Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 57: Blaster Master & Blaster Master Zero

Episode Date: March 24, 2017

It's a different application for the Retronauts Micro format this week as Jeremy uses the show to present a review of the newly released Blaster Master Zero alongside a series retrospective.

This week in Retronauts, this game is Hop and Rap. Mega Man Zero and Azure Striker Gunvolt developer Indy Creates has recently released a remake of NES classic Blastermaster for Nintendo 3DS and Switch. This is a remarkable turn of events for a few reasons, but most notably because it's the first follow-up. in the long-running series that actually feels better designed and more fun to play than the original game. Blastermaster, which debuted in 1988 in the U.S. and Japan, stands out in memory as one of the more ambitious games of its era. Certainly, it seemed to mark something of a turning point for publisher Sunsoft, who until that point had been turning out some very well-meaning but ultimately unsatisfying games for the system, especially in Japan. For example, their top-down shooter Iki, set on

the rice patties of medieval Japan, was something of a go-to whipping boy example for bad Famicom games during the early years of this podcast. their bold pitfall derivative Atlantis Nonazzo remains one of the most infamous Famicom releases of all time, thanks to its hateful combination of awkward controls, arcane secrets, cruel traps, combined with an expanse of treasure-hunting world. Sunsoft wanted to do great things. It's not like Atlantis No Nozo was terrible because it lacked ambition. The game had ambition to spare, with its 100 enigmatically linked stages packed full of mysteries.

It just wasn't any fun. Likewise, Medola No Subasa, a gutsy 1986 release that may well have been the first side-scrolling action-rpg platformer on a Nintendo system. It beat Zelda 2's Japanese launch by a few weeks. Modola No Subasa did a ton of interesting things, such as featuring a tough female protagonist, Lucia, mere months after Metroid's secretly introduced one to audiences. It combined swordwork with sorcery,

allowed you to build up your hit in mana points, and sent you scurrying through a series of consecutive free-roaming stages reminiscent of design of Capcom's 1987 Black Tiger. Unfortunately, Madola No Subasa suffered from the same problems as all Sunsoft games at the time. It just wasn't any fun. Players found themselves quickly overwhelmed by the fast-paced action, which gave its heroine a stubby little sword with no attack range to use against swarm of aggressive monsters that instantly swarmed were on site. Combined that with Lucia's complete lack of recovery and invincibility, and you had a game whose forward-thinking design

was undermined by the prospect of instant death at a moment's notice. And since there was no continue feature, you had to use a special multi-button hidden command at the title screen in order to resume your progress after dying, something you could easily forget to do in the heat of the moment, as documented in a particularly heartbreaking episode of GameCenter CX. Sunsoft had a long way to go from the likes of Iki and Atlantis Nonazzo to the excellent latter-day NES games we associate with the company, such as Batman, Journey to Silious, and Gimmick. Blastermaster was one of their most crucial steps.

Part of the secret behind Blastermaster's quality seems to have come from the fact that Sunsoft didn't develop the game themselves. Instead, they appear to have contracted with an outside studio called Tokai Engineering, who did all the heavy lifting for the game. While I can find more or less universal attributions online to tie Blastermaster to Tokai, No one seems to know what the heck Tokai engineering actually was. It's safe to say that company had nothing to do with Victokai, since Tokai engineering put together games that felt far more polished and capable

than anything Victor Kai ever produced. There's speculation that Sunsoft owned Tokai engineering is some sort of hedge firm, since the studio only ever worked on Sunsoft games. It's entirely possible that Tokai was some sort of firm Sunsoft built or acquired entirely for the purpose of attacks write-off and developing games, perhaps poaching talented coders for the cause. In any case, after only one obscure Japan-only graphical adventure called Ribble Island, Tokai and Sunsoft put together Blastermaster.

