So, I found m'self with about 1100 wii points to use on whatever on my Wii ... I thought I'd go look at the recent additions to WiiWare ... I saw something odd ... Blaster Master. Now, it wasn't the NES version (I already downloaded that), this was something new. Being 1000 points (ouch) I went ahead and got it.
I haven't beaten it yet, but it has a few things with it that are .... annoying. Firstly, only certain caves have a save point in them, and from what I've seen thus far, the boss caves don't all have a save for certain. So if you go against a boss, and the save point wasn't in his cave, you have to remember how to get back to the boss cave and traverse it again.
Next annoying bit is that while it's nice to know that "hey, this is how big your life bar COULD be if you had all the upgrades", I don't think I need to know that when I'm starting off, I have only 1/20'th of the total health available in the game. How would I have fixed that? Well, I would have made it so the game checks where you're at in comparison to the main tank's upgrades, and only shows you the max upgraded to current max HP/energy if there is a difference and there's something you can get with your current gear set. For example, if I've got this hookshot thing, and I'm traversing around in areas I've been before trying this thing out to see where I can get to, if there's an upgrade that can be now reached, I'd know I could reach it now, rather than having to wait.
Another annoying thing: Swimming/dive equipment for tank. If you've played the old NES version, you'll know that you could jump and start swimming or using the dive equipment like right when you leave the ground. Here, no.. you have to wait until you are at the peek of your jump before you can start swimming. The swimming speed is uber fast as you would expect compared to trying to straight jump through water.
There are some interesting aspects of the game that, while some area annoying, are understandable. I've not gotten the wall climbing gear yet, but I expect it to drain the energy from my tank real fast when using it. See, every thing you do with your tank drains energy. Shoot a cannon shot? yep, uses energy. Use the HOVER (not fly, but hover, and gradually loose height still anyway), oh yea, that uses energy. Jumping ... no, that doesn't require energy .. wait what? ... I understand that it's to keep people from just spamming the fire button like mad constantly.
The storyline states that some virus was spread around the world or something like that wherein all the animals were transmuted to some kind of beasts and they're attacking constantly, yet it also states that humans that contract the virus don't mutate, they just ... go catatonic ... yep, the world's population falls asleep to this virus. Now, when you get out of your tank, you slowly start loosing health ... I suppose from the virus in the air? yet, when you walk into a cave that has no door, you don't loose health anymore. Selective virus doesn't like dark places! The enemies in the caves are ... sometimes robotic ... so, the virus affects robots as well? Well, that'd explain the turrets that are the worst thing in the game I've met so far.
See, these turrets, they hang from some places, they fire a constant stream of firepower fairly fast, but the turret always fires directly at you. So now you have this stream of bullets heading towards you all the time while you're in range. The blind spot for these things is actually above the horizontal line for them. So as long as you're above eye level with them, you're good to not get shot at. Major problem with some of them is they're placed in areas where you cannot fire upon them without them firing upon you as well... they'll get in 5-6 shots hitting you before you can hit them twice. Let's just say there's one particular climbing cave where about every jump you have to jump through a curtain of bullets to get to the next level. Forget trying to kill them, you'll loose more health than just running by them. Of course this presents a big problem as well, with that jumping hallway thing, if you get to the middle and end up low on health, you can't go down, and you can't go up ... you're doomed to die, and start over from your last save point (which may actually be BEFORE that last boss you fought that took you 20 tries to beat, and 10 minutes each try).
Yea, saving is a biznitch, and you only have one life ... so you best always find a save point cave before you go do anything new. Granted the save point is just inside the cave entrance, less than half of the caves have save points. You can look at the map and see where all the caves are for each area, also which ones have save points in them. But the map itself is not that great. It doesn't point out where you are in the area you're in (but it will flash that area that you're in (as if centering the map on that position wasn't enough), when zoomed in it also doesn't give you any details of that area, say like, where some cliffs are, or the fact that while this big area has a save point cave at the top, it doesn't tell you the only way to access that cave is to go through two separate areas and come in through a second or third entrance to the area to get to it. Granted, this is something like the mapping system in Super Metroid, but not completely. When you enter an area the whole thing glows stating you visited it. It doesn't show where for example, I walked into this one room that on the map was very tall, but I couldn't climb anywhere in it as I need the wall-walking attachment. So now I don't have a way to know where that room was without me just wandering to the edges of everywhere I've been.
::sigh:: Right, so, I recently did just get the dive equipment for my tank. While useful, it does drain energy while it's running, oh, and you have to hold jump to keep it driving. Getting to it was crazy as well. No, it wasn't like the whole stage in the NES version where the entire stage was under water, heck no...but there was a place where I had to be on a ledge, jump off to the left, fire the grappling hook diagonally to the left, then hover to the left. What's so hard about that? Well, where you jump from you can see the roof you have to grapple onto but you can't seem to reach it, even though that roof doesn't drop in height at all to the left, you still have to jump to the left, fire the grapple and then immediately start trying to hover.
