Do what the title says and blast your way through this action driving game.

Pretty nice tune here.

To Beat: Reach the ending after Level 50
To Complete: Beat the game and play all levels
What I Did: Completed the game without dying
Played: 5/28/18
Difficulty: 6/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: RoadBlasters Longplay

I’m noticing that a lot of video game names are long and complicated these days. Part of that is because modern games are also longer and more complicated, and they do seem to trend that way all the time. It’s tough to sum up modern games with short names that can also carry the idea of the game itself. The other part is that most of the simpler names are already taken. With early games especially, the ideas are simple enough to sum up in a word. I’m thinking of games like Asteroids or Centipede where you don’t need to go any further in explanation to know what they are about. RoadBlasters has a straightforward name and you know what you are getting into when you play it.

RoadBlasters originated as an arcade title in 1987. It was both developed and published by Atari Games. The arcade version came in both a standard upright cabinet and a large, cockpit-style cabinet. This game was ported to various home computers and game consoles, including the Atari Lynx and the Sega Genesis. The NES port, released in January 1990 in North America, was published by Mindscape. PAL versions were released in Europe sometime in 1990. A lot of what I read said that Atari Games or Tengen developed the NES version, but I believe it was Beam Software as they are mentioned on the title screen for producing the game.

RoadBlasters is a driving game that’s more of a shoot-em-up than a racing game. There’s no story here for a change. You drive an armored car that is outfitted with guns on the front. Simply drive ahead and blast away anything that stands in your way. Your task is to reach the end of each course before running out of fuel. There are 50 courses in RoadBlasters and you beat the game when you reach the end of the final course.

Blow them up! It’s more of a shooter than a driving game.

This game has simple controls. You use the D-pad to drive. Press Up to accelerate and Down to brake. If you let go of both Up and Down, your car will maintain speed as long as you stay on the road. Press Left or Right to steer in the desired direction. Press the A button to fire your main guns. You have unlimited shots! The B button is used to launch any special items you have. The Start button pauses and unpauses the game.

The game screen mostly consists of the open road and your car with the view from behind your vehicle. The bottom part of the screen contains all pertinent information. The left side shows your score multiplier. The small, vertical rectangle to the right of the multiplier is an indicator light that flashes when you are approaching mines. Next to that is your fuel gauge, both your normal fuel and your reserve fuel tank. You also see your current speed as well as your score. The round number is displayed in the upper-right corner of the playfield.

One of the main mechanics to this game is the score multiplier. It begins at one and can go as high as ten. You accrue points rapidly just by driving and the multiplier determines how quickly your score increases. Every way you can earn points is influenced by the multiplier, whether it is from shooting enemies or earning a bonus at the end of each course. You increase the multiplier by one when you shoot down an enemy, but it decreases by one if you miss with a shot. You really need to work on your accuracy and not just spew fire all over the road if you want to have a high multiplier.

Orange cars sometimes leave behind fuel pickups.

Another mechanic is the fuel system. Naturally, you use fuel in this game as you drive and you don’t want to run out before reaching the end of the course. There are a few ways to earn fuel. Sometimes there are fuel globes on the road and all you have to do is drive over them to add fuel. There are green ones that appear on the course that add a tiny amount of fuel, and there are orange ones you get by blasting certain cars that add more fuel than the green ones. Many levels have a checkpoint halfway through that automatically refills your main fuel tank back to the starting amount. You also have a reserve fuel tank. Only when you run out of fuel in the main tank will you automatically draw fuel from the reserve tank. When you complete a course, you get a point bonus that doubles as a reserve fuel refill. The more bonus points you get, the more reserve fuel you get. This is the real reason why you want to keep your multiplier as high as possible. A multiplier of ten at the end of the level fills up your reserve tank all the way.

There are some special items available. Periodically, a support plane will fly above and drop off some special gear containing one of four items. The item name will appear on the bottom of the screen after you collect it. The U.Z. Cannon mounts a turret on the top of your car. There is an ammo meter and the U.Z. Cannon is lost as soon as you run out of ammo. Firing the U.Z. Cannon does not affect your multiplier so you are more at liberty to fire at will. The other items can be used three times each. Round icons at the bottom show how many uses are remaining. The Electro Shield causes your car to flash colors for a while and you can drive through anything on the road unscathed. The Nitro Inject gives your car a huge speed boost. Normal max speed is 212 but you can get up to 298 with it. The Cruise Missile destroys everything on the road. Be careful because it also removes fuel globes on screen. All items are lost when either you use them all up or you crash your car.

