From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Blaster Master - Fourth Time's the Charm
The story of Jason and Sophia the 3rd's four-phase mission to tunnel their way into my world.

Had you asked me during my late-teenage years to name the one game that I regretted not adding to my NES collection in my early NES days, when I was forming my strongest bond with the console, I would have immediately responded with "Blaster Master."

"That's definitely a game that would have had a profound influence on me," I would have told you.

Before then, though, things were much different. Blaster Master had no value to me. It had never been on my radar. In the nine years that I'd been playing NES games, I never once came across it. None of my friends or cousins ever owned it, and no one ever talked about it. It was virtually nonexistent in my circle.

For the longest time, I knew very little about Blaster Master. My knowledge of the game was limited to what I'd seen of it while I was speedily skimming through back issues of Nintendo Power and what I'd been told by the kids at school. "It's a lot like Metroid except that its main character is instead a highly mobile tank!" they explained.

Now, I loved Metroid, so I was very intrigued by the first part of that description. It spoke of a game that was right up my alley. "Blaster Master is just like Metroid?!" I thought. "Well, then, sign me up!"

The problem, though, was that I felt very different about the second part of that description--the bit about the "tank." It was a major turnoff. The moment I heard the word tank, my mind became filled with images of Moon Patrol and all of the other vehicle-based action games that I didn't care for. I just didn't like those types of games. I didn't like playing as vehicles; they didn't control as well as human-type characters, and the action they fashioned always felt slow and restrictive. So the idea of traveling around a Metroid-style open world in a heavy, physically limited armored vehicle just didn't sound that interesting to me.

So I concluded that Blaster Master probably wasn't a game that I would like and that the best thing I could do was continue to avoid it. "I'll pass on this one," I said to myself. (What also hurt Blaster Master's chances was that none of my friends owned it. At that point, I was still in my copycat-gamer phase, so had any of my friends owned the game, I would have been apt to want to own it, too! But because none of them owned it, I didn't want to own it, either!)

Now let's fast-forward a bit to the middle of 1995 and to a rather ordinary summer weekend in which my parents and I were heading over to Staten Island for our monthly hair-stylist appointments (well, it was only my mother and I who were getting haircuts; my father, who wore a hairpiece and was always proud to advertise that fact, was only there to provide us transportation).

We went to the trouble of traveling all of the way from Brooklyn to Staten Island (to the corner salon on New Dorp Lane) for our haircuts because it saved us money. The salon we went to, you see, was owned by the Catricolas--longtime family friends who would always give us generous discounts (and like all of the other people who treated us so kindly, they did so as a thank-you to my father, who was always helping them out financially). They were cool people.

The Catricolas (Mary and Johnny) closed their salon early on the weekends, so sometimes my parents and I would hang around after we'd gotten our haircuts (my father and I would head over to the pizza place that was located on the adjacent corner, and my mother would stay in the salon's waiting area and chat with Mary as she worked), wait for them to finish closing, and then follow them back to their house and spend the day with them. We'd hang out at their house and have some fun!

Well, really, it wasn't always that much fun for me because sometimes such a day would entail my having to endure boring activities like sitting around the kitchen table and spending hours listening to the women complain about current trends ("Kids these days!") and watching TV with my father. But enduring those activities was always worth it because of the nice reward that was waiting for me at the end: At around 5 or 6 p.m., Johnny would order and then go pick up some Chinese food! I don't know the name of the restaurant from which he ordered, but I fondly remember it because of how great its spare ribs were. I especially loved how its cooks would chop each spare rib into three or four mini-ribs and make them so much easier to eat!

And that's how it went on this particular day: I listened to the women complain, I watched TV with my father, and then I had some delicious Chinese food.

But something else happened on that day--something that helped this particular visit to stand out from all of the others. It was the memorable event that occurred before dinner, at a time when all of the adults were endlessly chatting about old times, business, and family problems: Sensing that I was bored, Mary turned to her daughter, Janie, and suggested that she take me up to her room and let me play around with her video-game console. I assumed that she was speaking of the SNES because that was the console to own at the time.

That didn't turn out to be the case. Rather, there was an old NES resting beneath Janie's TV, which I thought was weird.

