Hello and welcome to another Nostalgia World review. Originally, I was going to do Goldeneye this week, but due to the fact that I also acquired a copy of Halo Reach this week, my brain essentially went “No, NO MORE FPS GAMES FOR A WHILE!” so in following with that, I completed Reach on Legendary with two mates yesterday, all the while ignoring my brains pleas to not punish it any more. So I decided instead to stay up all night playing another N64 game, in place of Goldeneye, a game that I still have a massive soft spot for in my heart. A game that actually requires skill to play it decently and complete it.
I’m talking about Blast Corps, in case anyone managed to miss the massive header up there and the pic too.
Blast Corps is a 1997 Rare game for the N64, and is arguably one of the more original concepts for a game. The story is absolutely insane and over the top, with two nuclear missiles being transported to a demolition site, when they start leaking, forcing the trucks onboard computer to divert course and take the most direct route to the site, even if that is through villages and cities and suchlike, all the while avoiding hitting anything because the nukes will explode if they so much as are nudged gently. It’s up to the titular Blast Corps to destroy EVERYTHING in the way, whether it’s an abandoned factory, or somebody’s home. Especially if it’s someone’s home. That’s the first part of the storyline, essentially.
The insanity doesn’t stop there, as you get a selection of vehicles with which to destroy stuff, from the basic bulldozer, a rocket-propelled buggy, a dump truck, to a rocket-firing bike that I’m pretty sure was borrowed wholesale from Command and Conquer, to not one, not two, but three robot suits, two of which are huge, mech-sized beasts that fling themselves around the landscape or fly around it in jetpacks. I believe that sanity was abandoned fairly early on in making this game, but that just makes it even more awesome.
The J-Bomb, standing proud and tall
The levels start off easy, but get progressively harder as you proceed through the game. Most of the vehicles are easy to use to destroy stuff, with the exception of the dump truck, also known as Backlash. Backlash is an absolute SOB to use, requiring you to powerslide the rear-end of it into buildings to smash them up effectively. You can also attempt to do crazy doughnuts mixed with powersliding, so you end up practically doing a barrel-roll through the scenery to smash it up. When I first played this game, 13 years ago, I couldn’t get the hang of it, and so, used to get my elder brother to do the Backlash bits for me. Even now, 13 years on, I still struggle at times to smash through everything and avoid smashing the nukes whilst powersliding everything.
That’s the basic premise of the story anyway. There are other levels, like time-attack races, and levels where you have to destroy specific objects, or destroy stuff in a specific way, like with the Ballista rocket-bike being stuck on a ledge and with limited ammo to blow stuff up. It does take skill to do a lot of it, especially as the camera angles aren’t helpful at times. You can switch between an overhead camera view that follows the nuke carrier around, with an arrow as to which direction it is going in, and depending on the colour of the arrow, how much danger it is in of crashing into something, or you can have a 3rd person perspective that at times, feels a bit clunky, and isn’t helpful if you’re trying to judge a decent angle with which to fire the Ballista’s rockets from. Other than that, the camera work is fairly solid, which does help make the game good.
There is plenty of other stuff to do, like “rescuing” civilians (i.e. blowing their houses up and letting them run free), or collecting all of the Radiation Dispersal Units in each level (RDUs), although quite why you really need to get all of the RDUs in a level when you’ve blown everything up isn’t really explained. If you also collect all of the six scientists in the early levels, then you get access to the bonus stages as it were, where you have to go to different planets to destroy debris on them. The gravity is altered on these, making the Backlash a lot easier to use as you can just fling yourself off a ramp and land in the middle of buildings, utterly obliterating them with ease.
Dump trucks? On my moon?!
The music is pretty good, with each level starting off fairly relaxed, but as soon as the nuke carrier is in imminent danger, the music starts to become wild and panicky, alerting the player that they’re in danger of becoming a part of a gigantic red explosion. For the time-trial levels, such as racing or destroying, the music is either perky and upbeat or chilled out, providing good ambience and setting the scene decently.
Replayability is a fairly high factor for me, and Blast Corps does provide it, in the form of medals. You get either bronze, silver or gold in the start, for both time-trial and main storyline missions. Quite why they’d award you with a bronze medal for completing a level, I don’t know. “Hey, you saved us all from nuclear extinction, but you didn’t do it as fast as we’d have liked you to. Have a bronze medal,” is presumably the conversation you have afterwards. Once you’ve got golds on all the main levels, you can start getting platinum medals. You also rank up as you get medals, which provides a nice touch as you become a god of destruction along the way.
Unfortunately, the game is singleplayer only. If there was a co-operative mode, that’d make it an even better game, albeit a really easy game at times. Just think of all the carnage you and a friend could cause together, all in the name of protecting everyone. Brilliant. I’m signing off now, and leaving you with news that next weeks review will be Goldeneye. It’ll also feature my views on the upcoming remake as well.