And it was a Blastermaster piece. Now, Blastermaster felt very much like a product of its times. 1988 was basically the peak of Famicom developer's obsession with smashing RPG elements into other genres, which gave us a huge array of games that normally would have been Miracite-style works, but, thanks to their placement in NES history, turned out to be action RPGs, including things like Pack-in Video's bizarre take on the movie Rambo. Badolano Suvasa was an early leader for this trend, but it would come into better focus through superior 1987 Famicom releases like Zelda 2, the Go

Gunies 2, Casylvania 2, and more. You even saw limited arcade action creations like Rigar and Bionic Commando go all exploratory as well. Blastermaster was no different, and arriving a year after the action RPG explosion, its creators felt pressure to come up with a different take on things. So what we got was a vehicular combat game in which players controlled a small jumping tank, making its way through an underground realm of mutant monsters. The simple fact of controlling a tank didn't radically set Blastermaster apart from its peers.

On its surface, the biggest change wrought by making the player avatar a vehicle was that instead of being a nonlinear melee combat game, ranged attacks became the default action. Nearly every other action RPG of the era featured protagonists who relied on short-range attacks, with projectiles taking a secondary role. Blastermaster gave players a cannon that could be fired in three directions, which added something of a megaman or contrived to the action, which was a pretty significant change. In fact, Blastermaster's most immediate antecedent was Metroid, Nintendo's landmark exploratory platformer.

As in Metroid, you could take out bad guys from a distance, and as in Metroid, it also lacked the overt RPG mechanics you saw in the likes of Zelda 2 and Riga. Finally, Blastermaster's emphasis on technology as your central apparatus meant that, as in Metroid, it made perfect sense for upgrades to game mechanics to take the form of modular attachments to the tank. Just as Samus upgraded her power suit to leap higher and absorb more damage, Blastermaster protagonist Jason upgraded his tank, the oddly name Sophia the 3rd, so that it could fly stick to walls, and swim. This impressive suite of add-on skills also helped set Blastermaster apart from other games.

Rather than growing in attack power and endurance, as was typically the case for action-RP protagonists, Sophia III never gained defensive strength, and its attack upgrades were all front-loaded in the game, and largely served as keys to breaking early barriers. Instead, the tank improved its maneuverability. By the end of the game, critters from the very beginning of the adventure could inflict the same amount of damage on the tank as ever, but the tank itself could go anywhere, including straight up into the air. That was pretty unique, but Blastermaster really set it's a part by not making the tank its sole player avatar. With the press of a button, Jason would hop out of

Sophia III to take on the underground mutant kingdom himself. This was a clever design choice, because it changed the game. Outside of his tank, Jason was terribly fragile. His gun had a limited range and could only deliver a fraction of the tank cannon's destructive power. Enemies inflicted more damage on him, and a fall from too high would instantly kill him. But Jason was much tinier than Sophia III, a tiny little blip on the screen, which meant that he could slip through openings too small for the tank to pass through. The result was an interesting back and forth design that occasionally forced players to leave the relative safety of their tank in order to progress. There were other advantages to swapping out to Jason mode as well. Sophia the Third's

cannons sat high above the ground and couldn't depress downward, so you'd need to use Jason to take out enemies too small for Sophia the third's line of fire, unless you wanted to waste one of the tank's precious limited special weapons in order to do the trick. And interestingly enough, you had to use Jason to take on the game's bosses, all of which lurked in layers too cramped to take the tank into. This, alas, is also Blastermaster's one big sticking point. Throughout the world of Blastermaster, you'd encounter special dungeon areas that switch the camera perspective, becoming top-down sequences linked room by room. If the tank portions of Blastermaster played like Zelda 2, the mutant layer sequences reverted back to the original Zelda, though, of course,

as a shooter. This in itself wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but a single punishing design choice made these portions of Blastermaster insanely difficult. You know how the big sticking point of the Graddeus games is that if you die, you're sent a little ways back and stripped of all your upgrades? While Blastermaster inflicted that sort of debilitating challenge on players with every single hit they took in the top-down zones. Not only would Jason lose health when an enemy struck him, he'd also lose attack strength.