Now don't misunderstand me: I didn't think that it was strange for someone to have an NES hooked up to his or her TV in 1995, no (I mean, all of my friends and I still had our NESes hooked up). I just found it unusual to see an old, technologically outdated console standing all by its lonesome instead of right next to a more-current console. "Doesn't everyone go out and buy the newest consoles as soon as they become available?" I thought to myself, naively.

Well, obviously Janie didn't. All she had was an NES.

So Janie dug through her closet and pulled out a box that was filled with NES games, and before she departed (she had to head out to work), she showed me which games were her favorites and even made a few recommendations. Specifically, she made a short stack of games that was comprised of those that she thought I might enjoy.

And wouldn't you know it: The cartridge that stood atop the stack belonged to Blaster Master.

In that moment, I wasn't convinced that I should give serious consideration to the idea of playing Blaster Master. I still suspected that I'd dislike the game's style of action. But the problem was that I didn't have many other choices; I'd already played the majority of the games in that box, and I'd done so to an exhausting degree. "So," I thought, "I have nothing to lose by trying out Blaster Master."

So as soon as I had the room all to myself, I popped Blaster Master into the NES, switched off the lights, and got ready to dig into an NES classic that I'd ignored for seven years.

And immediately I was enchanted by what I was seeing and hearing.

I absolutely loved Blaster Master's opening scene, in which an amazingly-well-rendered tank burst out from a highly detailed cave opening in spectacular fashion, and the music that accompanied it--the game's main theme, which was every bit as rousing and as brilliant as Metroid's heroic-sounding Brinstar theme. I was completely captivated by everything that was occurring in the opening moments.

When you're an enthusiast for a platform, you gain a sort of sixth sense that enables you to quickly determine whether or not one of its games is any good. You're able to get a feel for a game's quality by simply observing its intros and title animations and gauging their tonal aspects (their colors, their sound and animation quality, and the general vibe that their images and tunes emit).

So it didn't take me long to determine how I felt about Blaster Master. After playing it for only a few seconds, I was already a fan. I was impressed by everything I was seeing and hearing. In that moment, my great-game-o-meter's needle was pushing past ten.

I was utterly enchanted by the game's outstanding main theme, which was so powerfully evocative that I couldn't help but stop and listen to it for a minute and think about the story that it was telling, and its wondrous atmospheric elements--its otherworldly sound effects; its darkly tinted, mysterious environments; and, of course, its opening area's eye-catching, highly entrancing mountain backdrop, which was instantly burned into my memory.

So what my old classmates told me was true: Blaster Master was very similar to Metroid. It looked and sounded a lot like Metroid, and it, too, liked to evoke feelings and emotions and tell its stories via musical and environmental conveyance. And it even had enemies that looked just like Metroids! Fanged jellyfish-like creatures that were clearly inspired by Metroid's titular foes were swimming around in the opening area's water section! (It seemed to be a rule that every Metroid-inspired game had to have at least one enemy that resembled Metroids.)

But Blaster Master's world appeared to be much larger and more complex than Metroid's. Its stage areas, it seemed, were far more vast and expansive than any of those I'd explored in the latter. I felt overwhelmed by all of it.

The whole time, I didn't know what I was doing. I had no idea where I was supposed to go, I couldn't figure out how to properly control the tank, and I wasn't sure when it was appropriate to press the Select button and switch to the diminutive hero (which I didn't even know you could do until I unintentionally pressed the Select button instead of the Start button when I wanted to pause the game). And when I discovered that Blaster Master also had top-down sections, I got really intimidated because I saw the inclusion of such sections as a sign that this game's world was way larger and more complex than I originally thought (and my original estimation was that it was "overwhelmingly enormous").

(I would have been impressed by Blaster Master's having the audacity to include top-down sections had I never played Rygar, which also contained top-down sections and had executed its top-down gameplay at a much higher level. But still it was interesting to learn that another action-adventure game had incorporated top-down sections; before then, I believed that Rygar was the only 80s-era action-adventure game to ever try it.)

Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to make any meaningful progress. Dinner time had arrived, and the adults called up to me and told me to come downstairs. So I had no choice but to abandon Blaster Master for the day.

