L.A. Blaster (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
59A playthrough of Cryo Interactive's 1996 FMV battle-racing game for PCs running Dos, L.A. Blaster.
The video shows all six stages and the three boss battles.
Here's yet another FMV game that doesn't seem to be terribly well known. I played this when I was a teenager and loved it, but found this MegaRace clone utterly impossible to ever finish. Coming back to it over and over in the years passed, nothing has changed whatsoever.
The completely CG rendered graphics are gorgeous (and punishing on hardware - this video shows the game running natively at 640x400 @ 16-bit color depth - 65,536 colors - and requires a serious machine to push it at a constant frame rate. For lower end Pentiums, it has an 8-bit 320x200 mode - don't even bother trying on a 486!), the music rocks, and it plays absolutely miserably. Everything can kill you in about 2 seconds, you usually can't see projectiles coming at you until they've hit you (or are close enough that you can't get out of the way in time), and the controls are less reliable than stilts made out of lukewarm, lunch-bag string cheese. I guess it makes sense that the developers didn't want people to finish the brand-new $60 game in under thirty minutes the first time they played, but this is beyond cheap.
Oh well. It's so damn fast and fun to look at. Therefore, in order to get through all of the races without dying 7 million times, I launched the game with the following command - if you want to try this game, you might find yourself referring to this :)
c:\lablast\lablster.exe /cryogod /cryomad /cryocred
The bosses are pretty hilarious for the short time that they're around, as are the random air-surfing people that float around the screen sometimes. The video quality is also pretty amazing, especially for Dos! If you try to run it in Dosbox, you won't have access to the high color mode without a few edits in your configuration file. It requires a fully vesa 2.0 compliant card, and univbe doesn't like to provide that in Dosbox without changing the SVGA video card setting to "vesa_oldvbe." I also ran the game on the dynamic core at around the 70k cycle mark - any lower than that, and the screen-tearing became pretty bad. 32 megs of RAM is more than enough to keep the loading times to a minimum.
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