As you advance through the dungeons, Jason could collect gun icons that would boost his weapon's capabilities. Each of the eight upgrade steps you progressed through caused your gun to gain new features. Shield-like wraparound projectiles, a wave beam, and ultimately a column of pure destructive fury. Maxed out, Jason was practically unstoppable, until he stepped on a spike, or failed to dodge an enemy projectile, or collided with one of the infinitely responding flying creatures that zipped around the layers in Medusa-like sine wave patterns. A single mishap would send Jason spinning down a death spiral of debilitation and failure, making the boss lair is nearly impossible to complete at times. Add to this the scarcity of healing items and the finite continues available to players,

and you had a game that many loved but few could master. That was perhaps the one thing Blastermaster shared in common with its Sunsoft predecessors, a punishing difficulty level. Despite this one cruel shortcoming, though, Blastermaster really did stand out as a high point of the NES library, and it instantly put Sunsoft on the map for many NES fans. The quality of the company's output from that point, forward greatly improved, and you were more likely to find a good game bearing the

Sunsoft logo than a bad one. While the company never quite reached the level of respect of Konami or Capcom, it came close. A claim muted somewhat in the U.S. by the fact that we never got some of the company's best output. Sunsoft developed its own high-end Famicom mapper chips with extra audio channels, similar to Konami's VRC series. But of course, Nintendo of America didn't allow those to ship over here. That meant we missed out on some of Sunsoft's greatest creations, like gimmick and euphoria. Still, the name Sunsoft could be taken as a guarantee of quality, and the company remains one of the handful of NES-era greats to still be around today, albeit in a greatly reduced capacity as a game publisher. Given Blastermaster's importance and success, then, it's perhaps a little surprise that

it spawned a minor franchise. Sadly, that franchise never quite lived up to the game that kicked it off, though certainly it has seen some interesting oddities over the years. Perhaps the most interesting and significant of these offshoots wasn't a game at all, but rather a kiddie-lit novelization of the game called Worlds of Power Blastermaster. Written by the pseudonymous A.L. Singer, this entry in the Worlds of Power series simply recounted the plot of the story in elementary age-friendly prose. Unlike, say, Konami's Metal Gear, Blastermaster's print adaptation didn't really have much source material to work with. The game had an outlandishly flimsy narrative pretext

that posited Jason as a random kid whose pet frog Fred escaped one day and bounded into a container of radioactive waste that inexplicably appeared in Jason's backyard. Having instantly mutated to massive size, Fred then plunged down a hole. Jason inexplicably followed, landing at the entrance to a sprawling underground kingdom of mutants, hungry to conquer the world of humans. Handily, Jason happened to tumble into the underground and land at the feet of a jumping combat tank, so he suited up and went into battle in order to stop the mutants.

Mainly he wanted to rescue his frog. That's not really much to work with when you have to stretch an eight-level game into a hundred pages of large print type. So the man known as A.L. Singer, went to town, giving Jason a full name, and introducing a female navigator for his quest by the name of Eve. Eve, it turned out, had created Sophia III on another planet and pursued the mutant boss all the way to Earth, and she helped Jason in his quest to rescue the frog. The addition of an extraterrestrial element of the game makes its premise more bizarre, not less, but it does seem to suggest that the book's writers were aware of the original Japanese version of Blastermaster. called Cho Waku-Sae Sanky Metafite in Japan, it was essentially the same game throughout, but it opened with a completely different story. Rather than involving a school kid and his frog, Metafite told the tale of a young warrior

named Kane Gardner and its attack tank, metal attacker, aka Nora. Sophia III is not the name of the tank, rather Sophia 3 is the planet on which the action takes place. And Nora was created by a young blonde woman, not an alien and not named Eve, but still very similar in spirit and appearance to the character A.L. Singer came up with. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but in any case, this common element between Metafite and the worlds of power interpretation of Blastermastermaster Master probably accounts for the fact that the book has been grandfathered into Blastermaster's series canon. In fact, Metafite has essentially been

overwritten in Japan. 2001's Blastermaster Blasting Again for PlayStation was simply called Blastermaster in Japan, and Inti creates newly developed Blastermaster Zero has the same title. Blastermaster Zero across all regions. It also effectively remixes both the Famicom and NES storylines into a cohesive whole with the Worlds of Power story list serving as a sort of reagent to make it all work. I'd like to hope that Blastermaster Zero marks a fresh start for the series rather than simply existing as a one-off remaster. It does a better job of recapturing the essence of the NES original than any remake or sequel since 1988. And it would be a great fresh start for the franchise on both sides of the Pacific, and the Atlantic, for that matter.

