Retronauts - 491: Blaster Master

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Jeremy Parish, Stuart Gipp, and Todd Ciolek talk about BMs. But no! This is not a scatological episode. Well, no more than usual, anyway. These BMs are Blaster Masters, the frog-savin' franchise that Sunsoft kicked off back in 1988 on NES. Edits by Greg Leahy; cover art by Greg Melo. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week in Retronauts, we celebrate the high-fiber diet by talking about our BMs. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts episode, I believe 491. I am Jeremy Parrish, and I'm here with my fellow old men talking about dietary health and frog rescuing. This episode is about Blastermaster, the game, the series, the experience. This episode, It's not technically a tie-in with Stefan Ganser's The History of Sunsoft, Volume 1, available for sale now through press run games at limited to rungames.com. But it kind of is. A lot of the information and just general awareness I have of this subject was kind of reinforced by his book and also an NES works video that I recently put together on Blastermaster.

Stuart, what introduce yourself and explain things. Hello, I'm Stuart. But I didn't know this was advertisement or I would have refused to participate. Oh, it's too late. You're in for a pinning, in for a pound. The pounds all go to me, not to you, sorry. Being in for a pound at this point in history doesn't really amount to much. That's true.

It's better than a yen, though. And finally, who else do we have here? Well, I am Todd Seelich, and I do remember that the really good bits were about frogs when it came to Plastermaster. So, very glad to be here and interested to talk about this. not about weird watermelon lady that's right um no that comes later yes so let me ask you what is your personal experience as video game people with blastermaster are you a fan from the olden times or are you a new a newcomer a newfangled fan or do you even like it i don't know stewart you tell us i i haven't really got a history with the original uh game in the i sort of

and you exist it, but I didn't really get to play it. I'm not going to recount my entire personal history with gaming again. You'll have to listen to my episodes to get that. It's exciting. Okay, well, it's going to be two hours of rambling. But basically, long story short, didn't really play much Nintendo. And even when I got emulation running, I didn't really play Blastermaster. I think I might have booted it up,

seeing that it was nonlinear and just immediately kind of gave up and looked for a normal platform because it was too scary, you know. There was too much to thinking involved. But I did like try out Blastermaster Zero late on the Switch because it was made by Integrates and I have a habit of liking their action games. As a result of which, I decided to go back and play the original NES Blastermaster really recently, like about two weeks ago, in fact. That's very recent. Yeah. So that would be newfangled, yes.

So I'm coming to the game with extremely new perspectives. There's not going to be any nostalgia from me. Just fresh facts. Did you find that the NES version was made redundant by Blaster Master Zero? No, absolutely not. They're completely different experiences to the point that I would call Zero the loose. I mean, it's not the loosest of remakes, but it doesn't feel to me like the original. The original is a much more obtuse.

Well, we'll get to it, obviously, but it's a much more obtuse game where Zero is very kind of guided, sort of lots and lots of help. It's very hard to die in that game because there's a lot of different. different options to keep you alive, whereas the NES game is quite keen on having you die from what I discovered, and has a lot more tension as a result. So I went back and I played basically the entire series to get ready for this. So hopefully you've not made me play Master Blaster 2, sorry, excuse me, Blaster Master 2 for no reason, because I would really be disgusted if that were the case. Yeah, I apologize for that. All right. All right, yes. So I'm not surprised

to learn that you are a fairly new, a newcomer to the series, given that you are a British person. And therefore, if you had played NES games as a child, they would have locked you in the Tower of London. It's true. We're not allowed, we're strongly not to blast a mast over here. There is the only joke about that that's going to come out on this episode. Thank you. All right. And Todd, what about yourself? Well, I was deeply entrenched in the NAS when I was a kid, of course, and Blastermastermaster was one of those games I didn't really know a lot about initially because I was not reading the write-up issues of Nintendo Power. So I knew about this from like seeing the cartridge the kids would hand back and forth at school. And I just remember that the name and the cover made it look like it was a light gun game.

I figured, oh, it's Plastermaster. I'm going to be zapping things with the plastic pistol. So that kind of lessened my interest in and the fact that somebody erroneously told me that the thing on the monster on the cover of the game and on the label was the final boss. So I thought to myself, you know, I already seen, I saw the final boss. I don't need to play this game. It's almost almost the final boss. The real final boss is a surprise. And later I dug into it a little deeper.

You know, when I thought, this is pretty cool. It's kind of, it's very, it's difficult. And I remember one time. sat down with the intention of beating it and I got stuck. I'm not sure if I was legitimately stuck or if I was just too dumb to figure out a way out of it. But I got stuck in the underwater level and I thought to myself, you know, I'll come back and do this again. But I didn't really do that until much, much later. Oddly enough, I kind of associated with Bionic Commando because they came out in the same year and there were both kind of these weeks, weeks apart from

one another. Yeah. And there were these big, like, you know, they were kind of demanding games to go or you had to, you know, know what you were doing. And I also got stuck in Bionic Commando. So they're both these, um, they loop together about like that. And I kind of stayed in touch with Blasteraster over the years. I remember when, um, the PlayStation game blasting again came out. I was actually very interested in that one. And I picked up for 10 bucks and liked it.

And then when the Zero games came out and was really pleasantly surprised by them. And I very much liked the first two. of the zero games. All right. So you are an old timer, much like myself. I bought Blastermaster probably early 1989, I want to say, a few months after it came out. You know, I was initially a little put off by the cover also just because the cover art in the American version is very, it just feels cheap. They like took a screenshot of the next to last boss and they cut out around it and then threw some like Memphis-style.

geometry on there to say, hey, it's the 80s. And then they gave it the title Blastermaster, which to my mind was just a knockoff of Kid Video and the vile villain Master Blaster. I was like, well, you know, this is just, this is just a knockoff. But at the same time, I did, I did receive that very first issue of Nintendo Power for free. And there was information on Blastermaster and there. And I talked my parents into subscribing to the magazine for me. And they blew out that game over several subsequent issues. And by that point, you know, the first NES game I bought for myself in early 1988 was Metroid. And I kind of realized, like, oh, this is that same sort of thing where it's a big map and you're moving around a world.

And I just kind of thought, you know, that's what video games are now. We had Super Mario Brothers and now all games are going to be like this and it's cool. And so yeah, I picked it up. I never actually beat it back in the day. I could tear through most NES games, but this one, the best I've ever done is to get to the final, final boss and that horrible power down system makes it really hard to defeat him

if you don't know his pattern. And you don't really get to learn his pattern the first time you fight him because he just crowd you with a whip into a corner and hit you until your gun and your life whittled down and you die. And then there are no more continues.

And that's it. that's, you have to start over from the beginning. But it was the kind of game that, you know, I thought was really interesting and I really enjoyed it, but I would only play it for like a couple of hours at a time and never quite get to the end. But it was one of those where I was like, you know, I've got a Sunday afternoon. It's kind of cold. I'm kind of bored. I don't have any friends, whatever. So I'm just going to fart around with it. And every time I would get a little further and be like, oh, my God, the ice stage. It's so hard. Oh, my God. The fire stage. It's so hard. Oh, my God. The bio horror stage. It's so hard. Oh, there's

the final boss. So yeah, it just kind of stuck with me because it is exploratory. It's very atmospheric. And it has, it just, like the thing that makes Blastermaster's so memorable, irrespective of everything else, is that it feels great, at least in the tank segments. Like the physics and the controls for the tank are so good. It's just like, honestly, I've, you know, gone back and played through the NES library for NES works videos from the beginning. And I'm at the end of 1988 now. And really, there was nothing

that controlled as smoothly and as concisely and precisely as Blastermaster. Aside from, you know, the Mario games, Bionic Commando once you got a handle on the grappling arm, but that's pretty much it. Everything else was stiffer or jankier or just didn't have that feeling of like, whoa, I'm cruising around and it's cool and I'm kind of invincible as long as I'm careful. And that made it, yeah, really, really appealing. But then, of course, you have, you know, half the game is the top-down segments, which have some design decisions that really make it suck and really kind of bring down the average. But, you know, the tank parts are so good that you just kind of overlooked that.

I agree about the movement. I feel like this game would not be as fondly remembered as it was without that because a lot of the level design and game design is quite esoteric there are ways to go forward like the mandatory route you have to take forward that I just would not have found without a guide like going up above the entrance to the whole like right at the start of the game you have to do like the absolute apex of your kind of hover jump several times before you can even proceed and that's like that's that's rough like I don't know how I would would have found that without just traipsing all over the map trying everything everywhere which

is what I guess people did. Yeah, no, I feel like I will go to bat for the design of the game's world, because I feel for the most part, if you know kind of what you're looking for and you're curious about the world, then you're going to try things. And, you know, that opening space, you might not initially think to go back to it. But once you get the hover ability, you're like, okay, where can I actually use this, that it's any good? And so you're looking for kind of open spaces. And honestly, there aren't any aside from that opening screen, that opening section. So then you kind of think, well, what can I do here? And yeah, if you, if you like fly around in the middle, you're kind of boned. But if you go up to the

walls, then you notice, oh, there's some ledges here. I can reach those. Oh, and there's a hover capsule to recharge my hover power on this ledge. So I can do it again. And you just kind of keep going until you find a door. So, I mean, I agree. Like, I'm, it was, you know, for the time, definitely a different paradigm in game design. And a lot of games, I feel, have been sort of inspired by the way Blastermaster sort of lead you with breadcrumbs and tantalizing clues. It does a much better job of it than the original Metroid did than Castlevania 2 did.

Like, this is really, in my opinion, where the whole kind of Metroidvania style really started to take form. I'm going to stop talking now and let you talk. Sorry. Is it the first great Metroidvania, I suppose? I mean, it being esoteric doesn't make me dislike it. I think the feeling when you do discover those routes forward is worth it. But figuring out how you can use the ability to cling to ceilings, which at first seems fun, but maybe not especially useful.

