Previous Next

At the risk of editorialising, there's something I've always thought that Nintendo understood about handheld gaming that virtually no-one who has tried to enter the arena has ever quite caught on to. The PSP's library largely consists of PS2 style games (only smaller), whereas the DS has a library full of real handheld style games. There's an art to writing a good handheld game, it should be clear, it should be playable on a screen as small as a couple of inches and it should be possible to enjoy it when you only have five minutes to spare. A decent proportion of the PSP library won't even load in that time, let alone award you with any quality game-play.

I bring this up because if there's one game I've ever played in my life that epitomises the well executed handheld experience it's this one. Blast Arena goes from power on to game in about 15 seconds, a typical game is going to be around a minute, it's never difficult to know exactly what's going on and with the high score saving there's always a goal to achieve. Even better if you act while they're still available you can have your very own cart in your hand for £5.50, a perfect handheld game price to boot.

So to backtrack a little, the object of Blast Arena is really very simple. By moving your cursor freely around a single screen play area you simply have to collect the yellow squares (flanges) which appear regularly. Whilst doing so, you have to avoid the cluster bombs that appear randomly across the playing field, explode, and scatter bullets in eight directions. That's it, the game mechanics in their entirety - the only other thing even on screen is a waveform based on the music, but this can be disabled (some players may find it distracting).

Ah yes, the music. You can't quite credit the author for it, as it's borrowed from 90's Amiga game 'Pinball Illusions' (menu and credits music comes from a couple of other Amiga titles). That said, you'd never notice since it suits the game absolutely perfectly and the music player used produces an incredibly rich and immersive playback through my DS lite. The appearance of the first bombs, and some of the others, is synced to the music and it helps the immersion immensely. It turns this game from a playable curiosity into a true experience.

If I may raise a small downside, the controls just occasionally let the game down. While in most situations the quick, smooth movement of your ship is beneficial and incredibly well executed, it occasionally appears over sensitive and when making small movements it is annoyingly easy to overshoot, often into the path of an oncoming bullet. Learning to avoid this almost turns the game into a little more of a strategic experience as picking your moments to make a run across the screen become ever more important. [Ahem - if you read the instructions Dudley, you'll see that the 'A' button makes you move faster whereas the 'B' button can be used to slow you down. So there you go, problem solved! - JM]

A version on a bigger machine with analogue controls would probably be a lot of fun, but it would also lose a lot of the charm and this is certainly a game that is happiest in portable form. Squeezing it into a big console would be as much of a mistake as trying to make a full size PS2 game work on a handheld.

Blast Arena could well be the perfect handheld game, and while I only spend five minutes on it at a time, I can see myself spending those five minutes at least once a week for the rest of my life. For the considerably less a tenner it cost me it probably qualifies as bargain of the millennium. With no more than about 200 copies available on cart in the world, any self respecting GBA, SP, Micro or DS owner needs to get themselves one of these.

Out of all the GBA games in my collection, Blast Arena Advance is by far my favourite. It's basic premise and commercial quality production make it really stand out from other homebrew titles, and I'm actually quite surprised that no-one actually licensed this release - as Dudley stated above, it really is the perfect handheld game.

In addition to the above review, it's worth noting that the credits screen contains a nifty little conversion of the classic snake game, and each time you succeed in collecting all of the glowing orbs (thus spelling out 'Blast Arena') you'll unlock one of seven secret cheat modes that radically change the way that Blast Arena Advance plays. Genius!