The kids are all Reich: Blaster Master & Bionic Commando | Metroidvania Works 17
1,058I'm afraid it's true: This episode consists entirely of games that showed up less than a year ago on NES Works. Good thing that, as the kids say, these games slap. Plus, they represent critical improvements on the whole "metroidvania" way of life.
In fact, I would call Blaster Master the purest and most robust attempt to creating a proper metroidvania to have appeared to this point in human history. I would, except that those miserable top-down sequences drag it down and dilute its impact.
Not that this is necessarily a good episode in which to complain about "purity"... not when the second featured title involves putting a stop (again) to the genocidal bigotry of Adolf Hitler and his legion of goose-stepping morons. Still, while the premise of Bionic Commando is an all-timer—you are a lone soldier with a really cool grappling arm who has to blow up a lost Third Reich superweapon, and also Hitler—that alone doesn't afford the game a place in the lineage of the metroidvania. However, the fact that you do it in a fairly open interconnected world that incorporates skill- and tool-based gating along with a rudimentary experience system? That definitely makes this masterpiece a mini-metroidvania forebear.
Production notes:
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NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 720 with xRGB Mini Framemeister.
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Blaster Master Statistics For Jeremy Parish | Video Works
There are 63,651 views in 4 videos for Blaster Master. The game makes up 2 hours of published video on his channel, or 1.13% of the total watchable video for Blaster Master on Jeremy Parish | Video Works's YouTube channel.