Story:

While this may be the official story, the gameplay in Blast Corps has little to do with this plot line.

Play mechanics:

The general controls are as follows:

A=Move forward
B=Move backwards
R=Use a vehicles special ability or sound horn.
Z=Exit vehicle.

Control Stick= Steer

C buttons= Control camera position. The left and right C buttons circle the camera left or right. The top and bottom C buttons zoom in or out (by very little).

Control Pad= Some vehicles can also be steered by the control pad.

L button= Usually the same as R

Start= brings up the game's pause screen, giving you access to many different options.

Each vehicle is a little different, and there are too many vehicles to be listed here.

Each "stage" starts out with you clearing a path in front of the runaway carrier. Once this is done, you can re-enter the stage to demolish all of the buildings, "free" the survivors, find any hidden scientists, locate radar dishes that open up "bonus" levels, and light up little lights called RDU's (Radiation Dispersal Units). When all of these things have been done, the level is complete and you receive a gold medal. For each completed level (including the so-called bonus levels), you receive rank points. Get enough Rank points, and you'll be given a new rank.

Stages are grouped together according to difficulty, and a special screen will appear after completing every level in difficulty range.

A Controller Pak is recommended for Blast Corps. It will allow you to save up to four games at 14 pages each. According to the manual, the internal save in the Blast Corps cartridge (for one game only) will not save as much information as a saved game on a Controller Pak. One final note: When the game starts up, Blast Corps automatically creates as many of the four save slots as will fit on the Controller Pak. If you want to use the space occupied by an empty Blast Corps file, you will have to use a Controller Pak management screen (hold start while turning on the N64 with a Controller Pak compatible game inserted) to delete unused games manually.

What's it like to play?:

The only story line you'll get is during the game's opening demo. The gameplay involving the runaway carrier is short and infrequent. You madly destroy a few buildings over a minute or so, and that's it. And truly bizarre is the fact that this one carrier (supposedly headed in a straight line to a detonation site) appears in a web of levels in opposite corners of the world!

What's left after the brief encounters with the carrier is a schizophrenic mess of video gaming. After clearing a path to safety, you must return to save survivors. How do you do this? Demolish the buildings that the survivors are in, that's how. Apparently, the only way to free someone trapped in a building is to bring that building down on top of them. That's just plain nuts.

Another of the goals of Blast Corps is to light up 100 lights called RDU's in each stage. This simply involves driving around the stage (at an unbearably slow speed) until you find them all. Sometimes it's spiced up a bit by having the lights clustered together off in an obscure part of the stage. Very dull indeed.

If you find a radar dish in a level, it will open up a bonus level. What constitutes a bonus level? Several of them involve driving very slowly around very dull race tracks for two minutes at a shot using a hideously uncontrollable vehicle. What a bonus indeed. Other bonus levels are meant to help you get the hang of the vehicles or involve you destroying a few buildings in an allotted time. But these levels have nothing to do with the main plot in the game, aren't much fun (if any), and feel almost like bad shareware games thrown in to stretch out the game's length.

A handful of stages have a scientist hidden in an obscure place. Basic skills acquired from Lemmings or any similar puzzler will allow you to find them. For some reason, all scientists live in trailer homes locked away from reality in some far off cave. Very odd indeed.

So after you've cleared a safe path, lit up 100 RDU's and saved the survivors, what's left? Destroy every building still standing. Now call me crazy, but what's the sense in avoiding an explosion that'll destroy everything just to destroy it yourself?!

Normally a shallow plot would not be a problem when it comes to a game in which you blow stuff up, but in Blast Corps blowing stuff up is actually just a small part of the experience. In most stages, blowing the big stuff up takes less than two minutes and you'll spend the rest of your time searching for tiny little structures to go dust off. The explosions themselves are rainbow colored, and unimpressive when compared to the explosion effects of Turok. The explosions have little bass to them, and the game gave me no sense of accomplishment at demolishing a big building with one blow.

One really annoying aspect of the game is that while buildings may fall with a good nudge, the trees throughout the stages are absolutely immovable, occasionally blocking a necessary path. There's also no rubble after a building's gone, just a patch of dirt.

All of the vehicles are incredibly sluggish when traversing long distances. This makes searching for RDU's and scientists slow and dull. The lack of the ability to zoom far out or to see a map can also make things tedious. The steering is horrible, and the control of the vehicles can be best likened to driving on a surface of wet soap. Not good when precise maneuvers are necessary.

All of the various gameplay experiences in Blast Corps are tarnished by very poor play control. I read this in a magazine prior to playing the game, but I hoped that this was inaccurate. My hopes were squashed early in my Blast Corps experience.

The dump truck is by far the worst offender in the category of play control. The slippery control makes it next to impossible to demolish anything with consistent accuracy or speed. This led me to wonder what on earth ever made the design team think that a dump truck would be a good vehicle for demolition in the first place. In fact, all of the vehicles except the bulldozer and the robots are probably the worst instruments for demolition anyone could have dreamt up. The designers must not have been able to come up with an idea to keep blowing things up from getting old, so they chose the vehicles that they did to make blowing things up very hard to do.

There are two vehicles that are actually fun to use (and that have pretty good control), but they are severely underused in the game. The J-Bomb robot gives a jet-packing experience better than the one in Pilotwings, and stomping on buildings from high above is one of the few instances where I felt satisfaction at destroying something. The bulldozer is also a good vehicle because it can turn in place. This makes steering much easier. The bulldozer is the only other vehicle that makes demolishing buildings consistently fun and easy.

There are lots of superficial touches in Blast Corps that appear to have been thrown into the game to camouflage its flaws. For example, the graphics are eye-popingly close to an SGI simulation. Everything from the water to the indestructible trees is very nicely done. The overall feeling is that of having free reign of the world's largest sand box with a set of Tonka trucks and Hot Wheels. This visually inspired feeling is where almost all of the fun in Blast Corps comes from.

There is some voice from your "teammates" but most of it is hard to make out or is more appropriate for a light-hearted cartoon than a video game involving demolition and nuclear explosives. Most of the music is wildly hyper (I guess there trying to get the player excited about roaming for RDU's), inappropriate for the game's setting and is of a lower sound quality than many N64 games. The Blast Corps music actually gave me a headache after a while!

OK, so it's pretty obvious by now that Blast Corps is not my favorite N64 game, but it's not my least favorite game either. Blast Corps is one of those pointless video games that I spent hours playing when I was much younger. It isn't anything like what had I expected it to be. It feels like the game was originally meant to be a serious game involving a crew of demolition experts, but somewhere along the line Rare decided to make it cartoony and focus less on the plot line. The end result feels muddled and confusing, yet light-hearted and fun in a pointless way.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in Blast Corps is that on the surface it presents itself as an intense game for a teenage audience when in fact it plays like a kiddy game with poor play control. The game seems aimed at a young audience -- one that probably doesn't care so much about the depth of a game, so much as it has enough stuff to keep them busy on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

Whatever the target age group, I found myself playing Blast Corps and going through the motions of its gameplay when there wasn't anything on TV or I didn't have anything else that I wanted to do. Despite its many flaws, I kept playing. It wasn't a whole lot of fun, but I kept moving up in the Blast Corp ranks none the less, driving around in my big virtual sandbox and trying to remember what it was like to play video games at nine years of age.

Blast Corps is by no means a great game (and it's certainly not worth $60), but if you have a dull weekend with nothing to do, Blast Corps would make a good rental to pass the time with. Just be sure that you have a Controller Pak to save your game until the next rainy afternoon.