But even though I'd spent only a short amount time with Blaster Master, I'd seen enough to know that it was my kind of game. I was completely in love with it. Its wonderfully evocative music and amazingly atmospheric opening areas had made an indelible impression on me.

Over the next few days, Blaster Master was all that was on my mind. I continuously replayed its brilliant main theme in my head, and I constantly thought and wondered about its world and its incredibly alluring environments. I was so taken with what I'd seen of Blaster Master--so enamored with with its highly nostalgic, imagination-stirring music and visuals--that I knew that I needed to see more of it.

So I did what was only logical: I stayed away from Blaster Master for the next 19 years.

Honestly, I have no explanation for how or why that happened. My only guess is that I got so caught up in the hype surrounding the N64 and its imminent release that I simply forgot about Blaster Master. Then it never came to mind again.

I didn't see Blaster Master again until the early portion of 2014--right around the time I started up this blog. I returned to it because part of this mission entails addressing past mistakes and rediscovering and completing all of the NES classics that I sadly abandoned or overlooked in my younger days--games like Bionic Commando, The Goonies II, River City Ransom, and a few others that I plan to talk about on this blog.

"So how did your experience turn out?!" you ask with extreme excitement.

Well, I'd like to tell you that Blaster Master, after being forgotten for two decades, stormed back into my life and belatedly grabbed itself a spot on my all-time-favorite-NES-games list, but sadly I can't. That's not how it worked out. Rather, it disappointed me and left me feeling frustrated.

As I'd imagined, Blaster Master's world was vast and wonderfully expansive, its vehicle mechanics were creative and cool, and its every design aspect was dripping with ambition, but the problem was that none of those positive could get me to overlook the fact that the game was just far too difficult to be enjoyable. At times, it was completely it unfair; it would make absolutely unreasonable demands on the player.

My first real play-through of Blaster Master was a nightmare, and I didn't even know where to begin when I complained about it.

I had so many problems with Blaster Master.

For one, I hated how your gun's power-level would drop every time you took a hit. In this game, it was almost impossible to have success against the later bosses if you didn't (a) reach their lairs with a fully powered gun and then (b) proceed to maintain the gun's current power-level during the battles. The problem was that doing either was a painstaking task; it was incredibly difficult to make it through the top-down sections without taking damage from their highly aggressive enemies, and it was equally difficult to avoid getting hit during boss battles.

If your gun's power-level dropped more than two levels during any such battle, it was over; you'd be helpless. This repeatedly happened to me during the battle with the second frog boss. He'd keep finding ways to sneak in hits and render my gun useless. And each time he'd do it, my anger-level would rise. At one point, I almost had a conniption.

And those same bosses had way too much health. Even if you had a fully powered gun, it would still take minutes to beat any of them. So each battle was an overly stressful marathon. And what was worse was that bosses' hitboxes would sometimes go inactive for long periods, and in that time, it'd become impossible to inflict any damage!

Also, the stronger guns' bullets had weird, inexplicably wavy trajectories and would get absorbed by surrounding structures, and resultantly it was unnecessarily difficult to accurately shoot enemies with them. And it didn't help that the minor enemies' hitboxes were indecipherable and that enemies tended to appear within narrow passages, through which stronger guns' bullets couldn't travel (this is the same issue that drove me away from Fester's Quest).

I was also annoyed by the enemy placement and how enemies would shoot or walk into you as you were transitioning into the room. In such instances, there was no way to avoid taking damage. This was one Metroid element that Blaster Master should not have copied.

I had some serious issues with overworld navigation, too. I disliked many aspects of it. I didn't like that (a) your field of view was limited and Sophia's default position was set a few tiles over from the screen's center point, which created a higher probability of suddenly-appearing enemies attacking you before you had the chance to react; (b) the irritating worm creatures were so small that they could pass beneath Sophia's shots and proceed to incessantly hound you (and this problem was amplified because worms were the game's most recurring enemy); and (c) some rooms had so many enemies piled into them that the action would slow to a crawl, which only served to intensify my feelings of frustration.