Speaking of crashing, that’s another interesting thing about RoadBlasters. In most games, you would normally lose a life or lose a bunch of time when you crash. Here you can crash just about as often as you want and you come right back. The only penalty is a slight loss of fuel since you have to accelerate from a standstill each crash. I wrecked my car plenty of times when playing through RoadBlasters. It’s nice that the game is lenient in this regard.

The U.Z. Cannon is helpful against these off-road turrets.

There are several types of enemies and hazards on the road. The most common enemy is the orange Stinger car. These are taken down with one shot and can hide precious fuel globes. Small motorcycles can also be shot down, but they are a narrower target. Blue Command Cars aren’t damaged by normal fire and are often in your way. You can take them out with Cruise Missiles or the Electro Shield. Rat Jeeps are annoying enemies that only show up on a few courses. They drive in front of you from behind and then slam on the brakes to try and crash into you. You can blow them up but be quick. Gun Turrets sit on the sides of the road and shoot at you. They are difficult to shoot because of their positioning and are best left alone in my experience. Mines are telegraphed by the flashing indicator light but are tough to see on the road even if you know they are coming. Just avoid them. There are also rocks on the road that cause you to crash. Finally, oil slicks cause you to spin out and lose control when you drive over them. They are not deadly on their own if you manage to stay on the road.

The fifty stages in the game are grouped into twelve regions. At the start of the game, you may select from any of the first three regions, skipping some levels if you choose. When you complete a region, you are brought back to the select screen and you can choose a new region. This is really nice for practicing certain sections or getting to the end of the game faster. If you want to play every course in the game, then you must select the next region manually each time you get the opportunity.

You lose a life anytime you run out of fuel and are unable to reach the end of the stage or a checkpoint. You can continue from the start of the current course. After two continues, you have to start all over.

It gets tense when fuel is running low.

I have beaten RoadBlasters many times before. This was one of the earliest NES games my family owned and one of the few that was purchased new. I still have the same cart we bought back then and that’s what I used to play this time. I also beat RoadBlasters a couple of years ago for the NintendoAge NES contests. This is an affordable NES game that only costs around $5.

RoadBlasters isn’t exactly what I’d call an easy game. Some of the levels are very dependent on fuel globes and you need to be almost perfect to get through, even with a full reserve tank. You also have to do the dance of driving without shooting unless it’s necessary to keep the multiplier up so that you can top off your reserve tank for later. My past experience paid off big time, for I had no trouble beating RoadBlasters this time around. I played through every course and didn’t lose a life. My final score was a little over 1,950,000 which was better than I scored during the last NintendoAge contest. There were a few close calls in some of the later levels where I just barely survived, but overall I am very pleased with my run and my video longplay. It takes about an hour and a half to do a full run and it was good to get it done on my first try.

RoadBlasters is a fun action game that plays well on the NES. The controls are simple and work well for this kind of game. You can start out with easy levels or fast forward to some more difficult levels right away. This makes RoadBlasters a good game to play for just a few minutes or for longer stretches. The graphics are good and the roads curve quite a lot without any technical issues or slowdown. The sound is lackluster. All you hear during the game are car noises and sound effects. That can be exhausting for such a long game. The few songs that do play on the title screen and after each course are catchy and provide a nice sound break after the droning of the main action. One knock against RoadBlasters is that it’s a long game that is very repetitive if you take on all fifty courses. There’s also little room for error with only two continues to draw from. I’d say this a good NES game and a fun one to try out, even if you don’t care for racing games.

#87 – RoadBlasters

#87 – RoadBlasters (1,953,567 Points)

Who needs a yellow submarine when you can pilot a pink one?

One of the busiest title screens ever.

To Beat: Finish Phase 8
What I Did: Completed two loops
Played: 2/19/18 – 2/23/18
Difficulty: 6/10
My Difficulty: 6/10
My Video: Sqoon Longplay

This is not the first case in this project where I play a game that is linked to something else that I recently finished. However, this particular connection might be the most esoteric. What could Chubby Cherub and Sqoon have in common? After all, they are in different genres and created by different developers. I mentioned in my Chubby Cherub review that it is one of the few NES games that is exclusively in the 5-screw form factor, and Sqoon is another one. There’s only a handful of games like that, and here we have two of them nearly back to back. I find these nearby relationships fascinating even if it is purely meaningless. Allow me then to make another comparison. Even though Chubby Cherub is an early platformer and Sqoon is an early shoot-em-up, both games have some interesting ideas for their respective genres that don’t resurface very often.

Sqoon, pronounced “skoon,” is an original Famicom game released in Japan in June 1986. It was developed by Home Data and published by Irem. The NES version came out in North America in September 1987. It was not released elsewhere. Most of Home Data’s games stayed in Japan and therefore they are not well known outside of their home country. They made several Mahjong games as well as a baseball series named Koshien. Irem has a surprisingly small presence on NES, publishing only four games on the console.

