Mother 3: A Game’s Story

For all their merits, traditional JRPG’s haven’t exactly positioned themselves as videogames most cohesive narrative experience. One reason is foundational to the genre: the separation of world exploration and menu-based combat breaks player immersion from the story and characters. The other reason is true for the majority of games period: they all know how to implement a story but few understand how to exist as one. While still very much a traditional JRPG, Mother 3’s story takes root at its core, finding ways to incorporate all its elements into a whole that is surprising and emotional.

That’s not to say there haven’t been breakthroughs, though. One of Dragon Quest V’s most memorable scenes was framed entirely within its first person combat view, for a minute marrying story and gameplay while Chrono Trigger’s seamless transition from environment to combat unified the two disparate gameplay pillars, increasing the story’s potential impact. There have been notable exceptions, they just haven’t gone far enough.

You’re introduced to a perfect little nuclear family and their dog living in the Nowhere Islands rustic Tazmily Village before the title card even pops. Assuming you don’t just name them all after yours or someone else’s genitals, you’ll get the father Flint, mother Hinawa and the lovable Boney. But it’s the first two names, the brother’s Lucas and Claus, that might give you pause. Those are pretty different names for a pair of twins. Who would do that? Later, you’ll see that the boy’s personalities are just as different as their names- one is coddled and shy, the other strong and outgoing. But think on it and you’ll find that both names consist of the same five letters. By suppressing the urge to name one of the boys ‘labia’, you helped create a metaphor. Lucas and Claus are made from the same stuff, just in a different way. It’s a neat touch and representative of the care and attention that went into the entire game.

Mother 3’s mastermind is the famous Japanese novelist/interviewer/creator of the Mother series Shigesato Itoi and if you don’t know the name you obviously haven’t witnessed the awe-inspiring devotion to his games by the galactic travelers of Starmen.net. Itoi’s expertise permeates every element of the work from the interesting villagers to the save system to the dialogue. The entire thing is wonderful. And tragic given the fact that Nintendo didn’t publish the cart outside of Japan because of the low-sales of Mother 2 when they released it a decade before as EarthBound and the advanced age of the Game Boy Advance. Thankfully, mega fan Tomato took up the charge and translated every line into an amazing patch for the GBA ROM. If Tomato’s work is half as affecting as Itoi’s original, there are officially at least two reasons to learn Japanese.

Tazmily is nestled just between the beach and the forest of Nowhere Islands, a small, intimate chunk of land that’s connected by geography rather than an overworld; a place just off the coast of A Link to the Past’s Hyrule. Set your footing- no really, you need to hold the ‘B’ button for a split second before you can dash, it’s awesome- and you can quickly run through the world. It’s a world so rich with colorful details that it might be one of the most gorgeous 2D sprite games ever released. While it’s easy to assume that it was an early example of the retro pixel boom, the sometimes blocky, sometimes sleek character designs are deeply expressive despite the minimalist aesthetic.

Itoi is a man who recognizes that story design is all about maximizing your narrative’s potential, so the adventure on Tazmily is divided into chapters. Offering an omniscient narrator, this inspired structure provides the freedom to regularly switch its main characters as it evolves, bringing with them new specialties to the gameplay and perspectives to the main plot. For the gameplay, the few key differences between each character are slight but actually quite profound, changing up both how they move in the world and their use in combat. It implicitly establishes that these characters are doing their own thing, their own way for their own reasons. Whether it’s a courageous duty to fulfill, a roguish mission to accomplish or an unwilling role to play, every chapter has its own logical purpose within the larger fiction and when they merge, it happens naturally. Even counting Dragon Quest IV, it’s a rare structure for a videogame but fits in perfectly with the more flexible form for a novel. That’s Shigesato Itoi.

And Itoi is a master who understands how to upend your expectations of how a story beat is supposed to play out in order to manipulate your emotions. At the risk of being cryptically cryptic, take a pivotal moment where our character is given horrifically bad news. By ‘conventional’ methods, the scene is written incredibly wrong. It’s so wrong that it manages to shock both you and the character, provoking an almost savage response in them that is gut-wrenching to watch yet appropriate for a situation that deserved a lot more delicacy than it was given. A scene that could have been rote ends up being quite powerful. Some half an hour later, you’re running with a companion who is desperately trying to lighten the rightfully heavy mood, but it’s a digitized ‘blip’ from your speakers and your companion taking credit for what you didn’t realize was a fart that finally breaks the tension. Mother 3 gets a grip on your heart and plucks at its strings.

