Blasto is a 1998 3D third-person shooter platform game developed by Sony Interactive Studios America, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation. Phil Hartman voiced Captain Blasto, an extremely muscular, alien-fighting, dimwitted captain.

The Story Behind Blasto

Instead of texture mapping, vertex lighting was used to give color and definition to the floors. Producer and designer Jonathan Beard stated that the game's protagonist Captain Blasto was conceived as a parody of heroes such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers but with a comedic amount of overconfidence. While developing the character, Beard claimed the team had Hartman in mind while coming up with his voice.

Though it was not announced until the June 1997 Electronic Entertainment Expo, Blasto had been secretly in development since 1995. Because vertex lighting is a time-consuming process for artists, Sony gave the Blasto team carte blanche in taking artists from other teams to get the project completed on time. Initially announced for a late 1997 release, Blasto was later pushed back to the first quarter of 1998.

How Blasto Plays

Blasto was a high profile project for Sony, which invested a great deal of development resources on unorthodox programming techniques and a heavy marketing push towards making it a bestseller. The game was met with an unfavorable response, as critics said it suffers from frustrating controls, derivative concepts, and long stretches of play time spent wandering in search of objectives. The enemies are aliens that teleport in around the player based on events that are triggered as the player explores the environment.

Blasto is a 1998 3D third-person shooter platform game developed by Sony Interactive Studios America, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation. The left stick offers better movement control than the D-Pad and the right stick can be used to adjust the player's aim. The game is a 3D third-person shooter platformer.

Why Players Still Load It Up

The end result is somewhat different." Like the EGM reviewers, GameSpot concluded that "There's a good game here - that can be seen from the first three levels - it's simply hidden under many layers of frustration. No one wants to die in an action game by falling either - they want to die getting eaten by a tentacle beast with fangs!" GameSpot instead cited the frequency with which enemies appear by teleportation as the biggest frustration, and both GameSpot and IGN found frustration in how enemies can shoot through some obstacles that block the player's shots. Shawn Smith of Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM), for example, commented that "Blastos problem is bad control.

Avoiding enemy fire is way too hard and falling to your death is way too easy, even when using the Analog pad. Smith and Next Generation both found the dimwitted superhero theme had become a tired cliche, with Next Generation saying it was particularly derivative of the 1996 video game Captain Quazar. Swinging Blasto around precisely is difficult, and he makes his strafing move with hard-to-manage, quick, choppy steps." IGN and Next Generation criticized that players often end up wandering through the massive levels with no way of knowing where to go for long periods.

Blasto — Frequently Asked Questions