#39: Blaster Master

Released In: 1988
Developer: Sunsoft
Publisher: Sunsoft

For the villain from the Kidd Video cartoon series, see Master Blaster (disambiguation)

      When Jason Frudnick's pet frog Fred is exposed to a radioactive chest in his front yard, he grows to an enormous size and jumps down a giant hole. Not being particularly smart, Jason follows Fred down the hole. When he hits the bottom, Jason finds himself in a mysterious underworld filled with dangerous enemies. He also finds the SOPHIA tank and a powersuit. Determined to find his pet frog, Jason blasts off into the underworld on a quest that will eventually see him square off against the evil Plutonium Boss. To advance through the game, Jason will have to explore various caverns that are too small for SOPHIA and retrieve upgrade components for his super tank that are guarded by deadly Underbosses, including his beloved Fred.

Syd Lexia: Even if you never played Blaster Master, you may recognize it as one the games featured on those fucking Nintendo Power ads that came packaged with every licensed Nintendo game. The game had a famous cheat (i.e. glitch) that allowed you beat the bosses of levels 2, 4, 6, and 7 without much effort. All you had to do was detonate a bomb directly on the enemy and then pause the game for a minute or so. BAM! Instant victory.

I like this game a lot, but level navigation can be somewhat frustrating. It's not always clear where you're supposed to go and in some of the areas every fucking hallway starts to look the same.

greeneyedzeke: Blaster Master is one of the more perplexing games I've played. Its undiluted awesomeness is almost undermined by the game's backstory, which was apparently written by the direct predecessors of such luminaries as Uwe Boll and Paul W.S. Anderson, may they both rot in Hell.

So you're this kid, right? And you chase your gigantic mutant frog down a magical evil hole where you're forced to fight a horde of mutant bad guys who live under the Earth's crust.

Right.

So yeah, forget the story (or not... it actually is kind of cool in a "what the fuck?" sort of way) and focus instead on the gameplay. You spend the whole game inside SOPHIA, this armored death buggy whose ass-kickingness increases exponentially the further along your progress. I mean, this thing shoots missles, floats, swims, and even climbs walls.

This brings up an observation, which I like to call Reason #1138 Why Halo is the Most Overrated Franchise Ever. Namely, you l33t haXx0rz with the modded XBoxes who think that the Warthog is the greatest thing ever are kneeling at the wrong altar. SOPHIA was around way before your precious Master Chief was speeding around like a cybernetic Kermit the Frog in a glorified go-kart. And we didn't have the luxury of dual analog back then either. We saved the earth one mutant at a time and it was D-Pad all the way.

BACK                              NEXT