Similarly smart details are given to the enemies, fleshing out a behavior and lending personality to what would otherwise be abstract actions. Deciding to place enemies on the map instead of random encounters further realize Tazmily as an island with an ecosystem and, more importantly, give players some agency over how they’re engaged. Catch an enemy from behind and the battle transitions with a green wipe and a preemptive round of attacks before they turn around, a dynamic that works both ways. Persona 3, released the same year, would also use the design, but wouldn’t inform you about your opponents until you loaded into the battle. Enemies are varied, ranging from pleasing to playful and- in the case of the Ostrelephant- downright disturbing.

Now, it isn’t exactly a secret that Mother was heavily inspired by Dragon Quest. Both view battles from the same first person POV and have you select your commands at the beginning of each turn and then watch them get executed down the line. That’s fine. It provides you with as much time as you need to make your selections while the lack of attack animations allow the combat to be snappy and the pacing quick.

Enemies have a tendency to group up, changing the dynamic, so it’s worthwhile to plan how battles are initiated. One of the best examples is the Battery Man and Minor Robot team up. If you spend your time focusing on Minor Robot, when his HP drops, Battery Man will jump inside and recharge him, removing the little guy from the fight altogether but presenting you with a revitalized foe. It’s cool and adds a nice layer of depth. While you can fight more than three enemies in a given battle, you never fight more than three at once. Any additional baddies wait in a nice little line off screen for their turn to jump in. When one dies, they all shift around and make room. It doesn’t happen too often, but it keeps combat challenging without being grueling.

In order to sell the characters place in the narrative, their abilities are learned through leveling rather than being tied to equipment or items, supporting their innate personalities instead of relegating them to a fate as interchangeable vessels. Yet it’s not just about one main character but a group of people, the full roster of which never exceed the party size you can bring into a battle. The eclectic members make up a comprehensive list of abilities that keep from being redundant. They’re all important.

So wait. I can take as long as I want to issue orders? Yeah. And the story dictates my party? Yaw. Isn’t that kind of boring? Naw! Because of the simplicity of its combat, every encounter could to be built with basic assumptions about your moveset. This isn’t a game where your enjoyment comes from strategizing the perfect party or juggling your time to execute commands. The joy of combat comes directly from the act of managing the fight in front of you. You know what you have so figure out what you need to do.

It might not sound like much initially, but the spinning slot-machine-esque HP bar, whose value tick down every time you take damage, goes a long way to making the combat engaging. Suffer a mortal blow and you have the time it takes for your health to hit zero to heal before that unit gets knocked out. In a way it approximates Final Fantasy’s revolutionary ATB gauge in reverse creating a sense of urgency that exists nowhere else in the game. The usually relaxing gameplay becomes a mad dash to recovery or victory.

Mother 3 loves music. Need proof? You can find a Boogie Woogie or Reggae Rhythm in treasure boxes. Hell, enemy types come with their own theme music and every hero’s regular attack is accompanied by a sound tuned to their own instrument. Pay attention and you can time your attacks to the beat, stacking what would have been one hit up to a possible sixteen. The sound of your instrument combined with the enemy’s beats creates a little song. If you’re not musically-oriented, putting your opponent to sleep lets you hear their heartbeat and clue in to the rhythm. It may be more Rhythm Heaven than Paper Mario but adds action to the combat, attaching gameplay to an element that already exists and not by stapling on additional systems.

The story works so well because its events alter the fabric of the world in substantive ways. Here’s a brief tale about the Yammonster. The first time it appears is during a forest fire, this unassuming little thing that you’ll only fight if you run right into it. You come back to the area a little later and find a new enemy in its place, an evolution accompanied by new moves, higher HP and a threatening new look. The fire cooked the Yammonster into a Baked Yammonster. Tazmily is alive and reactive, full of details large and small where so many others are defined and static.

But it also knows when to pull back and let the gameplay be the story. A chapter devoted to collecting Plot Points is a stellar example. Even more than for its steady stream of new and interesting content, the section is remarkable for its sheer length. It feels long. Like, to-the-point-of-fatigue, long. Can it be that Itoi, who has more than proven himself capable of constructing a tight and concise plot up to this point, padded this one chapter out on accident? Considering the quality of the writing throughout- including a moment where you enter the ocean at the waves and keep walking- the answer to that question is ‘no’. This sequence is supposed to be exhausting. It’s a competition between light and dark using classic best-of rules, a test of endurance for both you and the hero. Its length organically fuses gameplay into a story.

