, oh, but that passed. It's true. You can't go to that anymore.
We've, we've, we're talking about time and how it passes now. We've run so much out of things to talk about this game. We're just talking about the passage of time. Well, Joe, don't you think that's a funny thing? The time just keeps moving forward. It just keeps slipping into the future. I do think. Yeah. It's a great song. It is. Yeah.
Uh, no, there is something we have to talk about with road blasters and it's way more serious than the actual game. Okay. Did somebody die? This is the game that created the evil villain turbo from wreck it. Ralph. Really? In the movie, in the movie, turbo's game is deemed old. Once road blasters gets put into the same arcade and I'm not making this up. Road blasters is the game that gets put in the arcade across from turbo's game.
Wow. That's funny. So he gets so pissed. He travels to the road blasters game via the surge protector that they're both plugged into. Oh, yeah. And then proceeds to crash into the road blaster car causing the kids to be like, hey, what's going on? And then the arcade operator to just shut down both games, basically leading to turbo's demise until he returns in the wrecked Ralph movie. That's the fun flashback. Who would have thought that road blasters could leave such an impact on the video game cinematic universe? Wow. So when was the- I did not know that. I'm truly shocked. Yeah. So the bad guy's game came out when in the lore of wreck it Ralph?
Yeah. It must have been like 1985 or 6 or something like that. Yeah. So this is an arcade game originally from when we first started this podcast. Yeah. But not really like, it came out in 87, but I'm saying like turbo's game must have been older. But I guess what I'm saying is, is that the arcade version isn't different than the- It just looks cooler. Yeah. It just looks cooler. Yeah. And looks cooler is, you know, not by much. Like arcade games usually blow NES games out of the water. This one, not too much. Okay. But yeah, on the sequels and spinoff side, none. Huh. Never. I guess you could count wreck it Ralph. Yeah, that's true. And wreck it Ralph too.
Oh, I guess you could also count Lego Dimensions where you can play a port of the arcade version. Wow. I guess this is like the rights to this game are just cheap enough that they end up in random things. Well, it's Atari. So that would make sense, right? They just give away everything. Yeah. So was this like a name though? Like people know Road Blasters. Was it like a thing in the arcades that everyone like knew at one point? Or is it just that the rights are maybe cheap and everyone kept using it?
You know, it's interesting because when I go to the Wikipedia for Road Blasters, it's a pretty lengthy article. You know, like it's got a lot of detail on the gameplay and the legacy and stuff like that. But when you go to the reception area to find out what critics thought of it, it's all about the Lynx version. Huh. The Atari Lynx version. Like what? Nobody cares about the Atari Lynx version of this game. I'm that. I am positive. Well, this one guy that edits Wikipedia really liked the Lynx version. If you like Road Blasters on another system, you won't be disappointed in the Lynx version, CVG Magazine said. Jesus. CVG Magazine said. It's not even a good review.
If you already paid $40 for this game, might as well spend another $40 to own it on another console. That's the review. That was the review they just gave. Unless there's something different. Maybe the Lynx version is just like way better. Maybe the Lynx version has fireballs. I mean, granted, and though this isn't the same thing, but it's sort of how a lot of Switch reviews go when they're like ports from other consoles or PCs. Yeah. But at least the Switch is like a different...
type of console. It's like, oh, you can take this with you. Yeah. So if you liked it, you may as well pay for it again. Yeah. In a review of the Lynx version, Robert A. Jung concluded, this is a mind-blowing awesome adaptation. I'd recommend it to most video game players, fans of driving games, fans of shooting games, fans of action games, and fans of the arcade original. That's a lot of fans. Notice how he didn't recommend it to Hulkamaniacs, though. All right. Are we done? We're not done. We have to do the most important thing that we do on every episode, Sean. And that is the essential games list.
Surprise. It's not essential. But you know what? One thing about Road Blasters is that we didn't want to just rehash what we've said in the other episode. So I feel like this would be the one time to say something nice about it. And that is that it's a perfectly fine game. Fine games just don't get you anywhere anymore. Especially when you can list off other examples of games that we were able to play much earlier on that do exactly the same thing.
Road Blasters should have either adapted from the arcade version for something better. Should have expanded that. Or it should have said, hey, they kind of beat us to the market here. Maybe we shouldn't release Road Blasters on the NES. One of those two things should have happened. But neither one did. Instead, we got Road Blasters. And we're just kind of hoping that we didn't play the other ones first so that we might be able to say more on this episode. I don't think that's a positive thing.
Sean? Yeah, I mean, in the same way that I'm a totally fine podcaster. But that doesn't mean that I'm particularly interesting to listen to. Or you're going to fall asleep to my voice. Or you're going to pay me a Patreon subscription to get access to our Discord and Nostalgia Bites. That's not what that means. It just means that it's worse than dog shit. I lost the thread a little bit on that.
It's not essential. There we go. A vote is always good. A vote is always welcome. Joe, are you about to blast this road? Oh, yes. Which could mean a lot of things. So here's what it means. I think that Road Blasters, again, similar to what you said, actually, I think it functions. It's functional. That's a nice thing to say about it. I think it's something that you might play. It's just like a mindless experience of like, oh, I just want something to do, a video game to play that functions. So I call it mindless, even though we did say it is like, basically like, better than chess.
But, yeah, it's kind of boring after a while. I mean, I feel like you get it right away. Maybe you have some enjoyment trying to see what the other, how far you can get. I shouldn't say what the other tracks are like, because I don't get that different. But like, how far you can make it, maybe that's interesting. But it doesn't hold my interest very long. So I'm going to say not essential. All right. So this one doesn't make the essential games list. But there's always next week. Next week, we are playing Rock and Ball.
Never heard of that one. Is that like the sequel to Rock, Paper, Scissors? Just two options? Who would win? And Rock always beats Ball. That's what I was going to say. Like, who wins in a fight where it's just two spherical things? Maybe it's like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Like, Rock beats Ball, but if you both pick Rock, you both lose. Or something like that. Yeah. So like, if you both pick Ball, you both win. But you win more if you pick Rock and your opponent picks Ball. This is the game. I would love to play NES Prisoner's Dilemma.
And if you're looking for something a little more offbeat, we are playing Captain Tsubasa 2 Super Striker on our Nostalgia Bites podcast. That is for Patreon members only. Patreon.com slash Nostalgia.
You know, the same things that we've always been saying are on that Patreon. They're still there. So if you don't know what's on that Patreon, rather than me list them here, you can either go to the website and find out, or maybe listen to one of our older episodes and find out. Just Google it. Yeah, just Google it, bro. Or ask ChatGPT. What are Nostalgia's Patreon subscriber features? I guarantee it will send you text back.
And if you're curious as to what kinds of games we play on this, check out Captain Tsubasa Volume 2. Kind of a cool, totally unique thing. So maybe that'll sway you to wanting to listen to the rest of our Nostalgia Bites. Yeah, it's Quentin Tarantino's version of soccer. Ha ha ha.
