Re-release this: Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy
Re-release this: Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy
The game deserves a second chance, and today's technology is better prepared for what it had to offer, too.
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Blast Works: Build, Create, Destroy never really had a chance. At least, not the chance it should have had. It was a shoot-em-up that released when that was not a thing people were buying much of, on a system that sold loads, but didn’t necessarily have a high attach rate for games that non-Nintendo companies released. It purposely went with simplistic graphics — lots of geometry and chunkiness, no attempts at the realism that had seized the day — and leaned heavily on user-created content at a time before that sort of thing could be easily streamlined.
If Blast Works released today, it might not be a huge hit, no, but it’s pretty clear we’re in a time period that’s far more open to user-created content — both from the perspective of the users willing to do the creating and the technology that would allow for it — than the one in which Blast Works released in. STGs have seen a real resurgence, too, in the 14 years since Blast Works released: whereas this was one of a handful of original shmups on Nintendo’s Wii, the Switch has… well, there are probably single months in the Switch’s existence that have more shmups released within than the entirety of the Wii’s life. And that’s without even getting into how the Playstations and Xboxes get their own shmups sometimes, too, and Steam is its own ecosystem with plenty of exclusives. Maybe it’s not the golden age for STG popularity, but it’s certainly the golden age for their availability.
The developer of Blast Works, Budcat Creations, wasn’t known for original games. They were a developer who would work with large publishers — think EA and Activision — developing the “non-target” versions of multiplatform games. So, the DS and Playstation 2 versions of things like Guitar Hero or Madden that were designed with, say, the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 in mind. Blast Works isn’t wholly original, either — it’s actually a re-imagining of a freeware and open source release, TUMIKI Fighters — but it’s dramatically more original than anything else Budcat was doing, and a testament to what the studio was capable of when actually handed the reins for once. While the conception of Blast Works is borrowed from Tumiki Fighters, which was developed by Kenta Cho in 2004, everything else about it is new. What set Tumiki Fighters apart from other shmups of the time is its central mechanic, where destroyed enemy craft could stick to your own, enhancing not just its size and defense, but also its offensive capabilities and destructive power. Katamari Damacy with lasers isn’t really an accurate description, but it’s also not an inaccurate one.
Tumiki Fighters is a whole lot of fun, and so is Blast Works, which built on the concept in a number of ways. There are five campaigns within Blast Works, three levels in length each, and in each of those campaigns you’ll be in a different setting, piloting an environmentally appropriate ship. So, in the first stage, which is kind of steampunk-y, you fly a biplane with a cannon mounted on the top. In the game’s final stage, which takes place in a futuristic and space setting, you have a more space-worthy ship to pilot. The different settings are a good touch, since the graphics are purposefully blocky, geometric shapes you’re going to be seeing a lot of over and over: this allowed Budcat, the developers, to create a ton of different enemy types and backgrounds, while having them all fit neatly into place despite how disparate they are, which in turn lets the game keep looking fresh despite its relative simplicity of design.
You will create some real monstrosities in Blast Works, and that’s a not insignificant part of the appeal. You start out with your tiny little ship, which is smaller than the vast majority of what you’ll come up against in the game, but you can make it bigger, and bigger, and well, big enough that it might not entirely fit on the screen. It’ll take some skill to get to that point, of course, but it’s possible, and worth figuring out how to do. For one, all of the parts of old ships — or entire ships you stick to your creation whole — can take damage without costing you a life. You might lose a part, either entirely or briefly as it flips through the air waiting for you to recover it, but so long as your primary ship remains unscathed, you won’t lose a life. As more sticks to your ship, you begin to automatically fire off additional weaponry that resembles what your past foes were firing at you. Rings of homing bullets, delayed shots that hang in the air before zooming forward faster than anything else in the game, the geometric equivalent of a short-range flamethrower — you don’t get to really choose what is being fired or from where unless you get real picky about where your fallen foes stick to you, but if you build enough, it won’t really matter, anyway.
Here’s some gameplay of the first campaign, played on the Rookie setting:
Blow up opponents, stick them to your ship by flying into them, and then let them assist you in clearing a path to the boss. The view zooms out when you begin a boss encounter, and the idea here is to have built something comparable in size, if not even larger, than the monster ship you’re about to battle at the end of each level. Bosses are much more resilient than you are, so you’ll need sustained fire on their vital parts in order to defeat them, but it is possible to build a large enough ship that you can kind of just out-muscle and outlast them from up close even as you shed ship parts while under constant fire. Getting to that point takes work, though, as you’ll need to learn to hide your ship parts in the levels themselves, to keep them from getting blown off.
By pressing the assigned button — the left shoulder on the Wii’s Classic Constroller, but there are other possible inputs depending on the control method — you can instantly hide all of the ship parts you’ve amassed, leaving you with just your core, original unit. You’ll be left at whatever firing angle you were at when you pressed the button, which can be useful for sustained directional fire, but you are mostly utilizing this to avoid taking damage. If a round of bullets is clearly going to cut through your ship and reduce its size, you can hide all but your original ship and then fly through the mess of bullets to safety. Successfully do this often enough, and you’ll start putting together some absurdly massive ships. Ones that don’t fit the screen that sometimes even defeat and assimilate new ships before you ever see them yourself.
