Blast Works: Sleeper Hit of the Year?
Posted by Chris Ward at 5:36 AM Jun 18, 2008
I've been spending a fair amount of time with a game that landed on my doorstep last week, which will run at the villagevoicemedia.com websites next week. It most reminds me of my days playing Art Alive! on the Sega Genesis.
What kid wouldn't want to drop $50 bucks on this shit? Just look at it! You can draw cats from scratch! You bet your ass I bought this game.
Art Alive! was the retarded brother of Mario Paint: imagine using Microsoft Paint to create things from scratch, except you ge to use a Genesis pad instead of a mouse. And, ok, maybe this game didn't have an exclamation point in the title, but that's sure how I remember it. If you were a kid whose creativity just edged out his impatience (and I was), you may have spent hours with that thing. That's what I'm hoping kids will enjoy about my favorite little game-that-could this week...
Developer: Majesco / ESRB Rating: E / Price: $39.99
“User generated content” usually means one of two things: you’re about to see an irritating Super Bowl commercial made by 16-year-olds, or another dramatic chipmunk.
Still, people love this stuff, so it’s no surprise video game developers are catering to the YouTube generation with “Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy”—a phenomenal little shooter-title where you can actually develop a game from scratch, and share your creations with others online. Want to create a laser-toting Cock-Rocket and shoot evil, robot dolphins out of the sky? Hey, if you build it, they will come—no matter how juvenile your ideas get.
Based on the Japanese freeware Tumiki Fighters (or, “building block fighters”), Blast Works appears simplistic at first glance thanks to its chunky, old school design, but plumbs amazing depths of creative freedom once you really dig in. It’s truly a game for Erector Set freaks and Lego Maniacs as much as it is for arcade gaming fans.
The Campaign and Arcade modes serve to show you the basics: you control a side-scrolling ship, attacking waves of enemies to reach the inevitable Big Boss. In a long-tradition of shoot ‘em ups, from Space Invaders to Ikuruga, there’s nothing new here. The unique twist is that every plane you shoot down suddenly sticks to your fighter like glue, adding its weapons to your hull. This quickly creates an enormous and ridiculous looking pile of flying, gun-toting junk. This is Katamari Damacy with lasers.
The meat of Blast Works, however, lies in its deceptively basic Editor Mode. From your fighter ship to bad guys, background elements to bullet patterns, everything is customizable in an easy-to-navigate, PhotoShop-esque program. You can even tweak pre-loaded elements, for those intimidated by a blank canvas.
Most of us don’t have the hardware or technical know-how to launch games for Nintendo’s WiiWare or Xbox Live’s XNA Creator’s Club, but Blast Works provides this opportunity on more modest, user-friendly scale.
This means creating precise elements takes getting used to, as you’re at the mercy of the WiiMote instead of a mouse. Also, artistic tools are limited to the fundamental shapes—triangles, circles, squares—manipulated and twisted to create, in the end, polygon heavy formations. The result may look more like Super Nintendo’s Starfox than a next-gen game, but the aesthetic actually works.
Majesco Games brilliantly bypasses Nintendo’s migraine-encouraging, 16-digit “friend code” system by offering its own Blast Works online community. Once logged in, you can upload your own handiwork and download surprisingly detailed creations from fellow users by simply adding them to a queue, turning on your Wii, and checking the in-game mailbox. Just this morning, I created a level using someone’s Ecto-1 Ghostbusters car, a flamethrowing Super Mario and a giant stapler. I don’t know whether this is closer to Salvador Dali or South Park’s “Imaginationland.” but either way it’s fun, and funny, as hell.
As the Blast Works community grows, you’ll realize you can’t beat a game that offers unlimited and—most importantly—totally free downloadable content that’s only hampered by your Wii’s memory space.
And if you want to blow up a top-hat wearing frog with your user-generated Ass-cannon, that’s your business. Isn’t new technology wonderful?
