RoadBlasters (NES) Playthrough
206A playthrough of Mindscape's 1990 combat racing game for the NES, RoadBlasters.
Atari's RoadBlasters cabinets were a common fixture in American arcades and bars in the late 80s and early 90s, and as was the case with most of their successful coin-ops, a version of it appeared on all of the popular home platforms over the next couple of years.
In RoadBlasters, you're competing for survival in a fifty-leg rally race. Swarming waves of armored cars and attack bikes do their utmost to cut your ride short, and if you let them distract your eyes from the road, you'll quickly find yourself turned into road pizza by a barrage of missiles or a landmine. Crash too many times and run out of gas, and it's game over, but you aren't left completely helpless. In addition to your standard-issue roof-mounted cannon, you can arm your car with uzis, rockets, shields, and nitro boosts, and you'll need them all if you're to have any chance at seeing things through.
The NES game, created by Beam, does a respectable job of bringing the excitement home. It doesn't look or sound much like the arcade game, but it's still fast-paced, explosion-filled, and a lot of fun. It has a fair amount of content, it controls well, and it puts up a good challenge. It can be infuriating at times, but it's usually fair in how it kills you.
It plays a lot like Nintendo's Mach Rider (but with a car and a smoother framerate), and that's no bad thing. The Genesis and Lynx versions of RoadBlasters are better, but this is a solid adaptation given the NES's limitations, and I remember thoroughly enjoying it back in the day. It was a reliable backup pick for those evenings when everything else had already been checked out at the video store.
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