Back in the day, I managed to beat the overwhelming majority of the video games I played, but there were a few titles that remained above my humble gaming skills, so playing for completion was a hopeless effort (like smashing your head against a wall).  Blaster Master was one of those games.  I loved playing Blaster Master, but the ending always seemed unattainable, like the summit of the infamous K2 mountain in winter.  Now, just over twenty-five years later, and I feel ready to climb that mountain again.  Being older and generally less skilled at gaming than in my youth, do I have a chance to finally beat this notoriously difficult game?


 
I've had my eye on picking up the first Blaster Master title for a while now, and when I started on my most recent retro jag, I thought what better time to get it than now. And since I've really been putting my junky (but humble) 3DS to work a lot lately, why not pick up the game on the 3DS Virtual Console?  Then I would have the extra added bonus of being able to play it on the go, as well as taking advantage of the save state system that all 3DS VC games have in common.  I might actually have a chance at finishing it, even with my poor platforming skills.

Within the first few moments of playing the game, I felt nostalgia give me a big ol' slap in the gob.  It felt strange to play this game after so many years, and on such a smaller screen than the 16" family television of my youth.  I instantly vowed to get a New 3DS XL model, even if my own collection had to suffer a tiny bit (larger screen and less hand cramps?  Yes please!).  And for the first time in decades, I marveled at the scale of Blaster Master.  This is what I fell in love with, not only the massive areas, but how the driver (Jason), could traverse the game world outside of the tank, and also on his own scale in sub-levels, different from that of the tank (SOPHIA the 3rd).  The movement and weight of the game felt awesome, and I marveled at just how much of the game I seemed to remember, from enemy locations to the "Extended Grenade" trick.

After the first hour of playing, reality sank in: This game is hard.  Not horribly blisteringly hard, like we occasionally find in modern platformers, but that special kind of hard found in many early NES games, when game design on the console was often more about revolution than simple evolution, but with that little edge of jank that we find in so many early NES/Famicom games.  You get an eight-bar energy meter, three lives (shared between SOPHIA and Jason), and five continues total.  In the sub-levels (where you control Jason through an overhead view) you also get a "Gun" meter that can be powered up eight times, but each time you are hit you lose one power up bar.  Seems kind of normal for a 1988 console game, but Blaster Master's has a Metroidvania level layout and game structure, and once you realize this, you'll manage each life bar with a teensy bit more efficiency.  Moving around a hostile environment with a depleted energy bar is a recipe for disaster, especially once you pass the mid-point of the game.  But I get ahead of myself.


Despite the obstacles (high difficulty competing against old memory), I managed to get past the first three areas with nary a drop of sweat.  See, there is a gameplay pattern to Blaster Master, and realizing this really helped me out.  It goes something like this:

1) Explore area
2) Within a sub-level, power-up "Gun" meter for Jason (i.e., grind)
3) Find and defeat boss for SOPHIA upgrade
4) Locate entrance to new area
5) Use SOPHIA upgrade to access new area

And thus Blaster Master continued, almost in a mechanical fashion, but something seemed off.  I clearly remember struggling through this game, so I had to ponder for a bit.  Is the 3DS VC version somehow compromised and easier?  Perhaps I'm not quite as poor a gamer as I thought.  Area four isn't too much of a change, though the sub-levels got so difficult that it put the kibosh on any ideas I had for a quick finish.  The area map wasn't too bad, but the sub-levels are so devoid of weapon upgrades whilst also filled with difficult enemies that survival becomes difficult.  The boss sub-level of area four wasn't too much trouble, which was a blessing, though I did have to break out the paper and pencil to map.

The last four stages are where Blaster Master truly earns its rep as one of the hardest NES games.  Area five was large and difficult, but the boss was a bit of a weenie. Area six was short and linear, but the boss drained two and a half of my continues and caused a horrible realization:  I dreaded having to restart Blaster Master from the beginning.  I remember seeing the "Game Over" screen so many times as a kid, I knew I never wanted to see it again.  Through some fluke, I managed to use the old "Extended Grenade" trick I learned from Nintendo Power back in the day, and thus ended the suffering that was the area six boss.  Area seven was the first point where I had to access a walkthrough...just to find the area entrance itself!  Seriously, it is such a part of the background that I never noticed it, and can only imagine the amount of searching some poor kids had to do to find it pre-Internet.  This makes me think about the hidden location of Death Mountain from the original Legend of Zelda and what I used to call, "playground intelligence," meaning that since everyone on the playground was playing Zelda, everyone on the playground knew where to find Death Mountain.  Not so for Blaster Master, or at least not in my memory. 

As for the seventh and eighth area, I would call it a mix of pain, suffering, and frustration.  Seven is basically like area six (short level, painful boss).  But eight...  Area eight of Blaster Master made me want to give up.  This is where I wiped.  Yep, total loss of lives and continues and back to square one; beginning of the game.  And even when I got back to area eight (after two hours of gaming), it was still obscenely difficult to get to the third screen, much less past it.  This screen is a spikey hell, and was the only part of the game in which I became enraged.  And to make make matters worse, some of the rooms are so big you will need to take a leap of faith, which will usually drop you in a deep spike pit that will kill you.

Lastly, I'd like to bring up a few things about my console of choice for this playthrough, that being the 3DS Virtual Console.  After spending about four to five hours playing Blaster Master (a rough estimate), I have to say I enjoyed it on the 3DS more than I thought I would, despite the smaller d-pad, screen size, and dark allure of the Restore Point feature.  The 3DS also has a very nice "Notes" function that you can access without actually closing the game you are playing, but the lack of a shape creator and more than two color pens means it is not appropriate for map creation (at least for me).  Seriously, the chicken-scratch maps I attempted to create were too embarrassing to share.  I think I'll just stick to good old fashioned graph paper.


Oh, and the "Extended Grenade" trick I talked about.  I read about the trick about a year before I got the game (I think), but it involves throwing a grenade at a boss and hitting pause just as it causes damage.  If you did it right, the boss will continue to receive damage while in the pause screen, and if you wait a few minutes and un-pause, the boss will die!  It doesn't work on all bosses, but I can verify that it does so on the areas' six and seven bosses.  However, this cheat is very difficult to pull off on the original 3DS, due to the placement of the "Start" button.  As odd as it sounds, this trick has stuck with me just as well as the Konami code.  I've even remembered the goofy name that the Nintendo Power writers gave to the code in the "Classified Information" section.

I must reiterate once again: Man does it feel good to have finally finished Blaster Master after more than twenty-five years!  And to think that I spent so long building it up to be this great impossible mountain of gameplay difficulty.  It kind of makes me wonder just how many other games from my youth that I might finally conquer...

Thanks for reading!

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