And you realize exactly how you're able to traverse the world that way. It really does change up everything. It's the kind of Metroidvania. like upgrades that actually feel like upgrades, they don't just act as a as a key to a lock necessarily. You are in odds. Except the one that literally is just a key to a lock. Except for that one. The most useless

one. That's a gimmie. They're allowed to have one. Fair enough. Fair enough. And I do think that the fact that you're not really punished so much for exploring because your tank can take a lot of hits and there aren't too many deadly things getting in the way because other games where

you know that have secrets like this you're often meant to risk, you know, instant death or something like that. But in this one, you're allowed to, you know, stumble a little bit when you're finding things out. So I think that really helps it in terms of exploring. Take a time machine back to before the world went to hell around the year 2000. The 80s and 90s were so rad. The movies, the music, the TV, the games? That's what I want to talk about.

If you're cool enough, join us, and listen to less than 2000, because that's all we talk about. Adam and Chad live less than 2000. Now part of the HyperX Podcast Network Introducing the new HyperX Cloud Stinger 2 The Stinger 2 is a refined evolution of the classic Cloud Stinger and keeps the fan favorite 90-degree rotating earcups, comfortable memory foam cushions,

and the Swivel to Mute microphone. It also features two years of DTS headphone X activation for upgraded sound localization, all while keeping the great price of the original Stinger. That's right, get the new Cloud Stinger 2 for only 50 bucks. Now isn't that nice. Available online at Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and of course, hyperX.com. Yeah, and one thing I will say is that we're kind of already jumping into the discussion of the game here, but that's fine.

That's fine. One thing I will say about the kind of visual design of the game is that the sort of interesting elements of the game, like the visually interesting environments, like the visually interesting environments, are really pretty front-loaded. like the bio-horror, the ice, the fire caverns. Like, those are the very final stages of the game. And they're kind of dull. Because by that point, you're pretty much just like, well, I'm basically invincible now. So I just got to go find the bosses. But before that, you know, the first four or five stages, they have a lot of variety.

They have a lot of like just intriguing spaces. I'm thinking of the third one where it's kind of, it's kind of like a techno base. And there's a lot of rooms that just have this kind of. cavernous appearance, even though they're sort of small. And they just, they tempt you to poke around and see what's there. And that is, you know, after you get through that section, you do get the hover upgrade. And then you realize, like, hey, I can combine the hover upgrade with the cannon that I have and blast through walls and take shortcuts back to where I was.

That's really cool. So, you know, for people who look at it game environments and think, you know, I wonder what I can do here. Blastermaster is very rewarding. I don't know that that was necessarily like the intuitive way to play video games back then because they did tend to be pretty linear. But I don't know. I feel like by this point you had a fair number of exploratory games that taught you to do that.

And, you know, like I said, I got my start with Metroid, which was all about like, hey, there's secrets and stuff. Good luck finding them. So it taught me to just blow the bejesus out of every wall and floor and surface that I could find. And that just kind of carried over. But, you know, even then, games like Hudson's Adventure Island were really about just like finding really, really arcane secrets in the walls. Adventure Island was about, you know, you really had to find things that were just hidden invisibly in random places by jumping at the right spot. Otherwise, you couldn't continue the game unless you found a secret in the first stage.

So, you know, this kind of takes that emphasis on esoteric hidden things and gives it all purpose and says, okay, like, there's more structure here. There's more of a reward for doing this. And also, there's more of, you know, like, there's more signposting to kind of guide you in the right direction. But you do still have to pay attention. And so, yeah, for me, like, that was, you know, one of the sort of early games that really, really shaped my taste. and turn me into the weirdo that I am now. Is it pre or post Milan's secret castle? It's post, but just barely in the US.

Okay, all right then, yeah. I mean, I was going to say, with regards to it sort of non-linearity, I was going to dare to evoke the likes of Jetset Willie again, because it's not a million miles. Not a million miles away from those kind of microcomputer games, Starquake and things like that, just a big open world that you gradually find your way through to try and get to it until.

collect all the items as it usually is the case but right or like the isometrics like night lore and things like that yeah absolutely um i i mean something that this game has uh as you've already mentioned the the whole power down punishment system which is vile i mean it's punishing for sure but uh it really sucks if you go into one of the sort of little kid in caverns get yourself all tulled up leave the cavern and then just almost instantly lose all of it and unable to get it back. It's a really punishing game. For that reason, I mean, I found it terribly, terribly difficult. I thought it was very challenging, even outside of the finding your way forward aspect of it. Just the enemies were quite punishing. Even early on,

you fight enemies that are too lowdowns to ground to shoot, so you've got to use your special weapons, and they're very hard to come by. Oh, no, you can also jump out of the tank and shoot it with little Jason. Pugh, phew, phew. Genuinely never occurred. to me to do that the entire time. Yeah, he's very low to the ground and has a very, very sad little gun. I tried to avoid using Jason because it seemed like if he stopped his toe, he would instantly die. Yes, he's fragile. He's a fragile child. So that bit where you swim through the quite lengthy underwater section is Jason is genuinely a fraught set piece. Yeah, no, it's, it's great. It's really cool. That is a great piece of game design. It really, yeah, it takes away

the thing that you've relied on. Like at that point, your tank is so good. You've powered up your weapons twice. You can fly. You can hover. And then all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, here you are in a new stage. And you can't use your tank because it'll just sink like a rock to the bottom of the water. So you've got to get out and be this pathetic little man with a tiny little pea shooter that doesn't even span the entire screen. And you have to go through the entire stage like that. Good luck. I was impressed as hell with that. The economy of it, the way they created that set piece of just, there's nothing new there. It's everything you've already. seen before, but all they do

is make you do it for longer, and it scares the hell out of me. It's great. Very good. Yeah, the tank is kind of like a safe place for Jason. When you hop into the tank, it instantly recharges your health for your character. Even if your tank is kind of low on energy, it, you know,

tops up your health all the way. So you can hop out again and hey, Jason's back at full health kids, but you can't do that in the water stage because you have to go swimming for a long, long way. And reach the tool that will allow your tank to dive underwater, and then you have to swim back to the tank in order to install it. And that's rad. I love, yeah, that's, like, I was, I was going

to talk about that stage anyway, so I'm glad you brought it up, because it's, it's a really great one. Yeah. It stood out for me as probably my favorite moment from a game that is generally speaking quite high quality. That stood out for me, big time. It does follow immediately on the heels of a part that they had to change for the American version, because there was a, when you, when you clear the gate to level five. You have to return to your tank and there's only one way to go forward, which is past the gate. And you have to jump and take a leap of faith in the Japanese version and land on this tiny little ladder and catch it as you fall. And otherwise, Jason being, you know, made of like China or porcelain or something will just shatter and die if he lands on the

ground. It doesn't catch the ladder. And I think the American playtester said, you know, That's probably asking, like, yes, of everything in this game, this is the part where you have to change it. You just can't go forward with this. Everything about this game, it's really very complex for, um, Sunsoft compared to what they were really doing before it. I mean, the game like a Wing of Medulla, you know, that it was a side-scrolling game with magic and things like that, but it wasn't nearly as involved as Blastermaster. No, but I do have a little section in here in my notes on the history of Sunsoft, and I do feel like Blastermaster is the culmination of everything Sunsoft was working toward. Because, you know, they started out as just a company that got into video games incidentally, Sun Electronics,

which was a spinoff of a textile company. And they were just doing whatever, you know, brought in money. They had like vending machines for soup or something that were a horrible failure. Oh, no, it wasn't soup. It was, um, it was odongo, you know, the sweet, sticky, um, dough dumplings that they're coated in like a candy glaze. Yeah. Apparently these were a huge mess. And, um, that was a huge failure.

But they had a lot of success in computers, and they started making video games, which in the late 70s was basically, hey, Pong clones, breakout clones. But, you know, gradually they started to kind of do their own thing, their own variants on Galaxy and that sort of thing. So, like, ripping off other people's ideas because that's every arcade game at that time. But putting more and more new ideas into it until finally they landed at Kangaroo in 1982, which was pretty much like Donkey Kong, but with some fun. different ideas, like a little bit of, like, almost kind of, looks like they swept a bit from Popeye also. And that was a big hit globally. It was a success in Japan. Atari brought it to the US. It was a huge hit, showed up on all the consoles. And basically from that point on, Sunsoft was like, okay, video games, that's what we're doing. And they entered the Famicom market in 1985 with a few

arcade ports, like Super Arabian, Iki, which I just covered on my video series. was a huge hit for them, like more than a million copies sold, not a great game, but it was just at that right point where basically if you put a game on Famicom, it was going to sell a million copies. That went away very quickly after that. But, you know, for the moment, for the time being, when Iki came out, it was a huge hit. And so that kind of locked them to the Famicom. And then they started, you know, going more ambitious.

You know, in 1986, they released Atlantis Nonazzo. which they designed specifically, like the hubris there, I have to admire it. They wanted to create a game that surpassed Super Mario Brothers, not in terms of fun, just in terms of size. Mario had 32 levels. They were like, we're going to do three times that many level. I love the idea. We're going to do 100 stages. They finished the game and they got the president in front of it and he just stood there, watched them play through it.

And then there's like a pause and just goes, you've done it. This is much better. Yes, exactly. Yamauchi was like, okay, that's great. Miyamoto, you need to stop now. Stop making it keep doing games. Today we could all be playing out Lenders and a Odyssey, you know, it could be so different. I know, right?

Damn. If only Activision had brought it over a super pitfall too. Illumination Pictures presents Atlanta's. Unfortunately, Chris Pratt would still do the voice. Yeah. And then, Todd, you mentioned Wing and Bedola, which was basically their take on Dragon Buster, but more open. It had a magic and leveling system. It had zero recovery invincibility frames when you took damage, which makes it not fun at all.