Maybe the most important reason to aim for having a massive ship to pilot, though, is that you score more and more passive points the larger it is. If you create a true monster of a ship, something that spans most of the screen, you’ll find you’re picking up 1,200 points or more every couple of seconds — no small thing when an extend on Pilot difficulty is every 12,000 points, and enemy ships aren’t giving you those kinds of points. You have to work on making a new huge ship in every level, too, as all your bonus parts pop off upon defeating a boss, so you want to take advantage of these most massive ship bonuses while you can. And you can’t do so by just hiding them, either, as the bonuses don’t feed your score as often or as significantly when you’re holding down that button. Build, build, build, then let it fly when the points are going to be great.
Blast Works has Rookie, Pilot, and Ace difficulties, with increased scoring thresholds for extra lives and tougher foes in the latter of those: Rookie is mostly for getting a sense of how the game even works, as you can pretty easily rack up extra lives in that which will sustain you even through the tough fifth and final campaign, but Pilot and Ace don’t mess around even in the first levels.
You can either play in Campaign Mode, which lets you start from any of the five campaigns you’ve unlocked and keeps track of high scores for each individual campaign, or in Arcade, which gives you some continues and has you give all 15 stages a go from start to finish. Campaign has two-player co-op, while Arcade lets you play with three others. While you can start on any campaign you’ve previously reached, getting through them without having built up some extra lives in easier levels in order to make up for the lack of continues can be tough.
Complete all five campaigns on Rookie difficulty, and unlock the original Tumiki Fighters. Complete Arcade mode on any difficulty, and unlock rRootage, which is a very different Cho game, one that drew inspiration from STGs like Ikaruga, Giga Wing, and Psyvariar, creating games modes that borrow elements from each in order to create varied rRootage experiences. Two other Cho shmups, Gunroar — think vertically scrolling Geometry Wars set at sea — and Torus Trooper — a shmup where you race against the clock in a 3D tunnel, the shape of which is constantly changing — are also unlockable.
Kenta Cho, whose one-man development studio, ABA Games, always releases games as free, open source projects, has said in the past that his games are “too simple” to be commercially released, but he wasn’t by any means against something like Blast Works being developed. If anything, it’s exactly the kind of port he was looking for, in the sense that he told Stephen Totilo, back in 2006 when MTV was still covering video games, that, “So perhaps if someone would release my game on the consoles, the gameplay or the graphics and music should be refined.” Budcat did just that by creating a far more detailed version of Tumiki Fighters, in a number of ways, but what really separates Blast Works from its inspiration isn’t the “Destroy” part of its name, but the “Build” and “Trade” portions.
While you can’t access what was once known as Blast Works Depot any longer, other than through the Wayback Machine, it was once a hub used to trade created in-game objects and levels, which were made with an in-game development tool like the one that Budcat themselves utilized. Blast Works might have come with 15 levels, to be played across three difficulties and in multiple modes, but it was also meant to be a game you could keep playing, and playing, and playing, whether you wanted to do any level construction yourself, or just play what other people created, in the same way some folks will enjoy something like Super Mario Maker. With WiiConnect24 and Nintendo WiFi Connection no longer in service, you can’t access the “Trade” portion of the game any longer. You can still build your own objects and levels, at least, so if you’re satisfied with “just” doing that, it’s not nothing. Obviously, a re-release, remaster, whatever would make it so you didn’t have to look up if there was some kind of convoluted private server system happening in the depths of the internet, where you get to pretend it’s still 2008 as far as Blast Works is concerned.
Speaking of video game releases: we already know why Cho doesn’t release his games commercially, but how come he releases them open source, where literally anyone can decide to take up the publishing rights to a port of what’s available for free on Windows? He also told Totilo the answer to this question in the previously cited interview:
“I distribute my game because I create the games that I want to play. And if some people want to enjoy my games, I give my game and code to those people. I don't have any intention to create money with creating games.”
Speaking as very much a “labor is entitled to all it creates” kind of person, it’s hard for me to handle that approach, but hey. If Cho wants to be the Stephen King of STGs — King sells the movie rights to his short stories for just $1 if a film student wants to adapt them — by letting a developer like Budcat Creations take a crack at something they want to do, or by letting an independent developer/publisher who posts to Reddit remaster rRootage for the Switch and sell it for $5 rather than making that money himself, then that’s his prerogative. From each according to his ability, etc., keep the games coming, ABA.
Maybe someone could let Majesco know that it’d be just fine to port Blast Works, too, or to license it out to someone who would love to bring it back and has the technical know-how to do so. Maybe it didn’t take off the first time like it should have, but as said, its chances at success are much better in today’s environment, and Blast Works doesn’t need a physical release to exist on consoles like it did 14 years ago, either. Bring the game into HD, create a new user-content platform and distribution system, and let Blast Works have the moment in the sun it’s deserved since it first released.
In the meantime… Tumiki Fighters, and the rest of Cho’s extensive, Windows-and-browser-based library, is still available for free. So you’ve got something to do while you wait for a release that’s probably never coming.
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