Blastermaster's history of video game sequels, though, is a pretty much. miserable one. The same team responsible for reworking the game's story for the US broke its brutally challenging top-down mode into a standalone Adam's family tie-in called Fester's Quest, which Bob covered in a previous Retronauts Micro, and contains all the cruel design elements of the NES games dungeon mode without the intoxicating tank exploration combat to balance the punishing top-down action. A couple of years later, Sunsoft gave us a Game Boy sequel, or rather quote-unquote sequel, like Fester's Quest, Blastermaster Boy came out only in the West and consisted entirely of the top-down sequences of Blastermaster.

It really seems like Sunsoft's U.S. Division completely misunderstood the appeal of the company's breakthrough hit. it, huh? Well, at least Blastermaster Boy had some justification for its design. It began life as a bomberman spinoff, called Bomber King in Japan. I guess it being a more puzzle-centric variant on the Bomberman formula, Sunsoft's employees thought, ah, yes, we can do a little cosmetic surgery here and make this work. And yeah, it's not a bad game at all. It's just not really Blastermastermaster. A couple of years later, Western developer software creations created a competent, functional Genesis game called Blastermaster 2. It was not nearly as good as the original. But unlike every previous attempt at a Blastermaster follow-up,

it was at least put together by people who understood that the appeal of the NES game came more from its tank sections than from the on-foot areas. They even attempted to add in some top-down sections in which you controlled Sophia the third, which was a nice attempt. But it didn't quite work out, and the series lay forgotten for more than half a decade until Sunsoft resuscitated it as part of that general trend to convert NES classics to Game Boy Color. Blastermaster Enemy Below for GBC looked like nothing more. than a crunched-down port of Blastermaster from NES to handheld.

But the further you played into the game, the more it began to diverge from the source material. While it largely stuck to the original in terms of content and mechanics, it added in a few new powers and changed up the world layout in places, to create a mostly similar but not 100% identical game. Why walkers Because my life is busy enough And I don't want to spend all day buying a car That's why Paul went to walkers.

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So keep your eyes and ears open for fully booked by Kirkus Reviews. All the unifying U.S.-Japan story convergence wouldn't begin to take place until 2001, when Blastermaster was turned into a frankly janky third-person shooter for the dying PlayStation. Blastermaster blasting again wasn't a particularly great take on the formula, suffering from a combination of straining technology, and equally challenged budgets. But it notably embraced the worlds of power story. elements, and made them canon. In blasting again, both Jason and Eve had died as part of the backstory, a real downer of a follow-up to a flimsy piece of kiddie-lit. But this grim narrative

choice did have the side effect of making enemy below a proper follow-up, one focused around the next generation of Blastermaster Heroes, Jason and Eve's kids. All of these developments were promptly ignored for what might be considered the first true follow-up to Blastermastermaster, the 2009 Wiiware game Blastermaster Overdrive. I say true because, unlike previous sequence, and remakes, Overdrive was, to my knowledge, the first to have been overseen by the NES games designer, Yoshiaki Iwada. Overdrive was definitely the strongest take on the Blastermaster concept since the original, but it had its share of failings. The action felt oddly stiff thanks to the clunky sprite design, and the fact that it supported only Wii digital

remote controls, definitely crimped its style. On the other hand, it also included new stages and new abilities for the player's tank, such as a drill attachment that allowed players to break through walls and damage enemies at close range. So Overdrive definitely has its admirable elements, but it's basically lost to obscurity thanks to its Wiiware exclusivity. According to Geigenworks, Victor Ireland, who served as a sort of midwife for Overdrive, the game was intended to serve as a jumping off point for Sunsoft's return as a major development power. That doesn't seem to have come to fruition, unfortunately. But Sunsoft has remained an active, if somewhat quiet publisher, all these years. So perhaps it's fitting that for

the company's latest attempt to resuscitate the Blastermaster brand, Blastermaster Master Zero, they've gone back to the arrangement that helped make the NES game a breakout in the first place by partnering with an outside developer. Inti Creates, of course, has a long and storied history as a game developer. I wrote a huge studio profile for U.S. Gamer a couple of years ago that you can check out if you want to learn more, but suffice it to say that the company was formed by a bunch of Capcom's 16-bit development talent, and that they genuinely understand the principles of great 2D game design.

