| I
fell in love with Blaster before
I’d even played it.
I’d like to say that our eyes met across
a murky arcade, her screen flickering myriad colours coquettishly,
her speakers gurgling sweet nothings for my ears only, and just
maybe it could have been that way. Except I lived in Woking. Or
more to the point, I lived in England, and we should have counted
ourselves lucky that we even got a Sinistar to play on.
Woking – and what would
have happened
if Blaster had ever turned up there.
Not that it stopped Williams distributors from
teasing us with gatefold colour brochures for their latest classic
that was clearly not speeding its way to a chip shop near us soon.
And it was going to be a classic. It had to be. Eugene Jarvis
was the only game designer I knew by name and he was my Hendrix.
His previous game, Robotron, was the greatest thing I had ever
played. And besides that, this brochure I’d been sent for
Blaster looked fucking amazing.
In fact they’d sent me three brochures.
Between them they showed an upright one that looked a lot like
a Stargate with a respray, a cockpit that appeared to be Star
Wars’ bigger and uglier brother, a “virtually indestructible”
plastic portaloo model, and finally a conversion kit to transform
all those poor fag-burned old Defenders into shiny new Blasters
in the time it takes to wire a plug. I half expected to be tripping
over them on every street corner by the end of 1984.
”Dramatic depth sensation”…
What Fuseball used to read
before he could reach the top shelf.
What really happened is that time passed and
Blaster joined my UK-centric list of vapourware coin-ops alongside
Major Havoc and Quantum. Instead we got bloody Hunchback and Break
Thru for our sins.
Fifteen years late, we finally met. It was in
a cold, damp garage in Hampshire and there was barely room for
us to crowd round the peculiarly cylindrical Duramold cabinet,
sandwiched as it was between a Qix and a Gorf. The proud owner
plugged it in and the title screen slowly faded into view. It
felt strange to finally be standing at the controls of the game
my teenage mind had so feverishly imagined. One frenzied blast
of a game later and… I’m a little disappointed. Ten
games later and… I’m considering selling my children
for one.
”Phwooooar! I’m coming up!”
So much of Blaster shouldn’t work and,
in all honesty, some of it doesn’t. The hardware is obviously
being pushed a bit beyond its abilities. It’s a cheap dig
at a twenty-year-old game but it does look a bit shit. Or rather
it looks a bit messy, and that is more than a little disappointing
after the stylised colour-cycling economy of Defender and Robotron.
For the first game, I struggled to see past the flickering blocky
visuals. Then I played my way through the first Time Tunnel wave,
and the Jarvis magic started to shine through. All the things
I loved about the earlier games were still buried in there –
the subtle variations in wave pacing, the perfectly judged breather
of “toke time” between them, the compulsion to mash
the fire button as hard and as fast as you can even though it
already has built-in rapid fire. Then it really clicks and you
start playing for the perfect bonuses on the Saucerland waves,
risking all for a clean run through the arches on the Robot Grid
and thrusting insanely through a field of Planetoids in pursuit
of an elusive shield-restoring “E”. You’re too
zoned in, weaving through the teeming hordes of Masterminds and
Vampires to care or even notice what it looks like any more.
When I got home, I dug out my old brochures.
I could fill in the gaps, comprehend the pictures now, but the
air of enigma had been swept away, with all my teenage dreams
in tow…
FUSEBALL,
February 2004.
RODENT CASH RATING -
Utterly Priceless
"Aye, she's a mad one, but worth every ounce of insanity."
Comment
Here. (It's working again)
____________________________________________________________________
Things to 'Make' and 'Do'.
The only Blaster cockpit
in the wild (the other one’s at Eugene’s dad’s
place).
Time
Tunnel.
____________________________________________________________________ |