Oh, my God. But it's still like, you still see them really just going for it and trying things. In 1987, they switched over to Faminecom Disc System and released a bunch of adventure games that never made it to the U.S. But all these games were growing in complexity, the graphics were getting better, they were growing in size, they were growing in just like the fluidity of the mechanics, they were just getting better. And so that culminates summer 1988 with the release of Cho Waku-Senki-Metafite, great, great-planet battle metafite, or Blastermaster, if you prefer. Right. And to look at Sunthought's history, there aren't too many games that really seem reminiscent of Blastermaster beforehand, but there is an unreleased 1987 game for the versus system that was the arcade version of the NES called Lion X. And it has, it's an overhead perspective for an action game. And the main character really actually looks kind of like Jason from Blastermastermaster. Similar design with the motorcycle helmet and the color scheme and everything. And the gameplay is not too. all that different from Blastermaster's overhead segments. So I've never heard of confirm, but I wouldn't be surprised if they took, like, you know,

this canceled game and sort of used that as the inspiration for the, um, the Jason segments of Blastermaster. Oh, yeah, you're right. I'm looking at the flyer. Uh, I, I remember reading about this game in Stefan's book, but I hadn't really paid attention to the artwork on the flyer, but yeah, that is straight up Jason right there. Um, man, this one, I was trying to find a video of it. It's one of those unreleased games that sort of survives only in the hands of a collector who doesn't share.

But it looks a little more basic than Blastermaster. You walk around punching things and you don't really get a gun until later. And the few people who have played it said that it was kind of boring even. So it's possible they looked at it and said, you know, let's give the character a gun from the get-go. But sometimes we have to take it away just, you know, to reduce his gun to nothing just to be spiteful. They can't have the game being too fun That wouldn't be any good But then they were just like

This game sucks This needs something There's just missing Genesee Qua And then someone just slammed their hand On the table and just went Put a frog in it And things just came to life from there really It was an American who put a frog in it

Oh absolutely Developers were all like So there's like this planet And there's an alien empire And there's like A cute girl who's going to be your navigator and talk to you and you never actually see you in the game, but you'll see you're in the ending.

Yes. And, you know, you're like the son of a great war hero, and you trained all your life to drive this tank. When I came to America, they were like, yeah, okay, so let's toss that out. You are a kid who kept, like he has a pet frog, and the frog escapes and jumps into his backyard, and his parents have left open bins of nuclear radiation,

just sitting out. yard. And also there's a massive hole in his backyard that leads all the way to the core of the earth. The frog jumps in the, hear me out guys. The frog jumps in the nuclear radiation and grows immediately to colossal size and then jumps into the hole in the earth. It's not that the earth falls out from beneath him. Look at this artwork. Nope. He is jumping headfirst into that hole. But Jason, God bless him. He loves that frog, even though that frog is now bigger than he is. And he's going to go save that frog by just jumping into a hole

that he's never seen. It's in his backyard. So, you know, it's got to be safe, right? And when he lands at the bottom, fully intact, no injuries, there's a super tank there. He's going to jump in it and blow up the bejesus out of everything he sees until he finds that frog.

And that is the masterpiece that is blasted master. Just one of the greatest video game concepts of all time. Just blow the hell out of everything for hours so that you can save a frog that wanted to get away from you. This was kind of the heart of had the Ninja Turtles really hit it so right as a craze at this point. Because this really seems like their attempt to maybe get in a little bit on that because, you know,

you touch Ninja Turtles, they touch some goo. They turn into a mutant and you can take it from there. So I wouldn't be surprised if that was their inspiration. But still, that is just a heck of a premise to lay on a kid. I want to say the cartoon started an idiot. 27, didn't it? Yeah, it did, I think so. So, yes, 100% inspired by Ninja Turtles before Konami got around to making their Ninja

Turtles game, which they didn't even get right the first time around. So to summarize, cute girls out, they're gone. Frog's in. There we're in. Drake, meme, cute girl, frog. That's the way I'm saying this. But see, then 10 years later,

I created a website whose mascots were a frog and a cute girl. So I really kind of unified these things. You crossed the streams. I did. And the world became a better play. Oh, no, actually, the world is shit now.

Because you crossed the streams. Sorry about that. I know. I did it. I did it. It's my fault. It's the main thing that the ghostbusters tell you not to do. I thought they were talking about, like, peeing.

Oh, well, everyone did that, right? No. Okay, never mind. Moving on. One thing about the frog that kind of, I remember about the game, is that one of the bosses is actually a frog, a giant frog. And the game doesn't really have any cutscenes. So after I fought that frog, I kind of expected maybe a little story bit about how I had actually, either the frog would turn back to normal or something else would happen.

But there isn't. So I went through the rest of the game, you know, up until I got stuck, thinking that I had actually murdered my pet frog. No, no, no. That's a fair assumption. And then you're lucky because you're happy because the frog comes back later and you're like, hooray, I can kill it again. Now he's orange. It must be his mom No explanation

That's the way I like it Complete incoherence Yes Story coherence was not a strong suit For Blastermaster But that by God They have done their best To turn it into an epic saga

All the same in subsequent years And of course in Zero They kind of mashed both storylines together Didn't they? They mashed together Right but I was there first man Yeah you were there first Twenty years ahead of them

It's anti-creatic if you want to get in touch I think you might have some money to talk about here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll have to ask Aizu about that next time. I interview him. So anyway, the idea behind Blastermaster, aside from the saving frog parts,

is that you are a dude in a tank that jumps and shoots and gets stronger and can do all kinds of things once you power it up. And sometimes you have to jump out of the tank and you are skilled realistically to that tank. You are a little dude and your gun is really sad. And if an enemy hits you, it's going to just wipe out your life bar. Just knock you silly. But sometimes you have to get out of the tank and be the little guy because the little guy can only do like little little guy is the only way you can get to certain spaces. And then once you reach certain spaces,

it switches to an overhead perspective where you're the little guy, but now you're bigger and your head is really huge for some reason. And you're shooting stuff in a top-down maze. And you lose your tank access, but you gain grenades. And also your gun can get stronger, but also it very easily gets weaker. And that's an interesting combination of things. Am I misrepresenting this game by saying it's shocking? complex, like considering when it came out, or were there Mennes games of this level around this time. I don't actually know specifically when certain NES games came out. But to me, I was struck by just how much there is going on here mechanically.

You should watch the NES works video series. It will give you a great idea of everything in its copper cut. But there's this boring guy droning. Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. You're like, you just have to take some no-dos and suffer through it. The video footage is good at least. I mean, like the year before, 87, you had Metroid and you had RIGAR and, you know, Zelda. But I still think, though, that, I mean, Blastermaster really, what impressed me about that was that most similar to RIGAR, you have two different games in one almost. You have the side-scrolling stages and the overhead action stages. And there weren't too many games that really combined to that.

I mean, Goonies 2 kind of has the, you know, first-person navigation. Right. And this does come after a Galgo 13 top secret episode, which is like, Like, hey, what is every video game concept we can think of? Okay, cool. We're going to put all of them into this game. Every single one of them. All of them. That's a little much.

Yeah. This strips it down a little. And yeah, you're right. It does seem very similar to Riga. A lot more complicated, though. And I mean, it's almost at that point where I don't believe the Japanese version had a password system or anything like that. But it seems like this was just before they really. started realizing how many that certain games needed, that sort of, you know, password system

or even a save game. The Japanese version didn't have a password system, but it did have infinite continues. You know, had this come out on Famicom disk system, it would have allowed you to save your progress, like Section Z. In Japanese, the Japanese version, you can save your progress, which makes it a much more manageable game than the American version where it's like, good luck, figure out that maze all on your own and one go. Yeah, have fun.

I did feel playing through this because I mean I was playing I'm not going to pretend I didn't use a guide to play this I'm not going to pretend I didn't use an emilates to play this but I was struck by not only is it really difficult it's also shockingly long and that's me and that's even with me knowing what I'm doing more or less because I've read where to go next

if I didn't know where to go next I'd just be completely aimlessly ambling around and I did feel like they could they really could have used passwords when you got your upgrades even if it did boot you back to the beginning of the game, at least you'd have the means by which to progress. The game, as you've mentioned before, is very good at creating new routes

through the old areas that do cut down on the time you spend backtracking. It's very, very elegantly designed in that respect, actually. But with a game that has all these dungeons that are... I mean, they're not dead ends, but they're just there to kind of power you up. They don't really have any gameplay purpose. You can really...

You could take forever playing this game and not being able to save. It's just kind of brutal, I think. more so than most NES games I can think of as contemporary, they're not this long, they're not this complex. This is just a really outstandingly comprehensively good game, I think. Yeah, I mean, I go ahead. I mean, I was about saying this is the sort of game that really made me concerned about

how long I could leave my system on because I was like, you know, is it kind of burn up? I was just remembering a friend of mine told me about how her dad had basically burned out the family's Atari by playing Pac-Man too much. So I, you know, as a kid, I lived in fear of destroying this expensive new Nintendo thing. Yeah, I think the system was just having an allergic reaction to that cartridge. Yeah, well, he probably played it for five minutes and then intentionally set it on fire and said it happened. Sorry, kids. The system died.

Yeah, that's it. Never played this game. But, yeah, this would have been like, I mean, Jeremy, you mentioned this was like an almost entire afternoon to go through the whole game. It wasn't the sort of thing like, you know, well, Mega Man, too, you could run through in an hour, under an hour if you knew what you were doing. Blastermaster really kind of asked that you kept track of things. And I'm curious, did you have to make a map when you first played it? I didn't have to make a map when I first played it, but I think that's because Nintendo Power did that for me. Like, they released maps.

They published maps of like the first five areas, I think. Like, they really went all out on this game. So, you know, that was a big help. But, you know, I will say that there was kind of a line of NES games that were very, very lengthy and complex and did not offer you any sort of save feature. And I think that really sort of culminated. And then, you know, once Super Mario Bros. 3 came out, that was kind of the end of it. Like, you didn't really see that again. But it all kind of led up to that.