See, there's a little thing with this tank where it seems to have a single core processor or something... or only a single I/O line. If you hold jump you'll jump to the height that the tank can, then it will change to the hover thing. Simple enough, right? Well, the moment you do anything else it forgets you were holding the jump button to keep hovering. So, while hovering down, if you hit the grapple and manage to hit and get pulled towards whatever you grappled, it forgets that you're holding jump to hover. So you immediately start falling. Well, after you grapple something you have to immediately feather the jump button until your grapple is done so that you can start floating right when you hit the roof/wall that you grappled against. This counts for anything you do, hover + firing? nope, forgets how to hover.
Now, the walking in caves bit, is a bit awkward. You are given the choice of 3 weapons to use, and like the tank, you swap between weapons with the A button on the controller (oh yes, it's only the wii-mote you use, no plugged in accessory, and hold the controller like the classic NES). The first weapon is a straight shooting, mid powerful weapon that as you upgrade it, will get faster shooting, and sometimes more bullets. The next one in line is the low power homing shots, at it's weakest, this thing is about as crappy as closing your eyes and standing in the middle of a paintball field trying to shoot things you hear moving around. The last one is a high powered rocket of sorts, this is a great weapon except for two things, one, very very slow fire time, second, it's short range.
Each of these weapons, when fully powered up, are pretty nice. The straight shot thing gets to be like a chain gun with about 5 rows of shots firing off in a random pattern so you would have a steady stream of fire being laid down in front of you. The homing shot thing becomes ... well, a mass shotgun effect of the chain gun speed of shots. The initial shots leaving the barrel are none too pretty, as they fly out in a wide spray before they start trying to home (if at all for some shots). The rocket, well, it's impact point gets a little bigger, and the explosion stays around for a short time longer. Being able to strafe now is a great thing with each of these weapons so you can hit the bosses easier. but strafing is by holding the Z button under the left hand, and is kind of far away for a classic holding of the controller as if it were a NES controller. So you have to bury your hand underneath the controller to get to the button, and it doesn't feel too comfy.
The bosses are ... a pain. I've only faced 4 I think so far... A crab, a caterpillar type thing, a fire spitting crab, and a bat-like thing. The next boss I have to face is a .... fire spitting caterpillar! ... The bosses are all quite large, and move around constantly so you can't reliably use the rocket / grenade launcher easily at all. I say now that it's more like a grenade launcher, as like the first boss, the crab. It has big claws that block shots from reaching it's face which is the vulnerable place on it, but you can fire the launcher thing and it will only impact at the point where you fired upon. You see the rocket fire off and travel through the enemy, but only hits where you aimed at. So far the easiest boss I've fought has been the bat thing... simple crazy eight formation of walking to keep it's shots from hitting you, and constantly hold fire on the level 5 homing shot thing and it'll eventually go down... granted it'll take a while to do, but you can basically keep from getting hit.
Your life bar may grow but that doesn't seem to phase things... I think on the first boss I could take 3-4 hits before I died. I've gotten many more health upgrades, and almost have gotten to the half-way point on the bar, yet the mobs still seem to take me out in 3-5 hits ... even those starting ones.
So, what's good about this game? It seems like not much seeing as I've complained about most every point of the game thus far... Well, it's good because it's hard ... it may be annoying at times with it's quirky-ness but it's hard, almost like the original, but a bit harder. It keeps with the original's idea of having to back-track through previous areas to get to higher leveled areas. It keeps with the platform jumping bit and cave-dwelling bits. Although admittedly sometimes, I think the tank should be able to shoot the doorway right off the cave, as when you enter most of the caves, the path is so large that the tank could easily fit in ... I'm not talking like "oh there's enough room for that sprite to get in here" ...I'm talking scale wise, the guy outside standing next to the tank is about as tall as the tank is, and one or two strides would put you from one end to the other on the tank .... I'd prefer to drive through these caves and just pwn up the boss with the tank.
The music is retro at points as well, using re-dubbed and perhaps slightly updated tunes of the original sound track (smoother music transitions). This is however overshadowed by the bullet shots. The original boss music is played, but you are constantly firing your weapon, and it is about twice as loud as the music is. I'll have to look and see if there is an options for it to turn down the sound effects or up the music...while I'm in there I suppose I can look to see if it has an option to go widescreen ... default it isn't and therefore I feel kind of blind as the limited width of the play area compared to my TV's width.
Overall: Fun game, annoying at times, but what classic game didn't have us frustrated to the point of wanting to throw the controller at the console or TV or another solid object? ... Pong? ... yea yea ... anyway. Back I go to try to get to this 5th boss, which by the video I've seen on youtube about it, doesn't seem that hard, just annoying to navigate the battlefield and fire on the boss.