Sure, the company hasn't always succeeded with his projects. They do have Mighty Number 9 under their belt, after all. But on the whole, they have a better track record at building on great classic design principles than anyone outside of maybe Nintendo's new Super Mario team. And that capacity for retro-style excellence appears on full display in Blastermaster Zero. For one thing, despite the title seemingly working as a callback to the company's Mega Man Zero games, Blastermaster Zero is not legendarily difficult like that other series. On the contrary, it's a much easier game than the original Blastermaster.

That is by no means a bad thing. The NES games challenge largely came from a handful of unfriendly design decisions and a limited allowance of continue credits. Zero becomes a much easier prospect to conquer thanks to some simple quality of life improvements and a more generous save system. You have infinite lives and continues, and you can resume your adventure after death from the nearest save station. Save stations do become fewer and further between the latter portions of the game, but every boss chamber is preceded by one, which makes the whole thing feel a lot less like an assault

on human happiness. There's also a bit of streamlining at work in certain areas, while Inti creates gives the player more options and others. One of the big changes involves Sophia the Third's weapons. First, you can collect a whole array of support weapons for the main cannon, in the form of selectable charge shots. From piercing lasers to ballistic shells that can take out seemingly indestructible obstacles, or Sophia III, if you're not careful, these supplementary skills can come in quite handy. You can also acquire a number of sub-weapons for the tank, just as in the original game, including familiar items like a triple missile spread and a homing torpedo.

Unlike in the NES game, however, Sophia III has unlimited ammunition for these weapons. Rather than having to collect stashes of ammunition, you now instead use the tank's hover meter to fuel these helper weapons. The hover meter very kindly recharges over time too, which means you no longer have to wander around farming H-caps. when you need to fly someplace. Instead, you simply hang around for a few seconds in your meter refills on its own. It's a really sensible and effective design modification. On one hand, it has a liberating effect on your use of, well, everything. You can jet around with a hover

attachment and carpet bomb enemies with missiles. On the other hand, you can't use these powers indiscriminately. You need to practice some conservation, so you don't spend all your time waiting for the meter to recharge, and you definitely can't just fly around blasting the hell lot of things. It's balanced. Best of all, IntiCreates has applied a similar fundamental reworking of power systems to the top-down sections of the game. While the power drain upon damage mechanic remains in place, two critical factors help mitigate its frustration. First, early on in the game, you acquire a weapon power shield. Basically, this is an energy shield that projects your weapon energy meter, and it absorbs a single hit from an enemy without causing

you to lose any power. It takes a few seconds to recharge, so if you get pounded by a bunch of enemies in rapid succession, you're going to lose weapon power. But it prevents a single stray shot or unlucky collision from debilitating Jason, which makes boss layers vastly more tolerable. The other change to Jason's weapon? He has access to eight different gun forms at all times. These guns have wildly different capabilities and effects than the guns in the original Blastermaster did. And while the basic level P-shooter isn't much use, each alternate mode has its own advantages. For example, when you face off against turrets that fire piercing lasers at you, your best tactic is to bring up the shield ray option and reflect those projectiles back of the turret.

Dealing with a huge wave of enemies, activate the lightning chain gun, which strikes one enemy and creates a link of electrical beams that zaps and often kills every monster on the screen in a single shot. It's tempting to use the almighty maximum beam and tear through everything in sight, but many of the lower tier weapons have useful secondary effects. The flamethrower may be slow and have poor range, but it causes enemies to slow down as they suffer cumulative burn damage. And on top of that, it's invaluable and icy areas capable of thawing slick floors and evaporating deadly spikes made of ice. The free-change gun modes do come at a price, though. Each mode is set to a different power tier, so in order to use them, you do need to boost Jason's gun power to the required level.

