Road Blaster (Avenger) | Sega Saturn playthrough (JPN) | Real hardware
1Road Blaster (AKA Road Avenger in the west) was first released in 1985 on Arcade laserdisc and quickly became popular due to its innovative gameplay and cutting-edge graphics. In the game, players control a high-speed sports car and must race through city streets while avoiding obstacles and outrunning the police.
Review –
It’s not hard to be impressed by the graphics of this game 20 years later, and I’m this is one of few timeless games that will always look good. Thanks to it’s excellent animation team, this looks exactly like an anime. OK the resolution could be better, but that’s for a 4K HD remaster to deal with.
Like many versions, this is an exact replica of the laserdisc arcade game, but different systems are able to provide better resolutions. Most people would have been aware of this game from the Mega-CD, even though a lot of people aren’t familiar with the console, this is one of it’s flagship games. And for good reason. It’s a hell of a showpiece for the CD based console revolution. Most FMV games were pretty bad but this one stands out and is still good today.
The gameplay is simple. Just press the corresponding button when it flashes on screen. This is a 100 times better than the old way of guessing when you should press the button like on other FMV titles, so you don’t have to die every 2 seconds to learn what to do next. This keeps the pace going for a long time before you die, and makes it much more exciting.
There are only 4 buttons to press. Left, right, turbo, and brake. I did find sometimes that turbo didn’t work for me. Then I found out in the instructions that you have to move a cursor into a box at the same time. This actually did make it hard because it’s not clear enough in your face, when you should use turbo, so I worked out that I could just hold on to the turbo button for the whole run! Later on, I thought of another trick. I wondered if I could also hold the brake button since it doesn’t seem to be counting the when I press the button. To make astonishment, it worked. I could trick the game by holding the Brake and turbo button for the whole run and just concentrate on left and right.
This makes it a bit cheaty but a lot more pleasurable experience. I’m not a kid who’s spent my birthday money on the game and has to get his money’s worth. Time is money at my age!
Anyway, I did the Mega CD version without knowing this trick years ago so I get a pass.
This is a great blast through and even better with my new trick.
Rating – 8/10
Difficulty – 6/10
Original (JPN/NTSC) game played on PAL Sega Saturn with NTSC converter cartridge.
Picture split between CRT TV for my own viewing and OSCC scan converter with 2x line doubler, upscaled to HDMI for recording
No cheats used
Easy difficulty
Losses cut out
Box art from thumbnail is taken from my own collection
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