Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Video Game Review #370: Blaster Master Boy

Blaster Master Boy
Game Boy




Nostalgia Factor:

I’m moving onto the year 1992 with my next review: Blaster Master Boy for the Nintendo Game Boy. Since I never owned a Game Boy as a kid, this is a game I never got the chance to play growing up. I absolutely love the original Blaster Master and it is one of my favorite NES games of all time. I’ve been aware of this game’s existence for years and years now. Sometimes I hear it called Blaster Master Jr. which is a title I prefer. But the official title here in the US is Blaster Master Boy.

I came into this game relatively blind here in the year 2022 – 30 years after its initial release date. All I knew was that it took place entirely on foot and not in the tank. I came into this expecting something similar to the on-foot missions of the NES game, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Read on for my full thoughts. And they aren’t pretty.




Story:

Jason, the hero from the original Blaster Master, is called back into action to investigate some kind of nuclear reaction deep in the heart of the planet and save the world from its potentially devastating effects. Honestly this game’s story means nothing, as it is quickly tossed away the second you start playing.



 
Gameplay:

This is where I have the biggest issues with this game. This is not Blaster Master. I did a little research and saw that this is actually a spinoff of the Bomberman series but reskinned as a Blaster Master game. The goal of the game is to walk around and explore each stage until you find the key that unlocks the exit. You have a series of different bombs at your disposal. You have to use these bombs to kill enemies and destroy roadblocks that are in your way. You have to be careful because unlike most video games, your own bombs can hurt you. And they hurt you BAD. You really have to make sure you put some distance between yourself and the bombs when you drop them or you’ll find yourself dying left and right. 

The different types of bombs include bombs that fire off in a straight line (and can thus take out entire rows of obstacles at a time) and bombs that explode outwards and do a wide radius of damage. You have to learn to conserve ammo for the boss battles, however. I found it was helpful to mainly use my default attack during regular stages unless I absolutely had to use something else.

You’ll encounter obstacles as you play that you need to equip items on your character in order to walk over them. That's an oddly worded sentence, but I don't know any other way to say it. Anyway, these obstacles include water and spikes. If you don’t pause the game and put on the appropriate equipment, you’ll immediately die or start taking damage. This leads to one thing I really hate about this game: you have to constantly be pausing and unpausing to use these items. But here is what I hate the most about this game: the dark areas. Sometimes when you destroy an obstacle it will uncover a staircase going down into the ground. If you go down the staircase, you enter a room that is 100% dark. You have to pause the game and equip the lantern in order to see. As I played through this game, I freely used my lanterns to explore these areas, thinking that there surely must be some kind of purpose or reason for their existence. I didn’t want to miss out on any key items! In my mind I didn’t realize I was making a terrible mistake. The lanterns are finite in their numbers. If you run out, you’re out of luck unless you can blindly collect one in the dark. Some of the later stages in the game take place 100% in the dark. If you don’t have any lanterns in your inventory these stages are nearly impossible to complete. You can’t see what is in front of you. Can’t see enemies. Can’t see spikes. Can’t see the water pools, which will kill quickly if you unknowingly wander into them. The game is virtually unplayable. Imagine trudging through this game, not having any fun in the process, and then getting to an area near the end of the game that you can’t complete. I would have had to start the whole game over again.

The fact that a game could have such a fatal flaw like this was 100% unforgivable to me. I was so angry. I wasn’t even enjoying the game to begin with. I hated it. I just wanted to be done with it. Rather than play the whole thing from the beginning, I loaded a YouTube video of someone completing the level (using lanterns) and then retracing their steps as I played along. Eventually I was able to make it through the end of the level – and eventually to the end of the game. Once I finished playing this I immediately reflected on what a terrible time I had with it. I’ve never been a Bomberman person so maybe that partially explains my dislike of the base gameplay. It just wasn’t any fun to me. It was the same thing over and over again. Walk forward. Blow up trees. Walk up to water. Pause game. Put on the life preserver to cross the water. Shoot enemies. Use bombs to destroy tree. Walk up to spike pit. Pause the game. Put on the boots. Walk over the spikes. Shoot enemies. Bomb away a wall. Pick up ammo. Find key. Go to level exit. It seems so mechanical and by the numbers. I hated it.

The only thing I liked about the game were the boss battles, which were the one and only thing in the game that actually felt relevant to Blaster Master. Even then, many of these boss battles took an annoyingly long time to complete. It feels like you have to hit some of them over 30 times before you beat them.


 

Graphics:

This game looks ugly and is easily the worst looking Game Boy game that I’ve reviewed so  far. Despite minor visual tweaks from level to level, the stages all feel the same. This is a very monotonous game in nearly every aspect, and its visuals do absolutely nothing for it. If I had to offer any positive feedback, it would be on the quality of the opening cutscene of the game. In a way, however, it only emphasizes how sad it is that this game hits its visual peak immediately and then goes roaring downhill from there.




Sound:

I already can’t remember a single thing about this game’s music or sound effects, and I barely just got through playing it. If that doesn’t just scream mediocre I don’t know what does.




Overall:

In case you couldn’t tell, I didn’t like this game. I really didn’t like this game. In fact, I hated this game. As soon as I was done playing it, I knew it was going to get an F. It’s terrible. I struggle to say anything good about it. It’s monotonous, it’s not any fun to play, and the whole running out of lanterns thing that made the game unplayable completely killed it for me. I can’t envision any scenario in my life where I come back and play this game again. Do yourself a favor and pass on this game, even if it is something you’ve always “been aware of” like me. It is not worth it.



THE GRADE:
F



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