And I especially disliked how the Wall 2 upgrade (the enhanced wall-riding ability) was programmed. Its increased clinginess caused the game's platforming aspect to become a complete nightmare. It would cause Sophia to wrap around platform ledges and drive directly into spike pits or lava pools; and other times, she'd quickly circle around to a platform's bottom portion and then inexplicably drop off! It was obnoxious.

And then, after all of that, Blaster Master went and committed the ultimate sin: It gave me only a limited number of continues! "What in the blue hell were its creators thinking when they made that decision?!" I thought to myself when I realized how completely inadequate three continues were. At that point, it became clear to me that beating this game legitimately was out of the question; I was going to have to use save-states. So that's what I did: I save-stated my way through Blaster Master. And I didn't feel bad about doing so because I just wanted the game to end. I wanted to be done with it.

And at the end, I decided that I didn't need Blaster Master in my life. I loved many aspects of it, yeah, but the fact was that I didn't enjoy playing it. It was just too damn difficult. It had too many troubling technical issues. And I just couldn't imagine a time when I'd ever want to attempt to play through it again.

So I left Blaster Master behind.

But the truth was that I never really moved on from Blaster Master. I wasn't able to because I had a certain disposition: I couldn't stand losing. I couldn't live with the idea that something had gotten the best of me. I needed to beat Blaster Master legitimately and thus earn the right to say that I was an "advanced player" (something I'd wanted to be ever since I was a kid).

The problem was that I didn't have the motivation or the courage to return to Blaster Master. I didn't want to struggle through a game that I didn't enjoy playing and engage in what was certain to be a long, painful grind. So I resisted my impulses and continued to stay away from the game.

Two years later, though, Blaster Master found its way back into my life.

It happened in the mid-late portion of 2016, when I discovered Twitch and subsequently became addicted to it. A couple of the streamers I followed (guys like Toad22484, Big Jon and NMEtv) happened to be Blaster Master speedrunners, so suddenly I was now seeing the game on a daily basis. And, well, I was happy about that because I enjoyed watching people play through it. Blaster Master was one of those games that was fun to look at and listen to. It had a rich nostalgic energy to it--one that I was always eager to drink in.

For weeks and months, I watched streamers play through Blaster Master, and in that time, I gained a much deeper understanding of the game and its mechanics. And consequently I found the inspiration to return to the game and beat it legitimately. "I understand this game now," I thought, "and I have the tools to win!"

The only thing I needed was convenient access to the game.

Well, luckily for me, Blaster Master happened to be available for my main platform: the 3DS (it was a "Virtual Console" title). So without hesitation, I loaded up the eShop and purchased myself a copy of the game.

It was time to finally beat this game!

Unfortunately, though, the experience didn't play out like I expected it to.

Once again, I had a really rough time with Blaster Master. The play-through went horribly. It was a total repeat of my previous play-through attempt. I ran into all of the same problems, and none of the knowledge I'd gained could help me to overcome the worst of them--specifically the later boss battles, which were as insurmountable as ever (I had no strategies for defeating these bosses because I'd never seen speedrunners engage them in a legitimate way; said runners always used the pause glitch to beat them).

And just like before, I got annoyed and frustrated, and eventually I grew so tired of the game's nonsense that I resorted to save-stating my way through it; and I did so just for the sake of getting through it and being done with it.

"I've had enough of this game," I said. "It's time for me to forget about it and move on."

Blaster Master, I'd determined, was a broken, unfairly difficult game, and I felt as though I had nothing to gain from continuing to subject myself to it. "There are plenty of other, better ways for me to prove that I'm an 'advanced player,'" I thought to myself.

But fate had other plans for Blaster Master and I. It had no intention of letting us part. And immediately it went to work and began creating the conditions for yet another reunion.

So over the next few years, two important things happened. The first was the release of Blaster Master Zero--a Blaster Master remake to which I immediately gravitated because (a) I was eager to play a version of Blaster Master that retained the original's best elements and fixed the ones that were broken and thus offered a fully realized Blaster Master experience; and (b) I desired to do something that I sadly failed to do in my earlier years: play a Blaster Master game when it was brand new and experience it a time when it was making its most relevant contributions.

