[Update: Majesco sent out a press release with a real release date on it! June 10. This release went out mere hours after our email to Majesco. Coincidence? Most likely.]
We don't know if this is official (but then no Blast Worksdate has ever been official), but Gamestop's release date for Blast Works: Build, Trade, and Destroy has moved from May 20 to June 3. If we weren't looking forward to playing the game, this carrot-and-stick routine would be comical, but really we're just angry. This was originally supposed to come out in October.
Amazon still says May 27. Best Buy says May 29. Were we regular shoppers and not game bloggers (which requires us to try to keep up with release dates and such), we would definitely have given up on following Blast Works by now. We'd just buy it whenever we happened to see it in a store.
Posted May 14th 2008 8:45AM by JC Fletcher Filed under: News
Blast Works Depot, the official site for uploading and trading user-created Blast Works content, is now online (despite the game's current lack of availability). Rather than creating a fancy new corporate-designed website, Majesco worked with an existing Wii community website, Wii FanboyMii Plaza.
It's kind of a brilliant idea -- (some) Wii owners are already used to sharing content on Mii Plaza, and Blast Works content now uses the same interface for trading levels, enemies, ships, bullets, and shapes. Oh, except you can upload and download directly from inside the game. Now all we need is for the game to come out, and for other people to buy it and create interesting things!
It was no mistake that Blast Works: Build, Trade, & Destroy didn't show up on our weekly releases list. We were sure that it was really going to come out this week, but just like every other time we thought Majesco would release the game, Blast Works has been pushed back. The new release date is still within the month, for now, so at least Majesco doesn't have very long to decide to delay it again.
According to Gamestop, Blast Works will be out on the 20th. Amazon says the 27th. We don't know if it'll really be out on either of those dates, but we will still want to buy it whenever.
Well, someone had to step in and tell Nintendo that they're doing a good job with their online platform (even though, and let's face reality here folks, they aren't right now, but we're hoping WiiWare can help change that). Majesco sees Nintendo as doing okay with the online content in titles such as Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Mario Kart Wii, but sees the system as able to do more elaborate and better things. Majesco is planning to make this leap into a bigger world with the release of Blast Works for the Wii.
So what is so envelope-pushing about Blast Works's online functionality? Well, players will be able to create and trade content online. On top of that, players will also be able to head on over to a special website set up by Majesco, where they can browse other content made by users and, through the power of a mouse click, send that content to their own Wii. The best part? No Friend Codes necessary.
Majesco said that Nintendo has helped them make this leap into a world full of more rich and dynamic online content on a console that hasn't had it yet and sees the future as very exciting regarding Wii and the online space. You can read all about how in the MTV Multiplayer interview here.
The latest Nintendo of Europe release schedule contains fairly awesome news for the neglected continent, as there's finally a concrete release date for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Nintendo's wildly popular fighter is hitting stores in the region on June 27th, and there's more happy tidings, with WiiWare and Nintendo Channel set to launch on May 20th and May 30th respectively.
There's little else in the list that both interests us and has a specific date (de Blob and Blast Works have both had a vague "Q2 2008" slapped next to them, though it appears that Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors will be out on May 9th), but heck, why are we yammering to you about this? Check out the latest European dates for yourself past the break!
In a bizarre turn of events, two new scrolling shooters will face off for the money of the tiny audience who buys scrolling shooters on May 6th (well, probably May 7th, since the games ship on the 6th). Both Majesco's Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy and Aksys Games' Castle of Shikigami III will be released on that day, according to Gamestop. This makes May 6th either the most awesome day in years or the worst for shooter fans, depending on their financial situation. There usually aren't two original shooters to choose from within six months of each other!
Exacerbating the shooter overload, Jack of All Games' 3D fighter-jet game Rebel Raiders is also coming out on the same day. Too many options! And of course, all three will be competing with whatever shooters Nintendo puts on the VC that week.
For a game as inventive and unique as Budcat's Blast Works, that sure is some vanilla boxart. Okay, so it's functional in a Ronseal-kinda way, but it's also far from pretty or imaginative (like the game itself). Then again, sporting the kind of cover you'd expect to see on the blandest of Wii budget shovelware didn't harm Game Party's chances, so perhaps this will do the trick, and millions will get to sample Blast Works' original premise and amazing item editor. We can but hope.
Speaking of the item editor, it's the center of attention in the fifteen new Blast Works shots in the gallery below. It looks as deep and as engrossing as ever, and there's some encouragingly weird ships being created in those screens.
Of all the neat stuff about Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy, the free bonus games get the least attention. Even if they are freeware, it's awesome that Majesco is putting four extra shooters on the disc, all of which are great. This latest trailer confirms that in addition to the original TUMIKI Fighters, Kenta Cho's rRootage, Gunroar, andTorus Trooper will be unlockable.