While it's easier to hang on to Jason's upgrades now than it was in the original Blastermaster, thanks to the gun energy shield, it also means that if you rely on the top-tier option as a lazy crutch, you'll find yourself underpowered and helpless the first time you take two hits of damage. It really behoves you to master multiple gun formats in order to avoid becoming overly dependent on the top-level power. Still, this is a small price to pay for such flexibility and ease of use. The game becomes far easier than the NES version was, but not in a bad way. It's not brain-dead or dumbed down, simply more fair. In another nice touch, the infinitely spawning flying enemies of the NES game no longer appear

in the top-down zones. By and large, Zero reproduces the game world of the original Blastermaster. But similar to enemy below, it does mix things up. more as you advance further into the world. For example, the underwater zone feels more puzzle-like, forcing you to exit Sophia III more often in order to solve certain challenges. And the ice zone now has enormous spike barriers that impede your ability to move around until you find the ballistic shell cannon add-on. Furthermore, there are now several bosses in the tank combat sections as well. Most of the tools you need to advance the game remain locked behind top-down area challenges,

of which there are now many more to contend with. But several times throughout the adventure, you'll encounter bosses that have to be battled by Sophia III. These are all great additions and make excellent use of the tank's new features, such as the ability to fire at a 45-degree angle by holding down the R-shoulder button. And finally, perhaps most impressively of all, Blastermaster Zero, once and for all, turns the goofy, conflicted mess that was the Blastermaster storyline, and miraculously reconciles it with the plotline to Metafite. You're still a young man named Jason Frednick, and you still are on a mission to rescue a frog named Fred.

But you're no longer an average Earth teenager. Instead, Jason is a researcher who hopes to restore life to a post-apocalyptic world. Fred is not a normal frog, but rather a large frog-like creature that Jason had never seen before, and which he hopes holds clues to restoring Earth's ecology to the way it was before the disaster struck. Eve, in the meantime, appears a few stages into the game and basically is written as she was in the Worlds of Power Book. I don't want to spoil too much, but suffice it to say that Zero manages to create a single coherent and cohesive narrative out of Metafite and Worlds of Power, which is a feat that demands some sort of metal or something. On top of that, Zero looks great, too.

Its visuals are definitely better than they could have been on NES. But Indy creates knows what's up. and didn't use cheap-looking shortcuts that compromised the classic fidelity of the game. Instead, the developers seemed to have targeted a higher technological spec than the NES and worked consistently to that standard. I'm going to peg it at turbographic 16 level. The color palette and level of detail seem consistent with the TG16 or PC engine. And the game lacks true transparency effects, instead using lots of dithered overlays to create the illusion of translucence, which of course don't read as translucent on the

switch's high-definition LCD screen, but that's okay. The whole thing has a consistent unified appearance from start to finish, and it helps to cement the overall feel of the game, which maintains the original games slightly loose and floaty tank physics. On the whole, it's just an exceptional take on the original Blastermaster. Despite some claims I've read that state it's a new game, it's very much an upgraded recreation of the original. But Intecreates has put a great deal of thought into Blastermaster's workings and reworkings, and the final product they've come up with here modernizes the game without compromising it. unless you feel that being able to reasonably beat the game

without cursing the people who made it as a compromise. It even has alternate endings to encourage replay. So what more could you want? With luck, Zero will serve as a new beginning for Blastermaster. We don't need tons of annual sequels to the game, but if one showed up every few years crafted with the design scruples on display here, I'd take that as an NES classic finally receiving its due, and it only took 30 years.

For Retronuts, this has been Jeremy Parrish. You can find me at Retronauts.com, where I write daily, and on Twitter as GameSpite, where I post bad puns about video games and retweet other people's political statements several times a day. You can follow Retronauts via iTunes or the podcast One app for weekly explorations of video game history, and for bi-weekly micro-episodes like this one. You can also help fund the show through Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. We'll be back on Monday with a full episode, courtesy of my co-host Bob Mackey, so we'll see you then. We're going to be able to be. Why Walker's rent in Mazda?

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Vins available at dealer. Price includes Mazda capital standard rate financing and cashback on select models. All prices plus taxes and license fees. Dock fees up to $150 may be added to the sale price or capitalized cost of a vehicle. dealer for details, ends 331.19. The Mueller report. I'm Edonoghue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General.

Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire, was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do.

The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.