Mother 3 uses every tool in its box to build its tale. But a story is so much more than the way its told, so let me summarize Mother’s in the best way I know how: it’s a funny, sad, whimsical, deep, touching, fun, cool, off kilter, playful, dark and surprising game about technology, nature, commercialism, progress, people, friendship, family, evil, heroism, the past, the future, life, death and love. It’s beautiful. It does something extraordinary: it makes you think. With an otherwise throwaway line of text, it made me ask myself whether or not the fact that the family dog wasn’t trained, couldn’t shake a person’s hand, meant he was free or meant he was wild.

DEVELOPERS: Shigesato Itoi, Brownie Brown, HAL Laboratory
PLATFORM: Game Boy Advance
2006

It’s All Been Done Before: Bioshock’s Infinity

NOTE: Franchise Spoilers

Two lighthouses stand tall. In both Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite, walking through their front doors is the first step in your adventure in two cities that share more in common than their architecture would lead you to believe. In Bioshock proper, the door leads to a bathysphere that takes you to the cold blackness of the underwater city of Rapture, deep below the sea. In Infinite, it contains the rocket that will launch you to the sun washed floating city of Columbia, high above the clouds. You only need to play the first five minutes of both these games to observe the duality at their heart- one is a descent into Hell, the other the ascension to Heaven.

1960. Rapture lies in ruin. When Jack’s bathysphere docks, the shattered lights, the broken walls and the streaks of blood all tell us that something very bad has happened here.  Much of the game has us scavenging among the wreckage for whatever goods we can use to help us survive, rooting through ransacked shops and looting their dead patrons. Over the course of the game, we learn the history of a place that was once much grander, a city whose culture, politics and people were twisted and disfigured until the people turned on each other in a violent rebellion. As much as Rapture feels like it was once a place, it was also a character.

It’s ironic watching two titans fighting over the burned out husk of the city. The war between founder Andrew Ryan and the conman masquerading as social reformist Frank Fontaine had destroyed Rapture and left them in a tenuous cold war with a pile of rubble at stake. When Jack gets there, he is ushered along by the disembodied voice of Atlus, a man who guides you through the halls and to Andrew Ryan’s office with three simple words and a question mark. ‘Would you kindly?’

Those words would come to carry a great deal of weight. When Jack finally meets Ryan in person, the capitalist says ‘A man chooses. A slave obeys.’ When Jack bashes Ryan’s brains out with his own golf club because he’s been programmed to follow the orders accompanied by ‘Would you kindly’, you realize that just as he didn’t have any control over his task, you didn’t have true freedom over the actions that led you to that moment. You could have used different weapons to kill your enemies or discover some areas of the city and not others, but the only choice you make that affects the outcome of the main plot is the decision to play, or not to play. The nightmare at Rapture was a means to analyze the nature of freedom and agency expressed through the unique abilities of videogames. Until that moment, both Fontaine as Atlus and the designers had manipulated you from objective to objective. A man chooses. A slave obeys.

1912. Columbia is alive and friendly. When Booker’s rocket lands, we find a bright day casting light over beautiful, clean streets. He’d been sent there to retrieve a mark- a young woman named Elizabeth. The shops are full and the people are happily listening along to barber shop quartets as a parade floats by. It seems perfect. But when you go to the raffle and discover that the prize is the right to throw the first pitch at an interracial couple who had the audacity to fall in love, you get see that below the smiles and sunshine is something sinister.

Elizabeth is caged in a large tower within the city, the mythical princess to Columbia’s prophetic leader Zachary Hale Comstock. As he makes his way to her, Booker discovers the truth about Columbia- under the pleasant surface is a city built on oppression and socially sanctioned racism. An underground resistance has formed calling themselves the Vox Populi led by the freedom fighter Daisy Fitzroy who is tired of the unfair treatment and unequal justice. When he gets to the tower, Booker finds that Elizabeth possesses strange powers that let her open tears in the fabric of reality and move objects through.

Getting out of the city requires that Booker aid Fitzroy in arming her people. With Elizabeth’s powers, he jumps into new dimensions, places that are similar to his but with a few key differences, and procures a vast weapons cache that finally lets the Peoples Voice be heard. The uprising begun, the population is locked in a civil war, the two general’s armies clashing in the streets. When Columbia lies in ruin, you realize that this is how Rapture had fallen and that you’ve initiated a line of events in Infinite that you had only discovered after they’d happened in Bioshock. Soon after you beat Comstock’s head in and drowned him in his holy water, Elizabeth opens one last tear. And you find yourself in the halls of Rapture.