Other awesome things in this trailer include: a very quick shot of a vertically-scrolling level, which would seem to indicate that it's possible to make vertical shooters in the game, and the black-and-white paper-airplane game. If that were a standalone game, we'd buy it. But it isn't. It's just something somebody put together in Blast Works.
Posted Feb 16th 2008 12:00PM by JC Fletcher Filed under: News
Gametap's latest preview of Majesco's Blast Works focuses on the part of the game that has previously received the least attention: the game. A lot has been said about the editor, but, of course, building objects isn't all that much fun without anything to do with them. Luckily, Blast Works, like no other shooter, puts objects to great use.
This is because the powerup system from TUMIKI Fighters is still present. When you shoot an enemy, it falls out of the sky. If it lands on you, it sticks to your ship, firing its own projectiles and acting as armor -- though, according to the preview, "because you're trying to quickly catch them any way and with any part of your ship you can, you wind up having little control over the actual direction that captured guns fire." If you take a hit, a piece of this "armor" falls off. It's quite easy to build up a giant Katamari-like clump of junk around your ship, but you then lose maneuverability and even start to have a hard time figuring out what's going on onscreen.
If there's one thing the Wii has plenty of, it's scrolling shooters, vertical and horizontal. Thanks to the Virtual Console, the Wii has probably the best library of shmups in history. You can go play something like Lords of Thunder or Blazing Lazers right now without even having to go to a store first. That's pretty compelling.
Which means that original disc-based shooters actually face a lot of competition from the VC. If you're just now discovering that you love shooters, you can get some of the best ones ever made for a few bucks. That could mean trouble for Castle of Shikigami III, Monkey King and Blast Works.
If you like shooters, are you content with the vintage offerings? Do you feel that there's enough of a reason to continue checking out the new games, or have you been reveling in undiscovered classics?
Not convinced that Blast Workshas been upgraded enough from the free Tumiki Fighters to be worth money? If so, watch this and learn. This is a totally unique game, unless you've been playing another Wii shooter about Mayor McCheese attaching downed lawn darts to his body to increase his firepower.
Seriously, it would be hard to conceive of a more rigorous test of a game's item-creation utility than Mayor McCheese. Part man, part hamburger, all politician, Mayor McCheese is a big collection of crazy, disparate shapes. And that looks just like him. What you want is what you get in Blast Works. Whoever made that deserves a break today, because it certainly put a smile on. If kids like us were running the world, you could make Mayor McCheese in every game.
If you become skilled enough with Blast Works'item editor, there's no end to what you can do! Like this ... thing with what kind of looks like the sides of a TIE Fighter as ears! It's pink and spiky and shoots triangles at seaplanes! Then, when you've finished creating horrible monsters made out of neat-looking white-outlined blocks, you can take them on with up to three friends -- also flying around in homemade avatars.
This set of four screens found at Wiiz doesn't just tease the multiplayer and the capabilities of the editor, but also shows the creation tool at work. Now we just have to find a way to become creative before the game comes out.
Blast Works: Build, Fuse, and Destroy developers Budcat Creations have started blogging on IGN about the process of remaking Kenta Cho's TUMIKI Fighters into something much more than the original free game. According to the blog, the remarkable item editing capability grew from a desire to create more complex ships than the original game engine would allow. So they built a more fully-featured Shape Editor.
They then stipulated that the artists had to use the Shape Editor to create all the game's assets. The final Shape editor used to develop the levels and the Shape Editor on the disc differ in that "the limits to the maximum dimensions of an individual block and the total number of blocks were removed in the PC version for prototyping." Feedback from the artists then went into refining the engine.
The results can be seen above, in this amazing video of a ship being constructed. We were excited enough when this was just a port of a free game. Now it's a completely new game, and one that looks like it absolutely should not be missed.
Though we haven't forgotten about the low-key releases, we've collected a selection of games and media to ensure that these titles stay on your mind too! Read on for our top ten list of awesome 2008 games that you totally forgot about!
Posted Oct 16th 2007 9:45AM by JC Fletcher Filed under: News
For a while, all we've known about Blast Works's editor mode is that it was feature-rich and awesome. Gametap's Jared Rea (formerly of Joystiq!) got to mess with the editor during a hands-on preview, and found not only an edit mode, but an incredibly versatile shooter creation engine.
Apparently, ships made of "over 100 pieces" are possible, and feature user-defined hitboxes and gun placements. Levels feature custom backgrounds, which can be layered for parallax effects, and populated with enemies designed and placed by the user, which shoot bullets that are also user-drawn. Any drawn element can be used for any other, so enemies can be placed in the background, or used as the protagonist's ship, or anything else.
We really hope to see a community built up around trading custom ships and levels online, through which we could be shooting forever.
[Update: Majesco sent out a press release with a real release date on it! June 10. This release went out mere hours after our email to Majesco. Coincidence? Most likely.]
