Blaster Master Boy is 100% overhead maze game, since that’s what Bomber King is. Looking at the image below, it’s really not hard to imagine how they managed to sell this as a Blaster Master game.Īs you may know, Blaster Master was part 2D platformer and part overhead action maze game. Why they didn’t try and develop an actual sequel in-house is a complete mystery to me, but regardless of their intent, Blaster Master Boy is what we got. It’s not like Bomberman wasn’t a recognizable brand in the US, but my guess is Sunsoft wanted to try and keep the Blaster Master name alive and this was a relatively cheap way to do that. The original Bomber King was released in the US as a game called Robo Warrior, and Robo Warrior was a spinoff of Bomberman, so as you can see, the lineage here is pretty darn weird. I say “effectively” because there wasn’t much reskinning at all.
It didn’t start life as a Blaster Master game, but it was released in the US and Europe as such, and that makes it a real Blaster Master game where it counts.īut to that point, Blaster Master Boy is effectively a reskinned port of a game called Bomber King: Scenario 2. So when someone tells you Blaster Master Boy isn’t really a Blaster Master game, know that they’re only half-right. Those characters and characteristics are woven into the fabric of the entire franchise to this day, so no matter its origins, Super Mario Bros. Sure, it didn’t start life as a Mario game, but later it was, in fact, released as a Mario game. 2 isn’t really a Mario game, but that’s not a very sensible way of looking at things. People love to say that Super Mario Bros. That game started life as a Famicom game called Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic. This is a similar case to the classic Super Mario Bros 2 story. But the first sequel to Blaster Master actually hit the Game Boy, and it was particularly strange because it was never intended to be a Blaster Master game at all. There was a sequel/reboot that was exclusively on WiiWare and required play with the Wii Remote held sideways. There was a Sega Genesis game that featured some of the worst overhead vehicle controls of all time. There have actually been a bunch of Blaster Master games over the years, but none of them have managed to catch on in any meaningful sort of way until 2017’s reboot Blaster Master Zero. Unlike Castlevania or Mega Man though, Blaster Master sequels did not have an easy to follow trajectory. Blaster Master is one of my all time favorite games on any platform. Can you get past the blast?ĭepending on who you ask, Blaster Master on NES is either a classic worthy of mention in the same breath as the likes of Mega Man or Castlevania, or it’s that weird NES game that’s way too hard to ever get anywhere in. In many cases, the games we loved on NES got weird yet often very influential sequels on the Game Boy. As these titles continued to evolve over the generations, there was a common thread amongst them that seems to be often overlooked. Gaming may not have started with the NES, but many of gaming’s most prominent franchises and concepts did.