This is the defining moment in Bioshock. We learn that the series takes place over a million million separate realities, places that seem similar to ours but have minute differences. An ocean of lighthouses with the same constants but different variables. Of course, if Bioshock was an examination on choice, Infinite says that everyone believes that they’re making the right choices, even if it’s the difference between being the story’s hero and being its villain. Because every choice that can be made, has already been made. Every bullet you shot, every bullet you took was one possible outcome in a chain of events that led you to that moment. The only way to break the chain is to remove one of its links.

At the same time, the revelation that Bioshock and Infinite are intrinsically the same story could be a tacit admission that it’s themes have been regularly used by the medium in one form or another since Super Mario Bros. Look at the relationships between the heroes and villains of the Legend of Zelda, Metal Gear Solid and Halo- the characters are different, but the quest has largely stayed the same. There are constants and there are variables.

That’s interesting considering its part of an industry built on franchise IP, content to crank out sequels rather than develop new ideas once they’ve found a workable blueprint to exploit. It’s even more interesting when you consider that Bioshock was a victim of this same trend when its publisher made a sequel that was considered-perhaps unfairly-an unnecessary attempt to cash in on the originals success. Maybe that’s another reason why Bioshock Infinite doesn’t have a number at the end- it’s claiming ownership over every entry that has been and will be and preemptively calling out any sequel that tries to tell its story again. Maybe Infinite is a challenge to the medium: do something new rather than recycle the same thing over and over.

Really, it’s on the cycle of human history that Bioshock’s lighthouse focuses its spotlight. The uprisings that took place on Rapture and Columbia are similar to the real life Boxer Rebellion or The Wounded Knee Massacre that you’ll find in Infinites ‘Hall of Heroes’ war memorial- it’s only the skin color under the uniform that has changed. With them, Bioshock has asked a question. If throughout human history, we keep reliving the same tales of social reform over and over, when are we going to wise up and stop? Thankfully, it’s given us a way to answer that question in the compounding resolution of its two stories: we have the power to decide our actions and change our world, we just need to know where in our story to make the right choices.

Mega Man Legends: The Future Archaeology

For a decade across the 8 and 16-bit generations, Mega Man had been an action-packed dynamo, but after some twenty odd games, his aging framework was in need of some vital upgrades. Powered by the PlayStation hardware, Keiji Inafune and his crew of robot masters successfully forged a new Blue Bomber, translating his action concepts onto a three-dimensional world.

The new 32 bit tech gave the series a chance to break away from the techno-future aesthetic found in both the Classic and X series with their cities dependent on robots for manual labor. Mega Man Legends is an adventure in a world covered in endless water where diggers explore the ruins of a lost civilization amongst the scattered land masses for Zenny and treasure.

Functioning as a tutorial scene, the game’s opening site introduces amnesiac metal boy Mega Man Volnutt and his mechanical genius adopted sister Roll. There’s an interesting dynamic between the two partners: safely aboard the families airship the Flutter, Roll monitors Mega Man as he explores, offering support and teaching you the basics of the gameplay.

In many ways, Mega Man moves like any typical 3D game, but it’s with the camera implementation that the control comes into its own. By mapping Mega Man’s horizontal orientation to L1 and R1, the designers were able to approximate a version of circle strafing in a time before dual joystick controllers were the standard and months before Ocarina of Time would revolutionize combat with Z-targeting. It might have taken a little practice, but mastering these controls provides a fluidity of movement that allows the game to stay true to its action roots while avoiding the slight disorientation to the environment outside your field of view that comes from moving outwards from a focal point.

With the dungeon’s energy shard under his arm, Mega Man sets off on the Flutter. Of course, it’s not long before they find themselves stranded on the lush Kattelox Island and swept up in a race against the infamous sky-pirate Bonne family for the mythical Mother Lode, the vast score of every digger’s dreams hidden somewhere underground.

High quality production values bring the story to life. Aside from the playful voice acting afforded by the move to CD’s, the smartly designed animation system overlays sprites on the polygonal character models to give its characters a large set of complex expressions. It’s an aesthetic that takes advantage of the PlayStation’s technology while utilizing the techniques Capcom had cut its teeth on in the previous generations. The blending of old and new graphical styles paints a living cartoon, a spirited steam punk adventure that calls to mind Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘Castle in the Sky’.

