Beat the game last night.
First non-spoiler surprise when watching the credits: the dev team was all Japanese. That was a surprise to me because it seems lately that love letters to the retro genre are usually western-developed. Not this game. In the end, all that matters is that the game is good I suppose. I just wasn't expecting it.
Jeff Gerstmann lets his cynicism spite himself wayyyy too much. On the Beastcast this week he said he played some of this game and was unimpressed. I imagine he must've played like 5 minutes of it and then got distracted by (the admittedly, probably much better) Zelda game. Suffice to say, I wouldn't take his lukewarm reaction to the game seriously.
Earlier, I was impressed that this game was only $10. Now however, I can understand why they came to that price. This game is a wee bit short. If you were to get on a 12 hour flight from Seattle to South Korea, you could start and finish the game in that flight time and still have time for a nap. My completion time was just a hair over 6 hours. I don't hold this brevity against the game, however. As I've gotten older, I've come to appreciate the rare achievement of actually playing a game to completion. This short length is also meaningful; the game's pace is balanced and it's short length means there's no filler. After all, the original game wasn't very long if you knew what you were doing, (although it never felt short when I was a kid). A pro could no-glitch speedrun the original in about an hour. If you're like me and you enjoy the low-commit feeling of a short game, then I can heartily recommend this one.
This game is also easier than the original but that's mostly in part to modern game design sensibilities. There's no "Continue?" system. You have unlimited lives. The penalty for death is much smaller, you restart at the last well-placed checkpoint or the last time you entered a door, whichever is closest. In the original, if you died you didn't lose any progress but after the 3rd death you were back to the beginning of the entire Area. Also the original didn't have battery saves or a password system. That's right kid, if you're sitting down to play NES Blaster Master than you better fucking play to win, mother fucker.
(The following points are my initial impressions after a couple hours with it)
THINGS I LIKE / IMPROVEMENTS OVER ORIGINAL:
• The biggest change (imo) is that there is now a reason to go into all of the dead-end dungeons. In the original, if you didn't know where the boss dungeon was, you would explore a dungeon and discover it was a dead end and so thus return probably empty handed or best-case scenario with an upgraded gun. This kinda hamstrings the replay-ability of the original NES game because once you knew where the boss dungeon was there was no point going in any of the other dungeons. In this game, every one (so far that I've found) of the non-boss dungeons has a unique "mini boss" at the end of it and a permanent fucking upgrade awaiting you after beating it. The upgrade could be a new feature for the tank, or it might be something as minor but helpful as...
• A minimap. They added a minimap. The game now tracks your progress in the area in a separate start menu, similar to something like a 2d Metroid game. If you find the map in the dungeon, the rest of the map will be filled out for you. It's a nice creature comfort and DEFINITELY HELPFUL to people who are completely new to the series and don't know, for example, how to get to Area 4.
• The tank starts out with less stuff. In the original game, your tank had 3 sub weapons: 3-missile, homing-missile, and lightning bolt. When you start the game, you only have the 3 missile. You gotta find the other original tank sub-weapons (and even brand-new ones) in the mini-dungeons. Speaking of sub-weapons...
• They revamped the subweapon system altogether. In the original, you had to farm drops from enemies to fill out your sub weapons and use them as consumable ammo. Now, there is an ammo-meter that all the subweapons use up. It's a nice way to streamline that system so you don't have to farm. I think it might slowly regenerate over time, too, but I may have been seeing things.
• They revamped the boy's gun upgrades. This is also great. Previously, you would collect gun power-ups and really only the last two or the first one was useful. The mid-upgrades made your bullets travel in ridiculous circles that weren't great at hitting their targets, and overall the gun upgrades were kinda boring. Now, each fucking upgrade point is a whole new weapon. I'm talking like, Metroid-type of whole new weapon. One of them just extends the range. One of them is a machine gun. One of them is a ball of lightning that zaps every enemy on the screen once impacted. It's really cool and (I think) there's even another layer where bosses have a weakness to one of the weapons--so it might not be best to just stick with the final upgrade. Really opens the game up to experimentation. The gun upgrades are also way more relevant because...
• The grenade now has limited ammo. Yeah that's right. You pick up grenade ammo drops. No more spamming grenades on the bosses to win. It's fucking genius. I'm now using the grenade in a more "just clear these enemies or do mega-damage" sort of way, which is probably closer to how it's intended. I'm also using grenades way more sparingly.