And Blaster Master Zero was pretty great. I enjoyed every minute I spent with it (I even wrote about the experience!). I had a lot of fun playing and replaying it. And during that time, I gained a new appreciation for the Blaster Master series. I wanted to see more of it. And in particular, I felt inspired to go back and finally beat the original Blaster Master legitimately, which, I believed, was something that I was going to need to do if I wanted to be a true series fan.

The second occurrence was my evolution as a player. During those intervening years, I had a series of Matrix moments and suddenly became the "advanced player" that I always longed to be. I was now able to beat the hardest games in existence and sometimes dominate them.

And the combination of those two factors provided me the impetus I needed to once again return to the original Blaster Master and attempt to beat it legitimately.

So when Blaster Master became available for the Nintendo Switch Online service in early 2019, I promptly loaded it up and made an earnest effort to beat it. And I was able to do it. I was able to finally beat Blaster Master legitimately! And during that time, I became a big fan of the game. I came to see it in a new light. I realized that, as usual, many of the struggles I'd had in the past were the result of me succumbing to my own idiocy. The game had some troublesome mechanical issues, sure, but it wasn't any of them that were causing me to struggle. It was me! It was my failure to do simple things like exit Sophia and shoot the pesky worms before they had the chance to swarm me, head into the final area with some hover power, and use the game's strafe function during boss fights.

This time around, I made sure to do all of the simple things, and I took the time to develop some very effective strategies. I played tactically. I sought out the best places for farming gun upgrades. I learned how to maneuver around bosses and manipulate their movements. And consequently I achieved victory and discovered that Blaster Master was actually a great game. I was now ready to say that Blaster Master was one of my "NES favorites."

And I've been returning to Blaster Master regularly ever since then. I've been having a ton of fun playing through it and trying to master its gameplay. I've already reached a point in which I can beat the game in a single life, but still I want to improve further; I want to be able to beat the game faster and more skillfully. And in my future play-throughs, I'm going to focus on doing just that.

At the same time, I'm going to continue to take every opportunity to enjoy and savor Blaster Master's other aspects--its wonderfully evocative visuals, music and atmospheric elements, all of which I've loved since the very beginning. They're a huge reason why I'm so drawn to the game.

I'm particularly nostalgic for the game's music, which is evocative in the most wondrous way. It has a special power: It's able to instantly transport you back to the past and remind you of the days when everything in life was simple and there was nothing better than hanging out with your friends on a summer night and playing your favorite NES games. Each of the game's tunes has this capability (especially Area 5's powerful aquatic theme, which never fails to bring to mind the most vivid of childhood images and evoke the most nostalgic of memories).

Blaster Master's is one of the most powerfully evocative NES soundtracks in existence. Very few come close to its level.

And that's the story of how Blaster Master won me over and found a place in my life. Through sheer persistence, it succeeded in its mission to tunnel its way into my world and become an important part of it.

Blaster Master is a great game. I love it. It has its problems, sure. It's glitchy and a little unpolished: Enemies can hit you while you're in a transition state, and sometimes they suddenly spawn in on already-visible tiles (which is an issue that you can correct by pausing the game and consequently reorienting the camera). Bosses' hitboxes randomly go inactive. And Wall 2's clinginess can cause you unintentionally drive into spike and lava pits.

But these issues are forgivable because they're clearly the byproduct of ambitious design. They're the consequence of a development team's attempt to push early NES technology to its absolute limits. They're annoying but not game-breaking. They cause you some headaches, yeah, but they don't inhibit you from thoroughly enjoying your experience. And they don't prevent Blaster Master from achieving the status of NES classic.

It sucks that I missed out on playing and experiencing Blaster Master back in the late 80s. I would have loved to have access to it back then, at a time when I was becoming a huge fan of action-adventure games. I would have greatly enjoyed playing through it and exploring it with friends. Unfortunately, though, I missed it. I was late to the party.

But you know what? That's fine because, in truth, it's never too late to discover the classics. They never lose their relevance. Blaster Master, like so many others, has shown me that. It has, as it surely would have back in the late 80s, had a profound impact on me. It has meaningfully shaped my world.

I'm happy to have it in my life.

So to Jason and Sophia the 3rd, all I can say is, "Outstanding job!" Your determined mission, which began long ago in that little bedroom in Staten Island, was ultimately a great success.