Sega CD Longplay #6: Road Avenger ( A.K.A Road Blaster )
13Road Blaster (ロードブラスター?) is a 1985 interactive movie video game produced by Data East for the arcades.
As with other laserdisc-based arcade games from the same time, the gameplay consists of on-screen instructions overlaid over pre-recorded full motion video animated footage of high-speed chases and vehicular combat. The player controls the cross-hair to steer their car toward the correct directions according to the green arrows flashing and beeping beside it, while controlling the gas pedal, brake and booster whenever they light up.
The game has nine stages. Upon successfully completing a level, the player is graded on the reaction time. Different difficulty levels can be selected. In Normal Mode, pop-up icons and audio tones signal when to turn left or right, brake, hit turbo, or hit other cars. In Hard Mode, there are no on-screen icons to guide the player.
The story of Road Blaster is inspired by revenge thriller films such as Mad Max,[ and takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland in the late 1990s United States (a future at the time of the game's release). The player assumes the role of a vigilante who drives a customized sports car in order to get revenge on a biker gang responsible for his wife's death on their honeymoon. After recovering from his own injuries, he upgrades his car and goes on a rampage through nine areas. His goal is to seek out the gang's female boss and complete his vengeance.
Road Blaster uses animation provided by the anime studio Toei Animation. It was animated under the guidance of Yoshinobu Inano, who also directed or key-animated such films such as Gundam: Char's Counter Attack, Macross: Do You Remember Love?, and Transformers: The Movie. It was animated using 15,000 hand-painted cels to produce over 30 minutes of animation. Game director Yoshihisa Kishimoto, who previously worked on Cobra Command, later directed the arcade version of Double Dragon, where the car from Road Blaster can be seen inside the Lee brothers' garage at the start of the game.
Road Blaster was originally released in 1985 as a laserdisc-based arcade game. Various ports were released throughout, including versions for the MSX, X1 Mega CD/Sega CD, LaserActive (in Mega LD format), Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and 3DO Interactive Multiplayer (prototyped as Turbo Blaster). However, only the Sega CD and Mega LD versions were released outside Japan, under the titles Road Avenger and Road Prosecutor, respectively. The titles were possibly changed to avoid confusion with the similarly titled arcade game RoadBlasters by Atari Games, which was ported to the Mega Drive around the same time.[] Road Blaster was also released for the Sharp X68000 and for and Windows in 2011, exclusively in Japan.[ Cobra Command and Road Blaster were ported to iOS by Revolutionary Concepts in 2010 and 2011, respectively.
Other variations included one-shot reproductions for VHS cassette players such as Takara's Video Challenger which was a limited interactive port of the Road Blaster arcade game. The Sega Saturn and PlayStation ports were compilations of Road Blaster and another laserdisc arcade game developed by the same team titled Thunder Storm (known outside Japan as Cobra Command). An unofficial Super NES port was also released in 2011. However, the game does not run on a stock Super NES. It relies heavily on the MSU1 Media Enhancement Chip, a somewhat new chip which allows 4GB of additional storage space, full motion video playback and stereo PCM audio.