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Review
Those who cast a cynical eye over modern games and secretly wish for the simplicity of old favourites like Space Invaders or Donkey Kong will welcome Blast Works with open arms. Courtesy of avant-garde game designer Kenta Cho, Blast Works uses modern technology to mimic the old polygon style of arcade games and embrace the old rather than the new.
Most of Cho's work has simply been shareware but Blast Works - a port of Cho's game Tumiki Fighters - is the first to be made available for consoles. The goal is simple: maneuver your ship/plane along a basic sideways scrolling environment whilst shooting down other aircraft. Since they shoot back, you'll need to dodge their bullets, missiles and lasers. A single hit kills you instantly.
So, the graphics are deliberately basic (the outline of your plane even blurs when you move), but if you can get past the crude visual aesthetic you quickly find it's a very addictive game that requires total hand-eye coordination; something that arcade fans claim was lost over the years in favour of flashy 3D environments and epic storylines.
Blast Works is just like Space Invaders or Ikaruga then, we hear you cry, but the interesting thing about Blast Works is that once an enemy has been hit, it will break up and float to the bottom of the screen. If it touches your plane then it'll stick there and act both as a shield (saving you from bullets) and an extra weapon because it keeps on firing. If you have a dozen aircraft attached to you then your pattern of fire will be extremely wide, giving you a greater chance of survival.
Since you can fly all over the screen, catching the somersaulting planes becomes something of an art. If they attach to you upside down their guns will fire uselessly behind you, so you must time your catch so the guns face front with yours. In terms of difficulty you can start as a rookie, a pilot or an ace; this denotes how thick the enemy waves will be on screen.