We are still waiting on a suitable Amiga AGA emulator with robust recording features before tackling such games.Blast Radius
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Player's Review
Blast Radius For the Original Playstation, Developed by Psygnosis Camden Studio and Publishing by Psygnosis in 1999. The game is using 256x240 with uncorrected aspect ratio in game (in contrast to Colony Wars which is already corrected for this gfx mode). An aspect corrected video will be available on Archive.org.
The game was released after the great Colony Wars yet somehow feels like a much earlier game with possibly an earlier version of the same game engine used in the colony wars series. Everything that made Colony Wars good is not included in this game. Apart from the short intro sequence there is not much more fmv in the game to drive the story. What story... More like the game Darklight Conflict, the game keeps giving you a series of missions to keep fighting back against the enemy even though for all 40 missions you are up against it all the time. Even though you win every mission, the enemy just keeps pushing you more and more to the brink of collapse. The lighting and particle effects are nice but seem to me to be better in the Colony Wars games. There is an issue with contrast making some ships/objects to dark to see, almost invisible. The Music in this game is of the usual great quality from Psygnosis.
The main game mechanic to make this game stand out is the ...Blast radius that you get when killing the enemies, especially the larger ones. If you are too close you will be destroyed instantly. The game is split up into 10 sectors, 4 missions in each. After sector 5 and 7 you are rewarded with new ships. There are 9 ships in total but you only start with 4 to choose from with an upgraded version of chosen ship after sector 5 and a wraith ship after sector 7 which is the same no matter which ship was chosen at the start. There are 40 missions and most of them have simple destroy everything to win objectives. Sometimes you have defence missions where you have to make sure at least 1 cruiser survives. This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't follow the usual Combat sim trope of the capital ships being completely defenceless and have paper thin armour and requiring that only one enemy fighter needs to get 1 good shot off to win. and it makes these missions annoying overall.
In the Longplay I play through all 40 missions. The missions can certainly be completed in faster time by making sure only primary objectives are focused on. I spend much time to just killing everything for bounty rewards so that I could afford all upgrades as soon as possible. One thing the Control Screen does not make clear is how ECM is used which requires double tapping primary fire. You will see these often fired by accident as I mash the fire button for no reason at all as I could just hold fire. Also there is a power shot by holding primary and secondary fire buttons but I do not use it as its pretty weak considering the time it takes to charge. At the start of each mission your rockets/mines are refiled. However I noticed that when I bought the mines, the cluster bombs vanished and I had to rebuy. I am not sure but I think it was because I used all cluster bombs in previous mission and so I had to rebuy the upgrade. Also not with the Nuke, you only get one and have to rebuy it if you use it.
00:00:00 Intro + Sector 1
00:13:45 Sector 2
00:27:10 Sector 3
00:45:27 Sector 4
01:01:28 Sector 5 (Enhanced ship)
01:17:40 Sector 6
01:34:01 Sector 7
01:51:58 Sector 8 (Wraith Ship)
02:08:57 Sector 9
01:27:37 Sector 10
The game was released after the great Colony Wars yet somehow feels like a much earlier game with possibly an earlier version of the same game engine used in the colony wars series. Everything that made Colony Wars good is not included in this game. Apart from the short intro sequence there is not much more fmv in the game to drive the story. What story... More like the game Darklight Conflict, the game keeps giving you a series of missions to keep fighting back against the enemy even though for all 40 missions you are up against it all the time. Even though you win every mission, the enemy just keeps pushing you more and more to the brink of collapse. The lighting and particle effects are nice but seem to me to be better in the Colony Wars games. There is an issue with contrast making some ships/objects to dark to see, almost invisible. The Music in this game is of the usual great quality from Psygnosis.
The main game mechanic to make this game stand out is the ...Blast radius that you get when killing the enemies, especially the larger ones. If you are too close you will be destroyed instantly. The game is split up into 10 sectors, 4 missions in each. After sector 5 and 7 you are rewarded with new ships. There are 9 ships in total but you only start with 4 to choose from with an upgraded version of chosen ship after sector 5 and a wraith ship after sector 7 which is the same no matter which ship was chosen at the start. There are 40 missions and most of them have simple destroy everything to win objectives. Sometimes you have defence missions where you have to make sure at least 1 cruiser survives. This wouldn't be so bad if they didn't follow the usual Combat sim trope of the capital ships being completely defenceless and have paper thin armour and requiring that only one enemy fighter needs to get 1 good shot off to win. and it makes these missions annoying overall.
In the Longplay I play through all 40 missions. The missions can certainly be completed in faster time by making sure only primary objectives are focused on. I spend much time to just killing everything for bounty rewards so that I could afford all upgrades as soon as possible. One thing the Control Screen does not make clear is how ECM is used which requires double tapping primary fire. You will see these often fired by accident as I mash the fire button for no reason at all as I could just hold fire. Also there is a power shot by holding primary and secondary fire buttons but I do not use it as its pretty weak considering the time it takes to charge. At the start of each mission your rockets/mines are refiled. However I noticed that when I bought the mines, the cluster bombs vanished and I had to rebuy. I am not sure but I think it was because I used all cluster bombs in previous mission and so I had to rebuy the upgrade. Also not with the Nuke, you only get one and have to rebuy it if you use it.
00:00:00 Intro + Sector 1
00:13:45 Sector 2
00:27:10 Sector 3
00:45:27 Sector 4
01:01:28 Sector 5 (Enhanced ship)
01:17:40 Sector 6
01:34:01 Sector 7
01:51:58 Sector 8 (Wraith Ship)
02:08:57 Sector 9
01:27:37 Sector 10
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