Blaster Master (book)

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Blaster Master is a young adult novelization of the video game Blaster Master published by Scholastic in 1990. It is the first book in the Worlds of Power series, and, like all books in the series, it is attributed to "F. X. Nine." The internal text lists the author as "A. L. Singer," which is a pen name for Peter Lerangis.

My mother allowed me to buy this book from a monthly school book catalog. Although I didn't know anything about the game on which it is based, I knew it was an NES game, and that was enough to enticed me. Though I found the book a bit childish when I read it, I still enjoyed it enough to seek out and play the game. It was only then that I learned how little the book had to do with the game.

Status

I still own my badly worn original and have read it.

Review

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

  • The book is fun and properly geared toward children.
  • The book has a much more interesting backstory than the one found in the game, which is: "boy's pet frog escapes and leads him to radioactive waste where he falls into an underground cavern and steals a futuristic tank that just happened to be there."
  • The characters created for the book add important camaraderie to the main character, and allow dialogue to what would otherwise be a dialogue-free story. The character Eve was even ret-conned into later installments of the canon games!

Bad

  • The book uses a lot of artistic license adding to and changing a fair amount of the game.
  • Some of the writing is a bit hokey, but then, it is written for elementary school students.
  • The jokes surrounding Eve's inability to grasp American idioms are pretty bad.
  • The book glosses over the later levels, bosses, and power-ups of the game with a single page.
  • I know it was implied in the game's American introduction, but it doesn't make much sense for Jason to believe that one of the bosses was his pet frog, or that any of the bosses were really pets. The first and third area bosses are clearly not pets, and how does a pet lobster escape an aquarium into the underground anyway?

Ugly

  • Nothing.

Media

Links

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