But, I mean, you look at other games from this era. You have Bionic Commando. You have Galgo 13. you have this. Super Mario Brothers 2. Like, you know, some of the Mario games have warps and stuff. Galgo 13 has a cheat code where you can jump to advanced stages. But really, those were meant to be played in a single session, a single sitting. And, you know, play patterns in the 1980s were different than they are now. There was not the expectation that you're going to sit down to the game. You're going to start it up. You're going to play it and, you know,

eventually finish it and then you move on to the next thing. It was, you know, much more like, Speaking of someone who bought this game and then didn't have any money to buy another game for several months, this was a game you lived with for a while. And you would play it and you'd make a little more progress. Like I said earlier, like you'd get to a new place. And you'd remember like, okay, this is, you know, how I get there. This is all the stuff that I have to do. And it gets easier every time. And you, you know, get to that more advanced space with more lives, more continues.

You know, you get there faster. And so you can make a little more progress. and you just kind of keep chipping away at it over time. And, you know, I don't think that people want to play games like that very much anymore, even someone like me, you know, who played games like that for a long time. Like, I would like this game better if it has a safe feature. I find it much more enjoy it to play Mario 3 when I'm playing in, you know, a version that does have saves like Mario All-Stars.

But, you know, that's just kind of what the expectation was. and how it was designed to be played. And that's, you know, that is what it is. I don't know if it's necessarily right, but, you know, it was of its time. Well, I mean, it's something that I kind of advocate for, in terms of games having that level of challenge and taking them as they come rather than having additional features added in

to make them, you know, palatable from a modern audience. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. But I think there should be the space to explore these games as they are. And there is, obviously. And what you were saying about playing it back in the 80s did make me think that if this was a master system game and I was playing it when I was a kid, I would have finished it. Like, I would have only had this game and I would have finished it. Like, I'd have to get dedicated an entire year of afternoons to finishing this game. And I'm fairly certain I would have managed it.

But the differences, I mean, this ain't a Disney game. This isn't a half an hour long six-level platform. this is a eight zone nightmare so I don't know and there really aren't too many cheats there's nothing to let you skip around there's just the um grenade trick that you can use on some bosses and not but not on all of them oh is that like the pause trick of megaman one with the i believe it is yes it is yeah uh it registers it continues registering damage from a uh sustained projectile explosion even when the game is paused so yeah you toss a grenade you hit an enemy in the vulnerable spot

and while the grenade is exploding and the enemy is taking damage, you pause it. And then you leave it paused for like 20 minutes because it takes forever to kill these goddamn bosses. They're way, they have way, it's like working designs redesign this game or something. I don't know what happened. They just like boosted the hit point tallies.

But yeah, like eventually it'll die. And then you unpause and hey, you got to level up. You got an upgrade. But it doesn't work for every boss. Previously on Chat of the Wild. Good to know. I wanted to use this time to impart some words of wisdom from Eslo.

Straighten up your hair once I'm gone. You got a style all over the ladies. La, la, la. la la la la la are the words to his new hit single live long love long and also he woke up from a dream where he forgot to study for the test so did he really say all those things yeah yeah these are all things that that i discussed that he discussed with me that's magical chat of the wild breaking down zilda and zilda like games one dungeon at a time wednesdays on the hyper x podcast network We're here to announce a special deal for all of our retronauts listeners. If you've had your eye on any of the pink variance of HyperX gear, you can save 15% off during the month of October by using code HXPN over at HyperX.com. Get yourself an elegant white and pink cloud two,

or a metallic pink ally origins 60, or any of the other pink peripherals on the site. Once again, head over to hyperX.com and get 15% off all pink gaming products with code all caps, HXPN. I think that's fair. I think that should just be used. Like, I don't think that counts as cheating at all in the skip. There's so much challenge in the meantime that I think, I say skip all the bosses if you can. Why not? They're probably the weakest part of the game.

They are. It sucks that the bosses all happen in the top-down spaces because those are the least fun parts. of the game. And it also means that all the cool collectibles you get throughout the game, you don't get to use those against bosses. The zero games have done better about that by giving you bosses and the external tank spaces. But here you know, you get all this cool stuff for your tank. And then when you fight bosses, it's just your little dude with the giant head and his grenades and his gun. And the gun, you know, we should talk about the gun system because it really sucks. And we've said it sucks. But we haven't really explained just how much it sucks. But it sucks on

every conceivable level. Well, it's like losing big Mario, except you can never really get him back. It's kind of like a shooter, almost like a, you know, a spaceship shooter, where you really get screwed if you die and lose all your power-ups. Oh, yeah, like that's, you know, yeah, but here it's also death by a thousand paper cuts. Yes, it takes longer. You can't. There's always a sense of like, oh, I lost a level, but I can get it back.

Hopefully, oh, no, something randomly showed up and hit me from the edge of the screen. that I couldn't have possibly predicted its presence. Oh, I walked into another room and landed immediately on top of an enemy that spawned right underneath me, and there was no possible way for me to avoid it. Yeah, so your gun, you have two health meters when you are in top-down view. You have Jason's health, which has eight points, and you have Jason's gun, which has eight points. And you start at nothing for your gun. And every time you find a gun icon, it goes up one level.

and if you find a flashing gun icon, it goes up four levels. But when the gun powers up, it shoots a slightly different pattern. Like it starts out just shooting a single bullet halfway across the screen and it's garbage. But eventually, you know, you get the gun to shoot like all the way across the screen. And then you shoot across the screen, but like little things curl off to the side and kind of spin around you. And then it becomes a wave beam. And then it's a wave beam with curly things. and then it's like an energy beam at the max level

that's just like tearing through everything and it feels really cool to be invincible like that but anytime an enemy hits you you lose a point off your gun meter and you have to find another gun icon and the game is not generous about handing those out if the game was generous with the gun icons as it is with the health icons

it would be fine because you could really easily power up again but it's not you really have to go out of your way to find them very few enemies drop them it's specific enemies. And otherwise, they're, like, located in stashes. Usually under blocks, so you have to blow up. It's just really, really frustrating. And, again, like the enemy spawn points and the level designs, the behaviors of enemies,

it's not fair. Like, there are places you literally cannot avoid taking a hit and losing a point on your gun and a point on your health. So you become weaker on two levels. And it just feels really stash. act against you. And I appreciate the fact that the zero games, you know, when they sat down to design it, they said, hey, we can't do this to contemporary video game players. They will not accept this. And they retooled the whole thing to work very differently and is a much more

enjoyable experience. You do still lose your gunpower when you get hit, though, right? I'm sure I know that's happening. It's a little more forgiving, but it's still less punishing. Right, right. Okay. Yeah, this game has a habit from my recent playthrough, I found there's a lot of areas where you need to go up to scroll the screen up, but doing so will scroll an enemy or a turret onto the screen you couldn't have seen before. And then you're suddenly in a position where you can't really do much to avoid it unless you immediately sort of double back. And that's, and turrets tend to release things that, for some reason, hang around on the screen a lot longer than you think

they're going to. That experience where there's a turret-type enemy that drops three explosives. And I'm like, one of those explosives going to disappear because I've been there for quite a long time. You're very little time and space to maneuver. It is a, I don't like criticizing it for this sort of too much because it makes me sound like I don't like it, but I do like it. I just think it's lacking in a little bit of polish, I guess, at times. In other places, obviously, it's polished as hell. It's just a bit rough around the edges, I think. Yeah, I mean, they were doing a lot here. They were combining a lot of ideas. Yes. Like, There's Contra, Metroid, City Connection, I don't know, Zelda 2, Mega Man, all of these things.

RIGAR all crammed into a single cartridge doing all these things. And most of it's really good. But then, yeah, the gun system, some of the enemy designs just really suck. It's also worth mentioning that you cannot power up Jason's gun in the Tank View gameplay. You can only do it in the top-down modes. But if you die in the tank, you will immediately. be powered down to zero, which really sucks in the final stage where it's genuinely difficult. There's all kinds of environmental hazards and really powerful enemies that will destroy the tank

if you're not extremely careful and, you know, basically have the layouts memorized. And when that happens, you're going into the fight, you know, the final boss in its chamber with a shit gun. Like, you can't possibly win. I can attest to this. Did either of you find that once you get the treads that, like, you walk on the ceiling on the walls, you're constantly accidentally doing it on small platforms,

and it drove me absolutely crazy. Your vehicle is very sticky. I was just thinking, like, I really wish that you could hold a button to do that. I mean, obviously you can't because there are only two buttons and the face buttons to work with, you know. But, man, that really wound me up. Whenever you just jump on a small platform in the final zone,

which was constantly, I would always miss jumps, because instead of jumping, I would go over the wall too early because there wasn't sort of much in the way of, I guess, gradual, you don't go over the all once your front tires are fully over it. You just snap to the side of the wall. And, oh, man, that was hard. Yeah, it would take a few years before someone really figured out how to do that, like, gravity flipping thing correctly. And that was with IREM and Tamtex's Metal Storm, which, you know, makes it a manual control like, hey, you're flipping gravity. You're switching sides by choice.

This tries to kind of just bundle it all so it's automatic. And, you know, you didn't really see that kind of contextual action in video games at this point. So it's kind of like forward thinking. You know, it's 10 years before Ocarina of Time, which, you know, honestly, that's pretty advanced. But also, it's still an abig game. So it's not really designed around that. So it's a little too advanced for itself. Definitely forward thinking.

