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Blaster
The human race narrowly escapes the conquering of Earth
by the merciless Robotrons. The last
surviving remnants of mankind scatter as they leave the planet, heading for a
distant world known as Paradise. Your job? Make sure they get there - by
blasting away at anything and everything along the perilous journey.
(Williams Electronics, 1983)
In the continuation of the Defender
/Stargate/Robotron
story cycle, Blaster builds nicely on the nearly- movie-worthy saga by
picking up from the inevitable conclusion of Robotron (i.e., the
protagonist's death). Now humanity is on the run, and there are all kinds of
nasty creatures waiting to finish the human race off, including the Masterminds,
which look a lot like Robotron's Brains, only more hideous (imagine a
large brain wearing a Darth Vader faceplate,
and you'll get the idea.)
At the time of its release, Blaster was a revelation, the first 3-D,
first-person space shooter game, though its graphics look fairly silly in
comparison to today's games along the same lines. But when one takes into
account the difficulties of pulling such a project off in 1983, it becomes an
impressive feat. No scaling software existed back then, none of the commonly
available processors that drove arcade games had true 3-D graphics rendering
and computing capability - even Zaxxon's
impressive vistas were nothing more than unchanging wallpaper. So, as silly and
chunky as Blaster may look today, it was quite impressive at the
time.
Nobody was about to
try to port this puppy to the Atari 2600.
Blaster languished in obscurity until two perfect emulations of it popped
up in the 1990s: the MAME version, and the very nice version on the Midway
Collection edition of Arcade's Greatest Hits for the Sony Playstation.
Rating: 
Three quarters - worth repeat play, but with some annoying features that
might alienate less patient arcade veterans.
Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster
 
 
 
 
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