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[ElTopo]

Confession: I'm pretty burned out on MetroidVania. I've played all of the 2D Metroids and beaten all of them except for 1 and 2 (they didn't age well). I've begun playing the Prime series. I've beaten Symphony of the Night and 2 of the 3 GBA Castlevanias. I've played and beat Herocore (Awesome game, check it out here. and watch the trailer. ). At some point you just get burned out with a certain genre or franchise. And MetroidVania was having that effect on me. I played Cave Story and put about an hour into it before I said "Ugh, this crap again." and moved on. Same with the other MetroidVania Castlevanias. Same with Metroid Prime 1. I don't think these games are bad by any stretch of course. But on the whole I just got tired of the genre.

Enter Blaster Master Overdrive (on WiiWare) and I'm actually getting into it. For one thing it fixes a few issues the original game had: namely the overhead levels being too long and tedius, the lack of a map system, and the biggest crime of all; no save system and no paswords. I have no idea how someone is supposed to beat that game in one sitting without a guide.

I was expecting a remake of the 1st game and it really isn't. It's an entirely different game when compared to the 1st and 2nd (which I feel is pretty underrated). It's also surprisingly difficult. It's not a cake walk by any stretch and if you don't play carefully you will get wrecked.

I've only put an hour into it but I dig it.

 

[TriAceJP]

I will always love/hate this game.

The first level theme is still amazing.

 

[ElTopo]

It's kinda' sad that this was Sunsoft's last hurrah and it was meant to re-launch them in the gaming market.

 

[ElTopo]

How is Sunsoft still around? I did a bit of research and it looks like they've done nothing but release one WiiU VC console game (Sky Kid on the NES). And that happened last year.

 

[Boney]

Uh dude.. Play Cave Story. It's only back and forth for the first third of the game or so, after sand zone it's mostly smooth sailing

Never played BMO though, not a fan of the original, way too confusing, and I have no problem with Metroid 1

 

[ElTopo]

One last bump. I just beat it. It's pretty good. It had me stumped for a little bit when I got the Grappling Hook and Hover upgrade and kept missing a route. It's about a 5-6 hour long game.

Pros

Good soundtrack.

Improves on the original game with a map system and more weapon variety in the overhead levels

Fair difficulty. It's definitely not a cake walk but not quite oldschool hard either. There's a few points where you really just want to find a save point without backtracking and they're pretty stingy with that.

Final boss was pretty cool. It was an interesting DPS race.

Cons

The sprites were pretty 'meh' for me. Real 8 or 16 bit sprites would have been preferred over the faux 2D look.

Limited options. There's no sound or video options or anything. I bring up this point because in the overhead levels the sounds of your two laser weapons are pretty obnoxiously loud. They easily drown out the soundtrack, that's just how loud they are.

It felt pretty linear. Similar to Metroid Fusion. It doesn't seem very friendly to sequence breaking.

Some of the overhead levels just went on too long and it sucked playing one of them for almost 5 minutes and have no real reward for going through it. There's a couple of these levels that place the gun powerup at the very end of a fairly hard gauntlet of enemies and that's it. Nothing else. Why do that, when you can go back to another level and easily get your gun powerups?

The homing gun in the overhead levels felt completely worthless. It does less damage then the other guns and unless you've fully upgraded it it isn't terribly useful. It feels more like a sacrificial weapon, such as you don't want to lose your upgrades on the other two weapons and equip the homing gun because you don't care if you lose upgrades for it.

Also, I hated that we fight the same boss twice and there's no difference other than he has one new fire attack. It's only the 3rd boss too.

1 out of 10 rating I'd probably give it a 7.5 or maybe an 8. For comparison, I'd give Metroid Zero Mission a 10, Symphony of the Night a 9, and Herocore a 10.

I don't know what Sunsoft were thinking by just dumping this with no fanfare or pre-release hype. It's a shame it flopped because it does tease future sequels. Make even less sense that Sunsoft never tried to port it, this is the kind of little game that would do well on Steam.