And the final zone does feel like they have made every. little space in it with it in mind that you could be upside down right now essentially like it really is clever like to find that final the way forward to the final area you have to be really observant I think

and it's reward again it's rewarding as hell once you realize oh if I go down here I'll be on the bottom of this platform and then I can go all the way over this way I loved it and as difficult as the game is I almost feel that it's perhaps a little more forgiving than this sort of games that were you know

popularized about a few years before, just because it doesn't really screw you over if you happen to miss something. For example, in Wing of Madula, at the very end of the game, you literally cannot beat it unless you saved enough magic points for a flying spell that, you know, I think takes you up

level, I believe. And that light, Blastermaster Master is kind of forgiving. Another thing, people who have dug through the code for the game and there's signs that they were actually going to make it even longer. There was a final, another stage that we're going to put on because it has two, you know, there are two

bosses at the end of the game, one right after the other. And there's even some signs that they remove some attacks that the last two bosses were going to use. Like they took out possibly another type of projectile or something. So they did maybe make it a little easier just because you have to make it get through two bosses one after the other. Even so, it's still pretty difficult. Yeah, isn't the deleted power up a spike buster kind of thing? I think it's something that lets you, yeah, it would probably make it a lot easier. That would explain it because the final stage is just crammed with spikes. So having something that would let you just like blast through those and then get onto the final stage. And they did sort of integrate that into Blastermaster

Master Zero, right? Like once you beat the eighth boss, then there's kind of a final post game stage that you have to complete. I think, I think you have to do like some sort of special, you have to meet some sort of special condition to get it. It's been, you know, five years since I played it. Yeah, I think you've to find all of them. I got the battery, I couldn't figure out. Oh, no. One other thing about the last boss in the original Blastermastermaster, though, is this is something, I don't think people have been able to substantiate, but Howard Phillips, you know, the game master from Nintendo. He told a story in an interview about how he had played an early version of Blastermaster. And the final boss had basically a, well, I think you described as a phallus right on its crotch,

like something that you absolutely could not have in a Nintendo game. And it told Sunsoft to take that out. And I don't think that's in the code anywhere. So that's just a strange thing, considering that. I mean, give the kind of, go ahead. I was just going to say, where are the game is up in arms about the removal of the blasted monster penis? That's my question. Right.

Where's the penis bones? So, you know, given the kind of the era that was created in and the sort of techno-bio-horror vibe that you get toward the end, like there was a whole lot of H.R. Giger in Japanese manga and anime design of this time that this draws from. And Giger loved him, some phallic imagery, some ionic imagery, just genitals dripping with monstrous horror visuals. That's his thing. So, yeah, like, I absolutely believe it. with this game, a thing that I believe we can all agree, universally awesome, the music. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Good. I believe this was a Naoki Kodaka composition, a set of music. And it's just like, it's great from beginning to end. Oh, yeah. Was this, I mean, Sunsoft games had the soundtracks were okay before. Was this, in your opinion, was this maybe the first Sunsoft soundtrack that

really kind of set the standard for later games like Journey to Silious and Batman? Yeah, I mean, before the Sunsofts games, they came to the U.S., I mean, they gave us Spy Hunter and SkyKid, which, you know, they're fine. Spy Hunter has the Peter Gun theme. It's like, you know, okay, sure, that's great. But then there was also City, not City Connection, Freedom Force. Yeah. Yep. And there just wasn't that much, like Freedom Force has a good soundtrack.

But, yeah, this is the first game just from Sunsoft in general. that made you say like, whoa, Sunsoft, very cool. This is awesome. But it did set the standard for the soundtrack quality. Despite having not played this game until recently, that's kind of what I associate Sunsoft with from the NES is stuff like Batman, Shatterhand much later. And I think, did they do gimmick as well.

Oh, yeah. They did gimmick. Shatterhand was Natsume, though. Oh, was it? Well, that's bad. I'll do it. That's okay. Lots of people make good soundtracks on NES.

But Sunsoft, like, they really went with the drums. Like, that was kind of their defining quality. I guess that's the case for a lot of developers. They, you know, he had like Tecmo. They really love their drums, and it was a distinct style. Konami really loved drums and like strum guitar. That was kind of their defining sample channels. Oh, Mr. Hits.

Yep. But, yeah, basically with the NES sound chip, you had one channel that could use sampled sound. And you had just a few bytes of data reserved and allocated for those samples. So you really had to maximize it. So the developers, you know, who had composers who really could think in terms of like, where can we, you know, make maximal use of sampled audio and how can we crunch it down so that we can, you know, fit it into this cartridge, but it still sounds good and has a great

impact. Like those were the ones that really stood out. And definitely those three developers, they had. great sound teams. Oh, yes. So we could not only play Blastermaster, but we can also read about it, at least in America. Yes. Blastermaster was not a big, metafite, was not a big hit in Japan.

It sold horribly, actually, according to the history of Sunsoft, like 30,000 copies. But in America, you know, Nintendo Power was like, buy this game, it's cool. And it had the name Blastermaster, and it had like geometry on the cover, which to everyone else, aside from me, was awesome. So it just sold amazingly well, like a massive hit. And as a result, yes, things happened. So please, Todd, tell us about the BM legacy. Well, right around the late 1980s in the height of Nintendo, basically, they, this publishing company put out these worlds of power novels. They were basically sort of aimed at, I guess, fourth or fifth grade the reading level. And they were based on all the, well, I would say most of the popular Nintendo

games of the time, like Ninja Guide and also infiltrator. Yes, for some reason. It was kind of like Captain N where sometimes they would pick popular games mostly, but every now and then you'd see like Puss and Boots or Hoops or something. But anyway, the Worlds of Power Blaster Master Book. It follows the plot of the game. You know, Jason sees his frog, disappeared on the hole and he's determined to get him back. During his underground, you know, mission to do this, they introduce another character, another tank. Her name is Eve. She's this alien bio-android who sort of helps them along. And the worlds of power novels, if you can call them that, they did usually introduced side characters or new characters every now and then so that the hero of the game

wouldn't just be going through the motions of it so they'd have somebody to talk to. There's a Castlevania book from the same line that brings a kid from, you know, our world into Simon Belmont's world for that same reason. But basically at the end of the book, you know, even Jason, they defeat the plutonium boss and everything's good. And like most of the worlds of power books, you know, everybody forgot about this. It was the kind of thing you'd get a kick out of bringing into your, you know, fifth grade reading, reading time because the teacher couldn't really tell you that you couldn't have it because it's an actual book. It wasn't just a video game. or a comic book.

But, you know, and these books were fun. I don't think anyone really expected to hear from them again. But as we discussed later, Sunsoft really remembered it. Remembered the Blastermaster World's a Power book. They did. So I kind of feel like Blastermastermaster's disproportionate success in the West versus Japan kind of put Sunsoft America on kind of upper footing for a little while, until they dissolve the studio like three years later.

But for a little while, it seemed like Sunsoft was really focusing on Western properties. You know, we'll talk about one in a minute, but you've already mentioned Batman, the Grimlins 2. Journey to Silius was going to be a Terminator game until they were like, oh, this license is terminated. I see what I did there. Anyway, so, yeah, they really,

they kind of focused on the Western. side of things. So I feel like, you know, at some point, they realized there's value, there's nostalgia, there's something to mine here. It took them like 10 years with Blastermaster. But it makes sense to me that they would look back at, you know, all the stuff that emerged from Blastermaster in the U.S. and say, okay, how can we build on this to create an experience that is in line with what this audience that actually liked the game expected? Which, honestly, that's that's more perspicacity than I think a lot of studios have with their their attempts to mind nostalgia. So I have to give them credit for that. They didn't just say like, okay,

let's just, you know, have one guy who worked on the original development team, do a thing that has nothing to do with anything whatsoever and put the name Blastermaster Master on it. They really, they really went back and I think tried to determine what it was that Americans liked so much about Blastermaster. And unfortunately, some of the the breadcrumbs that led there were false clues, red herrings, because they probably thought for a long time that we really liked the top-down stuff, because that's what they kept giving us, but it's not what we wanted. Oh, yeah.

So that was the end of a sort of a blastermaster. I mean, it took a while for it to get to get a sequel. Yes. They really did very well. But like you said, they really, since off really did seem to go more into the, um, the, uh, the licenses at that point. Even they put the Blastermastermaster team to work on an animus family game.

Did you want to talk about that or did you want to? Oh, that's why you're here, Todd. You are the definitive source on this game. This amazing game. We've had an episode on it already. So we don't have to go into too much detail. But it is, you can't talk about the original Blastermastermastermaster without talking about

Fester's Quest. Because it's so weird. Yes. So fascinating, really, how it came about at 5Mig. One of the designers for Sunsoft USA, he worked on Freedom Force before, but he had a dream about Uncle Fester hosting like a Peewee's playhouse thing, and he decided to make a game about Uncle Fester from the Adams family, and he talked to the rights holders that got their approval, and it is a game about Uncle Fester, depending off an alien invasion, and it plays very much, almost exactly like the top-down sections from Blastermaster. It was made by the same team by Sunsoft's Japanese staff. And it is a very difficult game because, for one thing, Uncle Fester has no continues. He basically continues from the very beginning of the game.

There's no checkpoints and no password system. It's also harder than the adjacent parts of Blastermastermaster because Fester can't move diagonally. He has nothing like the grenade. He doesn't have the grenade trick. And there's also, if you're not careful, you can pick up power-ups that decrease your weapon level. In other ways, it's a little bit easier because getting hit does not really affect your weapons, but he can only take two or three hit, I think four hits at most before dying.

That was just sounding real bad. You can see that sort of, though, it has kind of a solid structure underneath all the extreme difficulty, just because the Sunsoft, they were building on basically the success of Blastermaster, making a few things harder, making a few things a little easier. And the alien bosses that Uncle Fester faces, they're really straight out of Blastermaster, as are some of the enemies. They really look very similar to the little gooey mutated blobs. There are some frogs that jump around that are really right from the Blastermaster play with a book.

And in Sunsoft's defense, it's only the American version that doesn't really have a continual password system. They kind of fix that in the European release. but it's a very interesting game. I know it's not officially part of the Blaster Master Can, and I think it's one of the few things that the Blastermaster Master Zero games don't reference. Well, they wish they could say.

And it just kind of always fascinates me because I don't really think that you could make a game like this today. There would be too many, too much studio interference wanting it to be something other than a very simple game about a supporting character from an ancient sitcom, Blasting aliens. Although, was this actually presented as a tie-in with Adam's family? Yeah, I guess it was.

