0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Block Buster

    

Block Buster is an action arcade game similar to the arcade classic game Breakout. The game was originally released on the 3^rd of February 2000 under the title of Block Kazushi 2 in Japan and was developed by Tamsoft and published by Marvelous Entertaiment.

The game would receive a European release three years later on the 8^th of August 2003, with late Playstation regulars Phoenix Games publishing the game. In addition to the 2003 European release the game the game was re released as a part of the Japanese Simple 1500 series of budget titles.

 

Notable people who worked on the game, Toshiaki Ōta who worked as executive producer on the game and Worked heavily on the Neptunia and Senran Kagura series of games from 2011 onwards. With most recent credits being for Executive Producer on Senran Kagura Peach Beach Splash, Senran Kagura Estival Versus and Cyberdimension Neptunia 4 Goddesses Online in 2017

Notable people who worked on this game, Shintarō Nakaoka who worked as Director on Battle Arena Toshinden has had a long an productive career that is still going strong in 2017, with Nakaoka working on Senran Kagura Estival Versus as a Technical Producer and Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online as Producer. The Neptunia series and the Senran Kagura series have been a regular appearance on his resume since Battle Arena Toshinden 2 released in 1995.

Toshio Ohashi who worked as a Stage Designer on the game, has since worked on Street Fighter IV, working as both the Production and Design Director. He was also the Design Director for Resident Evil 5, more recently he worked as the Production Director on Street Fighter V.

Block Buster or known as Block Kuzushi in Japan is an action arcade game and is very similar to the Breakout series of arcade games. the game features 60 levels with the player controlling a paddle at the bottom of the screen, and bouncing a ball to break and clear the screen of bricks.

Movement of your paddle is done with either the D-Pad or the left analogue stick, movement is either left or right only. Up and down on the D-Pad have other uses, pressing up on the D-Pad is your Plasma Cannon, while pressing down will activate a Jump Ball.

To serve a the X button is used this also controls the small ball, you can increase the speed in which the paddle moves by using the Circle button, the main ball is added by pressing the Select button. The player has a few other options for influencing the game, they can shake either the left or right ball of the game area, as well as the ceiling.

To shake the ceiling of the game area the Triangle button is used, while shaking the left and right ball (could be wall not sure) the L1 and L2 shoulder buttons are used to shake the left, while R1 and R2 are used to shake the right.

During the single player mode of the game, there are two ball types. The first is the blue coloured balls, these are called the main balls and the green balls which received upon the collection of an item called split, these green balls are called split balls.

If the main ball drops off of the screen, your remaining ball count will be reduced by one. Should you lose one of your balls and it is the last of your supply will result in a game over. Split balls when lost off of the screen do not have any effect on your remaining number of main balls. This is why when playing you should always prioritise the return of the main ball over the return of the split balls.

The game features pick ups while playing, these can range from multiple balls, a shooting power this is you plasma cannon as well as other brick breaking power ups. Hazards may appear on screen that will deflect your ball and cause it to take an awkward trajectory.

Block Buster also has a combo system for when you destroy two or more blocks on a shot you will score a significant more amount of points. For example destroying a single brick will get you 100 points, while a combo of 4 will get you 600 points.

The game offers the player a total of three modes to choose from, the first is attack mode, this is the main single player mode which as mentioned above has 60 levels in total for your to test your brick breaking skill on. 

Endless Mode is exactly that test your skill in an endless game and try and score the highest score possible. The final mode is a two player vs mode, this mode sees the screen split in half and two human players competing against each other to clear the screen first.                                                                                          

This being released first in Japan and then late in the Playstations lifecycle in Europe, as a result there are no critic reviews for the game. So we will head over to GameFAQs for their user ratings, but even here we find very little useful data.

Looking at the games overall rating on GameFAQs we find only one user has rated this category, the same for both game difficulty and game lifespan as well. The lack of user ratings result in an inaccurate rating for the game, the single user rating for the game is a 1.5/5.

Moving on to the games difficulty level, the single user who rated this category rated it as having just the right difficulty level. Moving on to the games lifespan again we have just one user rating, which is rated as having around a 20 hour lifespan.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

 

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, where unsurprisingly this Japanese and European only release is not listed on the Gamedude site. So we will quickly move on to Retrogames.co.uk where we find one copy of the game listed, this copy comes complete and is in excellent condition and is priced at £4

Moving on to eStarland.com next, where we don’t find the game available or even listed, so we will quickly move on to Amazon.com, where we also don’t find the game available or even listed. So we will head over to the co.uk version of the site, where we do find a handful of copies available.

The first copy on offer is an acceptable condition copy for £4.04, this copy however does not state the games completeness, the next copy for £6.02 is in good condition but comes without the games manual. The next copy on offer is the first complete copy that is available and comes in very good condition and is priced at £6.29.

Another very good condition copy is also available for £8.52, this copy comes complete. This is the main peak price point for a used copy of the game, with the exception of one copy with a like new copy available for £22.22. In addition to these used copies there is one new copy of the game on offer, this new copy will set you back £20.45.

Written by

P J Gibbon