Sqoon is a side-scrolling underwater shoot-em-up with a deeper back story than I expected. The inhabitants of Neptune, aptly named the Neptunians, are facing a planetary crisis. They are an underwater race, but meteorites are destroying their land and they are losing their food, Man-ham livestock. That’s their name for humans, I suppose. (I know it’s weird but it’s in the manual!) They hatched a plan to invade Earth where they will be able to find plenty of food. When they arrived, they melted the ice caps and flooded the world. Earth’s only hope for survival is the pirate Narikeen and his trusty submarine named Sqoon. A desperate plea was just barely enough to entice Narikeen to defeat all the Neptunians and save the Earth.

The shrill warning noises add to the story for sure.

To beat the game, you must pilot the submarine through eight phases. Each one represents a location on Earth that you must secure from the Neptunians. You begin in New York and kind of circumnavigate the globe, ending at the North Pole. Unfortunately, Sqoon doesn’t have an ending, but if you can complete all eight phases and loop back to the beginning, that is good enough.

Sqoon has simple controls. You use the D-pad to move in all eight directions. You are limited to traveling underwater only, but this takes up most of the screen so you have a lot of room to work with. The A button fires your missiles. This is the default, straight-shooting weapon, and you can have several missiles on screen at once. The B button fires your ice ball gun. This shot arcs downward and is useful for taking out ground targets. You have unlimited shots of both weapons and you will be doing a whole lot of button mashing in Sqoon. The ice ball gun is a little harder to use and you can only have one ice ball on screen at a time, but some enemies can only be destroyed by it. The Start button pauses the action. When paused, the game plays a different song instead of silence like in most other games.

The primary mechanic to Sqoon is the fuel system. You begin with 60 units of fuel as indicated on the lower left of the screen. Fuel is consumed quickly, but there are a couple of ways to refuel. The main method is to get a fuel drop from the motorized island that can appear on the surface. You have to exchange either nine humans or one human plus a piece of gold to get a drop. There are pods on the ocean floor that hold humans and you can release them if you strike it with an ice ball. The people will spread out and you can collect them into your submarine. An indicator will briefly appear next to your sub showing how many people you have inside. Gold comes from the recurring crab also on the ocean floor. Bop him with an ice ball, and he will jump backward and turn into a gold piece. You can then grab it but you must be quick. He will turn back into a crab if you leave him alone too long and he is deadly to the touch. Once you meet either requirement, the island will appear above you. Navigate to the surface and mash the B button to drop off gold or people and get your reward. The other way to refuel is to take a death, either by colliding with an enemy or running out of fuel. Naturally, you want to avoid this if you want to get far in this game.

Save the helpless people!

By taking nine people to the motorized island, your fuel drop also doubles as a weapon powerup for your missiles. The default missile is the horizon missile. Grab one weapon powerup to turn that into the Bow-wow missile, and grab another one to turn that into the Adenoid missile. The horizon missile is consumed whenever it hits an enemy. The Bow-wow missile has the same straight trajectory but a single missile can defeat many enemies in a row. The Adenoid missile is a narrow three-way shot that has piercing bullets like the Bow-wow missile. The one bad thing with the Adenoid missile is that you can only fire one shot at a time, though it is powerful enough to still be useful under that limitation. If you lose a life, you go back one weapon, as well as lose any people you have saved up to that point.

There are a bunch of different underwater enemies in this game. There are fish, snails, shrimp, shells, and frogs, just to name a few. Despite the graphical variety, they use just a few distinct movement patterns. The most common movement is a loop-de-loop. It’s really an annoying pattern to deal with, but since you see it so often you eventually get used to it. Other patterns are more typical like a zig-zag or coming at you in a straight line. A few enemy types stand out. Sharks are non-lethal to Sqoon, but they will eat people floating around. Tall, pointy shells emerge from the ground and move straight up. These are indestructible and just get in the way. There are also minefields of little bobbing mines that you can take out with the ice ball gun for 1000 points each.

The levels themselves are quite plain. Each Phase begins with a cityscape in the back. It’s not super nice looking but pretty well detailed for such an early title. You will regularly pass by factories. These are large structures that have a lot of moving parts to them. Those parts can be destroyed with a direct hit of your ice ball gun. They also have at least one pod that releases humans. Near the end of the phase, you pass through a minefield as mentioned above. Then, unless you are in Phase 1, you reach the enemy base. Here the scrolling stops for a little while and you have to fend off swarms of enemies. It’s not mandatory to take out parts of the base but I always do. Other than these events, the rest of the levels are just plain backgrounds and are only distinguished by enemy patterns and the layout of the occasional ground factories.