It was, sorry, I was thinking the Munsters where Grandpa, like, he had, the actor had the image rights to his character separately and licensed those out. But that was, yeah, I was getting those mixed up, but different characters. This game, Fester's Quest, it predates the role Julia Adams family movie, right, by a bit, like a couple of years. So this would have been based on reruns of the black and white sitcom. Yes. I think that's why they were able to get away with an alien invasion game because it didn't, they didn't have a, have it, the revival of the 90s hadn't happened yet. I mean, this is why the revival happened. People bought Fester's Quest by the millions and said, we've got to bring back the Adams family.

It must have done well, because everyone talks about this game. Like, it seems to be one of the stalwart, like, U.S. NES games that I hear about. Well, it's very, it's sold a lot of copies, and it is very common, and not very expensive. It's one of the, it's one of those games I always see

in retro stores for, you know, a pittance, which is, you know, for the price, you get a pretty interesting little game, if a very difficult one. I mean, I haven't really played this, but one thing I do want to say, like, to its credit, I'm going to praise it where it deserves it. The smash cut to the,

title screen and the awesome rendition with the Adam's family theme after the sort of a track mode is great. Oh yes, the music is good as most unsoft games at this point. I'm hoping that digital clips will be able to do an Adam's family collection of some sort and bring together this

and Pugsy Scavenger Hunt and all the other misunderstood games. Even the turbographics game where you play as the Adams family's lawyer. Why not? Throw them all in on what the hell. Yes, perfect. The game by color point and click adventure, let's just Well, who cares? All of them.

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So yeah, for whatever reason, when they followed up on Blastermaster, they thought, oh, yeah, the kids really love the top-down sections. So they gave us Fester's Quest, which apparently was designed by the American team via fax, and then the Japanese team really did the programming and work on it. Right. And then they said, wow, let's just keep going with this. Who cares about tanks? Let's just have some top-down stuff.

So as a follow-up to that, we got Blastermaster Boy, which is not actually a blastermaster game. This is one of those games where you saw this sometimes, where a Japanese studio created a game. It did okay in Japan, or maybe it failed, but for whatever reason, Western audiences loved it. And they said, oh, okay, well, we have something that we can easily follow up on, but wouldn't it be a waste of resources for us to create a game that's not going to do well here in our home territory? we should outsource this. Or better yet, why don't we just license someone else's game? So, you know, you have Tecmo looking at Natsume and saying, hey, you guys made a game that's a lot like Ninja Guide in there with Shadow the Ninja. Huh? Why don't we make an arrangement

so that instead of suing you for this, you just put our name, Ninja Guideon, on your Game Boy spin-off and call it Ninja Guidein Shadow. There you go. Okay, thanks. This is a kind of the same thing. But this is part of the morass of branding and confusion that was Bomberman in the late 80s and early 90s. Now, Bomberman was not confusing in Japan.

It was very clearly, hey, here's bomber stuff. There's bomber man, bomber king, et cetera, et cetera. You know, bomber man boy or whatever, bomber boy. But in the U.S., we didn't know what name we were going to get. It could be Bomberman, but it could be Robo Warrior, or it could be

atomic punk, or Dyna Blaster, yeah, or it could be Wario Blast featuring Bomberman or it could be Blastermaster Boy. I played this for the first time today, actually, because I forgot it existed and I hurriedly booted it up. And as soon as I started it, I didn't know any of this, what you've just said, and I was like,

this is just Bomberman. Like, this is a Bomberman game. So then I immediately looked it up and it's like, yep, there we go. Well, technically, it's Bomber King. So this is the sequel to Robo Warrior, which weirdly enough, like, Robo Warrior and Bomberman came out at the same time in the U.S., which just bizarre. I'm putting together an N.S. Works episode on them soon. And, yeah, like Hudson just had no idea what they were doing. Just no clue. So for whatever reason, SonSoft was like, guys, just let us have this. Okay. We just need a bomber man or a blastermaster game. You've got a game about blasting in a top-down perspective with a guy. Can we do this? Okay, thanks. I mean, I thought it was kind of fun. I didn't hate it.

I tried to buy it, but it turns out for some reason it's insanely expensive. That doesn't surprise me, yeah. I'm kind of amused that even the cover doesn't make it all that hidden, that it's a Bomberman game, because the color scheme, the main character, he's dressed in, you know, Jason's outfit, but he has Bomberman's, you know, yellow face and white helmet, and he has the proportions of Bomberman. And so, yeah, it's almost a little nod to that. And was this called Blastermaster Jr. in Europe?

Yes, I believe so. Okay. Wow. And in Japan, it was called Bomber King Jr. or something like that. Right. I guess King Jr. is just Prince. I don't know. Bomber prints.

It's confusing. Anyway, so, yeah, there's no tank here. There's no side scrolling. It's just the top-down sections. There's all kinds of stuff hidden in blocks that you can explode. But you also, instead of just, just having a bomb. You also have a gun so you can shoot stuff. So it does have kind of that blastermaster feel. Instead of having grenades, you have a bomb. Okay, sure. That's fine. It's, it's not

terrible. It is a game that exists and is not offensive. But it's also not what anyone wanted in a portable blastermaster game. They wanted the tank parts. And we didn't get those. Let's go get music at least. I would hope so. I mean, combining Sunsoft and Hudson, God, if they had blown the music on that, there would have been riots. just, you know, fires in the streets. I tell you what. So we did get the tank in a subsequent game two years later. And it made us stop and say, did we really want the tank after all? And that game is Blastermaster 2. They put an actual numeral on this one and said, this is it. This is the follow-up to the NES classic from five years ago, Blastermaster. Here you go, kids. Blastermaster 2. We know. that you Nintendo kids went over to Super Neos, so we're putting it on Genesis. Please enjoy it.

Yeah, apparently there was a Super Nintendo version announced or mentioned somewhere, but never released. That's a shame. We really missed out there, didn't they? And the cover art in America, to continue with the whole idea of bothering people, it's not even

show anything, it's just a bubble with blaster and master and then the number two below it. So kind of a brazen of them to assume that the name alone would carry it. I mean, I remember when this game came out. I, because I'm old, I had just gotten into college and I did not have money for video games. And I only owned a super NES. So I saw this at Best Buy, just sitting there for Sega Genesis only.

And I said, I feel betrayed. And then emulation happened a few years later. And I tried this out on whatever. Genesis emulator ran on Mac in the late 90s, and I said, wow, I feel betrayed all over again. This is not the Blastermaster Master experience that I demanded. It's absolutely awful. Like, there is no... I wouldn't go quite that far.

Like, okay. I post it, I don't, I'm going to refer directly to this because you can't see this on, the game is shoddy. Like, the hit boxes are so poor. Oh, yes, yes. You will die. You will take damage. like when you clearly aren't touching things

and that's like one of the absolute like no right off things like the only way to get past certain like mini-bosses from what I could tell is to make sure you have full health before you go it into the room I guess you would do that anyway if you could but I thought stupidly I thought hey

if I'm skillful I should be able to beat this boss but no you just can't avoid taking it so you have to tank it's the only way there's another kind of tank tanking damage DEC. Maybe they did it on purpose, and it's all a big thematic through line. Anyway, Blastermastermaster 2, fit for the bin. I will say it's generally disappointing. Even the tank doesn't look as cool as it did in the original or the older games. It's just very bug-like in comparison.

And it controls terribly as well. Yeah, they lost the control physics that made the NES game so good. And on top of that, the combat physics, like now you can fire at a 45-degree angle, which is cool, but when you aim at a 45-degree angle, your gun just stays there. It just sticks in that direction. If you aim straight up, it just continues aiming straight up when you stop controlling it, which is not how it worked on an ES and makes it much more frustrating and complicated. Don't get me started on the top-down sections.

I didn't even play that first. Oh, God. I couldn't bear it. You don't play as Jason in the top-down sections. You play as the tank. But the controls, I don't even know how to describe them. It's so complicated. to move and turn and there's like inertia, it just, I don't know, like, okay, so Blastermaster

2 is part of another trend of this era where, you know, I mentioned Japanese studios would make a game that was popular in the West and say, well, we should, you know, work with someone else to create the game because it's not going to be a big deal here, and we should focus on our own, you know, our own local market internally with our actual in-house talents. So let's license. it out to someone who really gets that market. So you have this contracted to a British studio called Software Creations who had previously created stuff like Wolverine for NES and X-Men and X-Men and Spider-Man and Arcades Revenge. Like, not great games, but this wasn't the only time this sort of thing happened.

And compared to, like, tier techs and US gold with Strider 2, journey into darkness, this isn't that bad. You know, I had Strider 2 on Master System, and I noticed that it was weak, but I'd still rather play it than this. Like, at least, at least, it's, it's bad, but this, like, to me, this is like Cryptonite. Like, if the only should... You're just thinking of the box art. Because the box art looks like kryptonite.

I just, uh, oh, no. I mean, you know, if you stay still in this game for more than, like, a few seconds, a fireball appears on the screen and homes in on you and dug up damages you. Oh, it's like in Mario Brothers. Yeah. And if you pause the game, if you pause the game to avoid that happening, the music starts over every time you pause. And that happens when you want to change weapons or do anything? Oh, well, I mean, have you heard the music? Like, it's good to just not have the sound on in this game.

There are drips of water that hurt your tank. Like, they're water. Yeah, Jason didn't do a very good waterproofing. What can I tell you? The whole premise of this is, like, you have a tank that is just like the tank in the first game, but actually the tank in the first game, has been destroyed by aliens, who stole all its parts to create, like, a war machine that's going to blow up the planet from the core. So, Jason spends a month building another tank that's just like it. Oh, man. I don't know. It's bizarre.

Now, this doesn't have the frog at all, does it? It doesn't have friends. No, the frog, the frog got to take a break and didn't have to be involved in this. No frogs. I'm out. It's bad garbage. I don't know. I don't want to just, like, totally slack on this game because it just sounds like.

Oh, Jeremy's just being mean about European game design. Well, I'm here backing you up. It's fine. You know, I'd be the first one to tell you off if that was what I thought was happening. But this is a stinker. Like, it's the only things I can praise it for, I don't think the music is horrible. And I think the visuals are quite nice. It moves quite smoothly and such.