THINGS THAT I DON'T LIKE SO MUCH:
• True to the GBA era, this game has text-boxes and is a bit talky in general. The original had zero talking. So this is like, infinity-percent increase in talking and exposition. There doesn't seem to be a way to speed it up or skip it. It's charming in that GBA sort of way but will probably wear out its welcome soon.
• The music. It's only okay. It's not as good as the original. They tried to re-arrange the original music but eh... they probably should've just stayed closer to the original then the far-departure they went with.
• The level graphics and some of the monster designs are different. Not really an improvement over the original art direction.
• You can now truly aim the tank diagonally (good) but it's with the R button (bad). I'm playing on a new 3DS which feels a bit too small or cramped with my man hands. Your results/comfort-level may vary on this one. The Pro Controller patch for Switch is due March 16th, which is probably the most comfortable experience.
MORE THOUGHTS AFTER BEATING IT: (MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)
About that thing I said regarding no-filler, this is a HUGE improvement over the original. Take the bosses for example. The original game re-uses 2 bosses twice: Area 2 and Area 7 are palette swaps of the same scorpion boss, and the same is true of Area 4 and 6 respectively (both frogs). In this new game, no two bosses are alike. Some bosses do return from the original but they ones that do have been re-worked considerably. The god damn crab boss is back and they even build up some suspense before the final showdown with him. True to his heritage, I died to the crab boss moreso than any other (I think) but that was only like 5 times. My 7 year old self has died like fifty times to the original crab boss... and never beat him. So yeah this game is still dramatically easier than the original.
The new bosses... uh, wow. Without spoiling too much, let's just say the developers were thinking outside of the box on this one. They are bigger than any boss in the original game. More importantly, most of them are pretty fun.
There are some lesser bosses that are basically just horde matches with regular enemies, but those can be fun too. Any boss fight will result in grabbing a meaningful, permanent pickup.
Jeff Gerstmann also threw shade at the game's top-down inside dungeon's sequence. This comment I think shows his hand that he didn't play much of it. If he had played more, he would find that the developers also made meaningful changes to the interior environments. Sometimes, they aren't just move-and-shoot. For example, there might be a dungeon where you have to rush from safezone to safezone or get swept in a rush of water. There's another dungeon where you have to move carefully between moving platforms. There's even an Area where what you do inside the dungeon effects the outer-world with the tank(!), giving the game a crazy, classic Bionic Commando vibe.
The power-ups and upgrades are way better, too. Remember the lame upgrades in the original where WALL 1 lets you climb walls, but WALL 2 lets you climb walls and ceilings? Yeah in this one, both of those power-ups were combined into one powerup simply called WALL. In the original, some power-ups were pretty forgetful, like the Area 4 Key or even the Area 5 Dive power-up--once you're out of the relevant Area you're unlikely to use it again. In this game, your new skills serve you multiple times across the journey... although HOVER still wins the day for overall usefulness.
Speaking of which, HOVER is now even better than before. In my impressions, I mentioned that the tank's Sub Weapons all used the same pool of recharging ammo. I'm happy to report that the HOVER power-up also draws from this pool of "ammo" energy. This means no more farming 'H' ammo drops like you had to in the original if you failed the Area 1 cliff scale (for example). It's the creature-comforts like this that give me faith the developers looked at the original really hard and didn't hold sacred some of the clumsier things about it.
The exterior levels with the tank also got some meaningful changes, as well. You're not always just jumping and shooting. In Area 3 for example, you have to use the tank's wheels to drive treadmills that open or close gates and elevators. There are more examples but this sort of stuff is sprinkled throughout the exterior environments definitely breaks up the monotony in a way that the original game didn't.
There are still some things wrong with the game, to be sure. The exterior level designer for Area 5 is a grade-A asshole. I mentioned not being impressed with the music in my initial take, and I unfortunately can stand by that statement. The graphics are charming in a GBA sort of way but without prior context or nostalgia I might understand if they go unappreciated.
The ending is also nothing special... except I think there might be a secret ending I didn't get?
With all that said, if you've got a dusty 3DS or you already finished Zelda on your brand new Switch, maybe give Blaster Master a shot. You could do worse. Like get Bomberman instead, apparently
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