The comparison between Legends and Miyazaki’s animated masterpiece is just as fitting as the originals were to Osamu Tezuka’s manga milestone Astro Boy. As any fortune loving pirates, the Bonne’s are more than eager to break the law to sate their greed.  With the hot-headed Tron, the cunning Tiesel, the modular Bon and their army of cute, Lego-people-esque Servbots, they carry their weight through a fun story spread from the oceans around the island to the skies above.

And Kattelox is a place full of life.  What starts as a small town blossoms into a city bustling with activity.  From the hustle of the business district to the refinement of the harbor to the warehouses of old town, every block has points of interest; the museum in need of new pieces for its collection, the kids who want a clubhouse to call their own and the pulpy case files at the Police Station. Through your actions, Kattelox will change in ways that few games do, but not always for the better.

Take an early mission where Mega Man has to stop the Bonne’s from destroying the government facilities at the north end of town. Framed as a live news cast that cuts between the action and destruction, you need to destroy all the attacking bots before they level every building, the progress of which is updated by the reporter’s narration. After the battle, the ruined buildings become unusable, their content unavailable until you’ve donated enough Zenny for the locals to rebuild. For several hours of playtime after, those buildings are replaced with large containers for the reconstruction, reinforcing the town’s infrastructure and your attachment to the island.

The mechanical sensibility carries over to the character growth.  For weapons, it starts with modifying the Mega Buster’s base attributes.  By purchasing new parts or having Roll develop from various scavenged items, your arsenal not only becomes stronger but greatly expands.  A single special item can be equipped and each is incredibly different from one another, be it a rocket launcher, arm-mounted shield or vacuum. Traversal is augmented by finding the parts necessary to jump higher or quickly skate around town. The decision to make many parts simple household items that can be found in everyday locations adds character to the society and people.

But beneath the modern culture there is history.  The various dig sites reveal a network of interconnected passages, forming an enormous labyrinth to be explored and plundered. But roving their halls are the mechanical ghosts of time long ago. These reaverbots help portray the industrial aesthetic. While it’s hard to qualify the need for robotic snakes and dogs, the enemies are often designed to appear like they could have functional significance, constructed from bulky technology that has a rusted, metal composition and emit the sounds of creaky pistons and hollow echoes of furnaces.

There’s a stark contrast to the opposing nature of the environments above and below ground: where the fields of Kattelox are bright green and the oceans surrounding it a deep blue, the dungeons are a rusty brown; where the surface is cheery, inviting and fresh, the depths are oppressive, hostile and stagnant. The ruins feel like old factories compared to the more efficient models found above ground.

As your rivalry with the Bonnes escalates, you become more and more aware that maybe the secrets of this lost civilization are better left undiscovered. You uncover why at the end. The final dungeon back on line, our blue hero meets a new threat: Mega Man Juno. This powerful mech reveals that Mega Man had been a trump card created to cleanse the human population and decides it’s time to finally carry out its last orders.

It’s here that the story works into the franchises larger fiction. The over reliance on its automation had put the old world through upheaval and war and forced the people to seal away their mistakes. If Mega Man Classic is a light tale about technology run amok and X looked at the nature of life and freedom, Legends is about starting new by looking back at our history and learning from it. Not only will you find the metaphor in the story, but in the application of the technology used to tell it. Since its release in 1998, Inafune has made it known that Mega Man Legends holds a special place in his heart. Looking at the game, it’s not hard to see why; with its colorful, vibrant land and heroic story, Mega Man Legends is a game about constructing a future from the blueprints of the past.

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm: Astro Creep

Note- This text refers to the Campaign only.

As the Queen of Blades defiantly stands over a besieged Terran city watching her Zerg swarm breach its defenses and tear humanity to shreds, you remember again that the woman once known as Sarah Kerrigan’s thirst for revenge has killed the last bit of it in herself. But for all the great and terrible power she once wielded, Sarah has been confined to a sterile white-walled lab, a woman once more. Fitting of the ravenous brood at its core, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm’s campaign evolves Wings of Liberty’s versatile DNA into a powerful new beast.

Continuing from where WoL stopped, HoTS smartly contextualizes the Zerg’s mechanics into the story. What starts as a test to gauge Kerrigan’s power turns into a lesson on hubris for the ones trying to cage it, starting with simple base building and introducing the basic idiosyncrasies of the insectoid faction. Things soon get more complicated as Dominion forces attack and Kerrigan is thrown back down a path of rage and vengeance.