Yeah, it's got that Amiga look to it. It looks distinct from a lot of other Genesis games. Yes, it does. It really feels like James Pond is about to jump out at some point, or Tinhead maybe. Oh, man. That would save the scale. game. It's got that background design that you can sort of see

and stuff like Wiz and Liz and Stormlord. Hell yeah, now you're talking my language. All these sweet-ass games. But it's, yeah, it did remind me of that, so it wasn't a completely bad experience, but... The idea of having side-on sections where you fight bosses as Jason isn't an

inherently bad one. But unfortunately, the execution was just stinking crap. But is it so hard to just give us bosses that you fight with the tank, think it's all powerful and cool? Why is that so difficult? Apparently, yes.

This might be a good point just to bring up one 16-bed game that wasn't directly inspired by Blastermastermaster and turned out a lot better than, you know, the Blastermaster 2. And that's Metal Warriors. I didn't realize that was inspired by Blastermaster. Yeah. There's an interview where the developers basically said, because the game feels a lot like, you know, Cybernator and Assault suits, but you can get out of your meck anytime and there's six different mecs you get into.

And you know, you're a puny little jetpack guy. But it does feel a little similar than that because there are points where you have to get out of the neck and undo locks and discover other things. So I was kind of surprised to find that. But it makes a lot of sense when you're playing the game. That's LucasArts, wasn't it? Oh, yeah, LucasArts.

Basically, their Gundam tributes. I used to play the verse. There's a really fun versus mode with two players against each other. I used to play that on Emulates quite a lot. Oh, yeah, that is a perfect versus game now. Okay. Okay. So, um, I did not know. So, um, I did not know that about middle warriors, but now I need to check out the game. It's been on my, kind of at the edge of my

radar for many, many years, and I've never gotten around to it. So now I have a reason to. It's the real Blastermaster 2. Hooray. All right. So now we take a break from Blastermaster. Sunsoft goes through some stuff. They do some things. Not a lot of things, actually. And then kind of regroup a few years later. And they say, hey, what about this Blastermaster thing? That was pretty good, huh? Why don't we just do that again? They look at the Game Boy Color where people are just shoveling NES games

on Game Boy Color, not paying a bit of care or two. Does this game work when you crop down the screen dimensions? Is it good? Is it fun? Just shoved out there. And, yeah, so they come up with Blaster Master Enemy Below, which I originally thought was just a port of the NES game,

but it's not. It's more complex. than that. They actually took the time to say, hey, let's retool this and not just directly port the game. So it's a weird one. It's almost like just a remake, but there's more to it than that. And they change up a lot of stuff that you don't initially recognize. Like the tank parts are pretty much the same. The overall flow of the game is pretty much the same. The layouts of the environments in the tank stages are pretty much the same. But then you get into the the tap-down stages, and things are different.

There's a different perspective, like Jason looks different. He can no longer move in eight directions, just in cardinal directions. His blaster, his gun, only has four levels of upgrade as opposed to eight. So it doesn't feel quite as debilitating when you take a hit, although they still did keep the, you know, the power degradation. But now all the little stages, the top-down stages that didn't have bosses in them, are for more than just, you know, boosting your gunpower. There's actually stuff in there that you can get.

It's kind of neat. Yeah, I was quite impressed with this because initially, as you mentioned, I didn't assume it was just like an inferior do-over, because the tank on first go, it just didn't feel as good. But then as I kept kind of playing it, I thought, like, okay, it feels different, but the controls are quite tight. Like, it has good responsive controls. The tank is slower, but then again, you kind of need to be slower,

so you don't just blunder into everything on the smaller screen real estate. And yeah, the fact that the sort of sub-maps have keys that you need to find in them in order to progress is a nice change. It nicely sort of compartmentalises it into play sessions. Now, I don't know, I assume this game has some kind of way of recording your progress. I don't recall, but it would be odd if it didn't, given it is quite difficult and long. I thought the main thing that stood out to me as weak was sort of the sound effects because it almost felt like the gunfire from the tank was too obnoxious, too loud, and it would drown out everything else more than it did in the NES game. But no, I thought this was quite a good effort.

I quite liked this. Ah, and it's actually positioned as a sequel to the original Blasterasterasteraster. Oh, right, right, yes. And there's a Japanese release, too, that sort of carries on its, it calls itself Metafite E.X, I think. Played X, yeah. Right. So at this point, there were still two separate things. You know, they had different character names, and different cutscenes, too, I think, kind of.

But I don't think the frog is in the Game Boy Color version. Again, sorry, I have to point that out for every game. And yeah, I think there was a password system, I believe. Yeah, so in creating a sequel to the original Blastermastermaster, Sunsoft kind of started to build a Blastermaster Canon, not C-A-N-N-O-N, which already existed in Blaster, Master Master, but C-A-N-O-N, which is continuity. And that really, they really went for it with the next game, which came out the following year for PlayStation Blastermaster Blasting Again, which, man, I wanted to

like this one, but it just didn't quite click for me. Yeah, I wanted to like it too. And I did. I thought it was really good. Oh, well done. I had a lot of fun with this, which felt like a very, when I was playing it, I was thinking, oh, man, I think Jeremy is not going to like this, and I'm going to have to be the one who loves it again, but I don't hate it.

I just, uh, it just felt really dated when it came out. Like, it's a 19, it's a 1996 PlayStation game released in 2001 for 10 bucks. So it's a little weird. Yeah, I remember picking this up for just $10. And I was surprised to how it, how much I liked it. It does have, I guess you could say, uh, jank is the kids like to call it these days. The environments don't always work too well. And the loading times are kind of a pain unless you're playing it on a PlayStation 2.

but it's got a lot to it. It really, I think, does a better job than, you know, Blastermaster 2 of giving you the off the vehicle segments and then the, you know, the on foot segments and the power-ups too. I think you initially have access to a lot of different weapons with the Sophia. And this was kind of an odd release in America because Sunsoft was going to bring it out as a normal game, but then I think Crave Entertainment ended up just buying this and a mediocre strategy RPG called Eternal Eyes

and just released them both his budget. So it was a good deal for $10. And in my opinion, the most interesting thing this game does, though, is that it makes Eve from the Blastermaster World's Power novel a character, a canon character. She and Jason apparently have children now, and they're the ones piloting the Sophia

against these mutant warlords from beneath the earth. Wasn't she like a robot or something? I think she's a biological robot, kind of like a bioroid from Apple Seed maybe, that... Oh, there you go. I don't get that reference, but I mean, can you have sex with them is what I'm swinging at here? Maybe like a replicant. I don't know. I guess they're compatible. Okay, well, that's good for him. Stuart, you're on the internet. You know that you can have sex with anything if your heart really desires it.

Oh, that's right. I forgot. Something's I forget. Unfortunately, it does establish that both Eva and Jason are dead by the start of... A little bleak. Alien cruelty. I liked this. I think that it captures the feel of the original NES game quite well with the way that the tank is quite fast-paced. It has a tiny amount of momentum, but not much. And the fact that it's quite a simple game as well,

where really you're essentially doing, solving mazes in order to sort of open gateways to get to the on-foot sections. But mostly all you're doing is driving a tank around, doing hilarious sideways jump strafes, because you can't do a traditional strafe because that would be a bit too, you know, difficult in a tank. But it's platforming and it is fast-paced, and it just feels like kind of old-school in a way that I really enjoyed. I had a lot of fun with it. I think the worst thing I could say about it is it looks like garbage now because the graphics are just saying. No, I assure you, it looked like garbage at the time. Oh, okay, fair play.

Right, 2001, yeah. But, yeah, it hasn't held up visually. Well, I mean, this is, I'm going to go back to this. I can see myself playing this to the end. I really liked it. Yeah, I wish it was a little more widely available. Maybe I need to give it another try. I admit I have not played it since it first came out.

And honestly, I wasn't in the best place in life at that point. So, you know, maybe my sourness just transferred onto the game. So I'll give it another shot. The best $10 you'll ever spend. Actually, it's pretty cheap these days, too. is it? Okay. Yeah, it's not that much. I guess they made a bunch of coffees back in 2001.

Well, if you want to give it a try, you could always download it, but don't forget, if you don't, if you don't own it, you have to delete it after 24 hours. 24. What if it's too, what if it's too big a game to beat in 24 hours? Then you'll have to delete it and then re-download it the next day because that resets the counter. Just keep your save. Save the, okay, that's fair. Okay, so anyway, that was an interesting start. or an attempt, I guess it wasn't really a start, because nothing really came of it after that.

So then we jump ahead like a decade, and for whatever reason, there's a Wiiware game that comes out called Blastermaster Overdrive, and it's not good. I thought it was okay. It seemed okay. I mean, the fact that it had this charming ramshackle, this was made in click and play kind of feel to it that I quite liked. And I thought the handling and the general control were not bad at all. I could see myself kind of enjoying it, but it doesn't look good enough and it isn't interesting enough for me to persevere with, basically.

I thought it was okay. I would probably agree. It's better than two. Yes. Yeah, but I mean, you know, bringing back Blastermaster after 20 years, like here's a new game. I really wanted something that was a little more,

Just a little more than a click and play kind of game. Like, you know, it just wasn't, it just wasn't quite there. Well, this was kind of part of Sunsoft's little, um, back, this was in 2010, but, and they were trying to sort of bring back some of their older properties, kind of, um, they had Geigenworks actually involved, the Victoria ones company too. And I feel like this was, this one didn't really hit that hard, did it? No, anything on we ever hit that hard. Was this when they also produced Icky Online, Ike online,

in Japan. I think so. Yeah. And one thing about this game, though, it seems almost like a remake at first, but I think it is actually a prequel in that it sort of explains why Jason has this giant tank buried in his backyard. So I'll get some credit for filling in that little space.