The cities are about the only background decoration.

The very first enemy in each stage is a special one. It’s a sea slug sitting on the ocean floor. You can hit it with an ice ball for 200 points, but it doesn’t die. You have to hit it on the back of the slug for this to work, but if you hit it exactly ten times it will transform into a necklace. Grab this necklace to get an extra life. If you hit the necklace with the ice ball gun it turns back into the slug. It’s nice to find this extra life every stage. There are also extra lives of various shapes that you can find in the game. Usually they are near the city at the start of the phase but sometimes appear elsewhere. What is special about the necklace is that you can trigger a weird event with it. If you have the necklace and can defeat an entire factory without dying, it turns the whole background to one solid, bright color. Play continues as normal except you don’t use any fuel during this time. It all feels like a glitch but it appears to be intentional. The screen eventually goes back to normal and you start consuming fuel again.

This was my first time beating Sqoon. I had played it once before in 2015 as part of the Nintendo Age contest. Looking back, I must not have had time to play that week because I didn’t get past Phase 2. Sqoon is an uncommon cart, but I have had two copies. I bought one at a nearby game store for either $10 or $12 sometime in 2014, and then I bought another copy online for around $30 in early 2015. Sqoon has an unusually fragile label. I picked up the second copy sight unseen in hope of a label upgrade and it wasn’t any better. The one I kept has a large rip in one of the corners. Either way, it was a good value buy. Sqoon has similar selling characteristics as Chubby Cherub. A loose cart sells for around $75 now, but the box and manual are even more hard to come by and are much more expensive. While values can be fluid, expect to pay $250 or higher for a complete copy. If I really want a label upgrade down the road, then I’ll have to pay for it.

These shelled enemies are awful.

It took me just a few days to beat Sqoon. It’s a tough game, but it seems like it gets easier more quickly than other games like this. The hurdles are coping with the enemy patterns, acquiring the items, and constantly staying refueled. A lot of enemies can simply be avoided, and once you get the hang of adding fuel you will always be prepared for your next drop well ahead of time. The middle levels seem to pose the biggest threat. There is a shelled enemy that shows up here which takes many hits to beat and has that curly movement pattern. There are enough extra lives in the game to keep afloat (sorry) and I can survive a few deaths in the harder sections and still be okay. The fuel recovery loop clicked with me at the same time I figured out the secret to getting the pendant from the slug.

Once you get the hang of the game, seeing it through to the end is a slog. It’s a slow scrolling game and some of the levels drag on a lot longer than they should. There’s not much variety throughout the game. It’s fun for a little while, but it grows old. The only other thing out of the ordinary in Sqoon appears at the end of the seventh phase. After passing the base, the screen switches over to a message from the Neptunians indicating that reinforcements are on their way. It’s jarring when it shows up so unexpectedly, but then you don’t get any other message when you finish the final phase.

When I first beat the game, I wasn’t recording anything. I left my NES on throughout the day and chipped away at the game. I played through the second loop, which only consisted of a few minor graphical changes. I took a peek at the NES Ending FAQ and the author indicated you get a special message near the end of the third loop. I completed that, but I didn’t see anything different. I went as far as to examine the ROM on my computer and look for text to see there were any other messages in-game. I was able to locate all the main text within the game, but nothing else. Perhaps this secret message is embedded into the background tiles somehow, instead of using the normal letter tiles that are used for all other text. I couldn’t find any other evidence online of anything in Sqoon past the second loop. In my opinion, completing one loop of Sqoon is good enough. I played through two loops in my longplay video just to show off the minor differences.

You want to collect the necklace at every opportunity.

There’s one more bit of trivia about the Famicom version of Sqoon. Famicom carts are interesting in that they come in various shapes, sizes, and colors. One notable trait of Irem’s early games is the inclusion of a red LED light on the front of the cart that lights up when the game is turned on. The Famicom is a top-loading console and lacks any power light like the NES has, so this was a neat little feature. I assume it became too expensive to include the LED on the carts, so later printings of Irem’s games do not have the LED. The non-LED Sqoon variant is harder to come by and therefore more valuable to collectors. I bet you thought I couldn’t come up with anything more obscure than NES cart variants.

Sqoon is a pretty good NES game for its time. It has many enemies with complicated patterns, and some interesting mechanics that don’t appear often in shooters. The graphics aren’t great by today’s standards, but they are suitable and have some nice detail under the early limitations of NES carts. The music is nice. The gameplay does suffer a bit in its hit detection with the ice balls, but it is something you can compensate for with some experience. I’d say it is one of the weaker NES shooters overall. It’s okay to pass on it, especially if you insist on having an expensive hard copy.

#74 – Sqoon