Every mission from then on showcases StarCraft II’s brilliant design and varied progression. Doubling as tutorials for specific units, each level features a creative spin on the mechanics including wave based survival, the hostile takeover of a massive cruiser and as battles against a series of boss-level enemies. Many of the missions tackle the concepts found in Wings campaign from a different angle, keeping them from feeling redundant. Notice how Hearts ‘Infested’ level takes the attack/defend dynamic of Wings ‘Outbreak’ mission with you as virus rather than cure. They’re all fun and interesting and teach you what you need to know about controlling the Zerg Army.

Taking control of Kerrigan directly reveals HoTS greatest departure from its predecessor. By integrating the hero unit concept from WarCraft III that maps unique abilities to her as a unit, Blizzard was able to surface StarCraft’s more active micromanagement components to a broader range of players. From the ranged AOE attacks to the quick dashes, there’s just something incredibly satisfying about controlling a massive force and then popping attacks to decimate your foes. Kerrigan feels as strong as she’s always looked, justifying her place atop the Zerg throne and diversifying the gameplay.

That gameplay has been built around many of the same RPG-lite progression systems from Wings of Liberty. While some of the more permanent upgrades still force you to choose between two evolutions, the bulk of them can be set and reset to provide the freedom to experiment with new options and strategies. This is especially true of Kerrigan whose success at bonus mission objectives increase her levels, empowering her with new moves and improved stats.

If there’s a place where HoTS falls flat, it’s in the development of its story. Despite hitting the important story beats with Kerrigan’s relationship with the valiant James Raynor and her war with the wicked Arcturus Mengsk, reaching them consists of various planets smaller story arcs that are poorly expressed or seem immaterial to the plot, often reusing the same meet/gain a foothold/conquer progression.

The presentation of that story is just as awkward as all Blizzard RTS’s with the company’s beautifully directed and rendered CG cutscenes that feel a bit disingenuous to the talking heads found during missions and the many conversations that happen aboard your ship with barely animating characters who have been standing in the same spot for twenty hours.

In its place as the middle chapter of the StarCraft II Trilogy, Heart of the Swarm had less to prove than Wings of Liberty did, so it’s interesting to see how well integrated into the whole it is both narratively and mechanically. As an entry that manages to close a crucial arch to a grander story and change the state of the universe, Kerrigan’s quest pushes the StarCraft story forward and readies us for the black coldness of the void.

DEVELOPER: Blizzard Entertainment
PLATFORMS: PC, Mac
2013

Blast Corps

Controlled Demolition

For anyone who used to make believe with a box full of Tonka Trucks and action figures, Rare’s Blast Corps is a special kind of game, one that takes you back to the timeless parts of your childhood that don’t fade just because you’re now an adult. It allows you to relive the freedom that comes from the act of playing and the simple joys that come from pretending that you’re taking control of a roughneck crew out to save the world through demolition.

A volatile nuclear transport truck is out of control. As a member of the destruction-happy, building-hating Blast Corps, you must clear it a path, leveling everything in its way and freeing families from the burdens of their homes, companies of their millions of dollars invested in industrial complexes and forever crippling the economy of the areas you’re ‘protecting’.

At its purest, that means causing maximum havoc with over a dozen controllable vehicles from bulldozers and dump trucks to giant mechs and rocket-launching bikes. Every vehicle comes with its own gameplay and physics offering an impressive variety to the levels. Since the nuclear carrier is always on the move, levels are often large time-based puzzles that must be worked efficiently. There’s a great sense of tension to every moment but the game never gets frustrating mostly due to its smartly implemented truck cam and warning systems that provide great contextual information so you’re never caught off guard.

Completing a level lets you freely return to finish bankrupting any company, homeless-ing any remaining survivors or publicly out any government satellite dishes to open new missions as every level’s state is persistent. Not only are main story missions packed with content, but many are devoted to secondary objectives including time trials and races across an ever expanding globe.

Blast Corps emphasis on destruction was novel for 1997, providing the tools to destroy the world around in a time before the concept of the sandbox was a videogames establishment. But even more than the mighty bulldozer, Blast Corps facilitates the most powerful tool at your disposal, one maybe you’ve misplaced- your imagination.

DEVELOPER: Rare Ware
PLATFORM: Nintendo 64
1997