I was really wondering about that. I'm glad that they've finally addressed it. Yeah, I'm looking over Sunsoft's release schedule, their history. and they kind of vanished between 2002 and 2010. They just went away. The only thing they released between Memorial Series Sunsoft Volume 6 for PlayStation, which combined ports or emulated versions of Journey to Silious and Euphoria, and Blastermaster Overdrive in 2010, was Iki Mobile,

a mobile phone game that was just a remake of the Famicom, Kusoge classic. Can I just mention about that memorial service, or whatever it was called? Memorial Series. Memorial Series, excuse me. I was thinking about the Queen. I do apologize. You're within your rights, of course.

Yeah. Well, it's a period of national warning, and it's going to last for, I believe, 15 to 20 years. I bought one of those because it had gimmick on it, and I got it. And did you know that the music is horrible? I don't know if they put Metafite on one of those I assume they did But if they did it would have sounded like garbage So that's just a fun fact for the listeners that

That's interesting and sad Oh no that's a shame about getting Kim Kimmik has such good music too It's an awesome game And it's coming out again finally And maybe they won't screw the music up this time So anyway, that was, that was Blastermasters. 20-plus year history. They just couldn't figure out

what to do with the damn series. But then, as we wrap up this episode, I feel like this might maybe deserve an episode all to itself, or maybe to focus on an IntiCreates episode. But through bizarre happenstance, Blaster Master Zero happened. I don't remember the exact circumstances

that led to it, but I've talked to Aizu from IndyCreates about it before. And basically, like a Nintendo a representative, put him and a Sunsoft representative together and said, hey, Sunsoft, do you guys want to do Blastermaster? These guys know how to make really good action games. You should talk. And they did. And they made Blastermaster Zero, which is in fact a really good action game. It's like, what a Blastermaster were made for turbographics. And that's a pretty compelling presentation. It turned out really great. I love it. I have only been.

the first one, but as what I now recognize as essentially a remake of sorts of Blastermaster, I had great fun with it. I think it's a really enjoyable game. I think there's only one point in the whole game where it's kind of confusing where you need to go next, but even then

compared to the NES game, it's absolutely nothing in that regard. I felt like, I don't know if we're spending a lot of time on it, as you say, but from what I played to the second one, I did like it, but I felt like they were moving away from the Ballastermaster kind of template a fair bit, and then I the sanity's in three, they do that even more.

Right. In the second one, they really kind of introduce a more a greater variety of stages you can go to because you're essentially traveling in space in Sophia and everything. And they introduce a few more characters that you don't actually get to play as. But one thing I'm impressed about the zero games is how much they combine into things. The first game, you know, it has the frog. He's a, now he's a dimensional, he creates dimensional portals or something. So he actually helps you during the game. And it has Eve in there, of course. She comes along and meets up with Jason.

And it even has Kane and Jennifer from Metafite, the Japanese version of the original game, as sort of background characters who are in the third game they're around. And the new characters in the second game that they introduced, you know, that you go to other planets and you meet these people who have, they have tanks like Jason and they're sort of all sort of the same design. And there's one that references Eiki, actually. Yeah, people were just telling me about that in the comments of my eiki video, and I had no idea. I think there's even a boss that references Arabian, one earlier sounds off the name.

I was, I'm a real talk of stuff like that. I have to say. Oh, yeah, that was very impressive. And I think the first two games are really nice. So the third one introduces the, they take the double dimensional mechanic in a different direction that I didn't really like too much. And I can't really explain why the third one disappointed me without spoiling the second game. So I won't really even say too much about that. For me, the second game, what I noticed is in the top-down sections, which they had... I thought in the first Master's Zero, they had essentially fixed those, making them a lot more fun.

There are a lot more different environmental gimmicks, like the one where the lava or the water washes over the walkways. Periodically, you have to be up on high ground. I thought that was a really smart way of freshening up those top-down sections and things like that. But then in two, they add in this dodge move. I think it's just tapping left Z-L or something whenever the bullet is about to hit you. and the whole game sort of seems to become about that and just countering and it's like what is this? What am I playing anymore even?

It didn't feel that fun for me but maybe I will persevere for it sometime. Oh yeah, the dodge mechanic. I feel like they felt they had to compensate for sticking with the system where you lose you still lose your power, you know, when you get hit even though it's a little more

it's softened a little bit so it felt they needed to give you dodge move. It was a bit of an overcorrection. It felt like it could sort of Intecreates as much as I love them and I do love them, if you're listening, Intecreates. They make excellent action games

and in a way they do some of his pivot around a manoeuvre like that. The new gun vault is very focused around a new, strange set of commands that you can do. So in a way it felt like they were just bringing that into Blastermaster and while they,

within their rights to do so, I felt like it stopped feeling like Blastermaster in that respect. It's still a good game. I would recommend it. it, but I wasn't crazy about that change. But then again, if they hadn't put that in, then it would just be the same game, I guess, against.

So, yeah, we're not going to talk about the watermelon booby-lady, are we? No. No, you did say something about DD, double dimension. I assume that's what that meant. Oh, dear. The thing I remember from Boston Master Zero, too, was seeing on Twitter some of the promo art for it, which was the Eve essentially,

can only be described as straddling the tank. And just thinking, there's no need for this. Yeah, compared to the first game, they took her in her design in an unnecessary direction because she's been mutated, but she's also been sexed up in. Yeah, it's disappointing. Yeah, yeah. And we'll say, though, at the end of the second game, they do give you a nice surprise regarding gang, well, you get to play as Eve for a brief bit. That's the point of one, I guess.

Yeah, you get to play as Shanty and Shovel Night. Probably. Yeah, and I think that's what disappointed me about the third one. that you're kind of stuck playing Jason and then maybe later on a very similar character. But they really teased you by getting to plays Eve, who has a completely different mechanic. And then it makes it more plausible like. But the third game doesn't, kind of forgets about it. So, but yeah, if you like Blastermastermaster and you haven't checked out the Zero games,

I'd definitely recommend that. They're pretty cheap, too. Yeah. All right. Wow, that's all Blastermaster. I don't know if we have anything more to say. So, yeah, thanks guys for talking. about Blastermaster. Any final thoughts about Blastermaster?

I've got a final thought. I like it. I think it's good. Smashing. I think the original NES game is still pretty probable, but difficult as it is. The PlayStation game, it might be a, it's definitely worth seeking out if you enjoy the Blastermastermaster formula. And the zero games, the first two at least, I really like them. I love them. So that's my recommendations for the series. I recommend not playing too. And Fester's Quest, of course.

You can't forget Fester's Quest. Of course not. Don't forget the Snow's Adam's family. That's another brilliant game. That was the ocean one, right? Yeah, rules. Even though it's by ocean, it's great. You know, they have a few outsiders accidentally made a decent game.

All right. So now you've learned everything about Blastermastermaster. Everything there is to know, you are an expert on this topic. because you listened to this episode of Retronauts. Well done. Very proud of you. And it looks like this is, it's an episode of Retronauts that is being released on the public feed.

And therefore, we have to give our bona fides. I will tell you that I am Jeremy Parrish and I am hosting this episode. You probably notice that by now. But if you would like to hear more episodes hosted by myself, sometimes by Stuart here, sometimes by other people entirely, you can go to Retronauter.

Notts.com. You can look us up on various podcast dispensing services. And of course, you can subscribe to us through Patreon. This podcast is largely supported through Patreon support. People who subscribe to the show make it possible for us to actually, you know, do this thing. And you can go to patreon.com slash Retronauts and subscribe to the show for three bucks a month. You get every episode a week in advance at a higher bit rate quality with no advertisements, very important. And also, if you subscribe for $5 a month, you get all of that. Plus, you get bi-weekly bonus episodes that are patron exclusive, will never be released to the public. There's Discord access and weekly mini-colums and podcasts by Diamond Fight. So a lot of stuff that we offer you

so that we can continue making this podcast. It's a it's a tit for tat, a quid quid pro quo. Wow. My Latin's really bad. So instead of speaking Latin to you anymore, I'm going to hand this over to Todd. Where can we find you on the internet? Well, I'm online as Kid Fenris. I have a website by that name, and I'm on Twitter. It's kidfeneres.com for the website. And my friend Joel and I also do a video series on YouTube called Unsung Game Creators, where we kind of look into the companies that have been working behind the scenes, maybe you aren't that well known, stuff like, well, not Sunsoft so much, since that's already very well documented by that history of Sunsoft, Jeremy was talking about, but maybe a company like ICOM who made Blaster Master Boyd.

Have you done an episode about Ancient or Aspect? Oh, not yet, not yet. That would be cool. That's my idea that you should definitely do them. Stuart, what about you? Oh, hello. You can find me on Retronauts, hooray, telling lots of fun and exciting anecdotes

and doing silly episodes about British games that would otherwise not get covered and Western Japanese games that would also probably otherwise not get covered or not get covered in such an amusing way, perhaps. Can I talk about the book? Is it legal to talk about the book? Do it, do it.

Okay. I've got a book coming out, I believe, this year. It is called All Games. Games are good and it's going to be published. It's not this year. Next year or the year after. Who knows? At some point in the future, before the heat death of the universe, hopefully this book will come out. But it's going to be called All Games Are Good and it is about that very premise. And it's collecting lots of games writing that I have done, adding lots more new games writing that I have done, and rewriting every single one of the games writings that I have done. It is more eloquent than me telling you about it now. But I don't remember seeing Blastermaster in there. Therefore, ergo, it was not a good game. Yeah, I'm afraid, unfortunately, despite everything that we've just said for over an hour and a half, Blastermaster not being in the book, not good. I'm afraid it's all been lies.

Utterly tragical. All right. Finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on the internet. You can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find me doing stuff at limited run games, such as Publishing Stewart's book. And finally you can find me on YouTube where I masquerade mysteriously under my name, Jeremy Parrish, making videos about games such as Blastermaster and many others. I did one about Eiki, but I haven't done one about Fester's Quest yet. That's a few years down the road.

Anyway, thanks everyone for listening, and best of luck finding that frog. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.