Games for Lunch: Blast Works

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0:26 I think I'm starting to get the hang of this retracting thing, finally. The pattern goes something like this: Use the big firepower from your collected pieces to shoot a bunch of shots, retract to dodge the enemy bullets, then expand to catch the pieces from the defeated enemies. Repeat until you take up half the screen!

0:28 I die and all my collected pieces go flying, but I collect them all again quickly with my new ship. Nice!

0:29 Now that I've got the basic expand-retract pattern/strategy down, I've built myself back up from zero lives to eight. My score, and therefore my extra lives, go up a lot more quickly when I have a lot of crazy crap attached to my ship.

0:30 The second boss goes down quickly, thanks to the massive armada I've built up over the level. Once the boss is gone, though, so are my accumulated pieces. What a gyp!

0:32 Once your ship gets to a certain size, aiming becomes more of an abstract concept than a hard-and-fast rule. There are so many bullets and pieces on the screen, it's a bit ridiculous.

0:34 I go into the third boss with less firepower thanks to an inopportune death. The bullet patterns here are particularly tricky. It gets a bit easier as I take out his cannons one by one and add them to my arsenal, but I have real trouble hitting the protected weak point as I dodge. I lose 10 lives in the matter of three minutes. Sigh.

0:38 On to arcade mode, which apparently does know the meaning of the word continue. Hurrah!

0:40 If there's one thing this game teaches, it's how to use the entire screen. Dodging up and down isn't good enough -- you have to move forward and back and all around, sometimes very quickly.

0:42 I must be getting better, because now I'm breezing through the first level with more lives than I started with. It's all about the skillful retracting -- this game is much more strategic than it first appeared.

0:47 I can't overstress the importance of having a lot of firepower going into a boss. Without it, it's much harder to take them down with the basic pea shooter weapon.

0:49 I use my first continue in level three. If this were campaign mode I'd have to start over. Why that fact justifies a whole different mode, I have no idea. It's really just a harder difficulty.

0:51 It would be nice if the camera could zoom out a little. When your ship takes up literally three-quarters of the screen, it can get a bit ridiculous.

0:54 The third boss knocks out most of my accumulated firepower rather quickly, but I sneak into an undulating opening to finish it off. Campaign 1 is complete! I unlocked the" "wireframe cheat."

0:55 Stage 4 is filled with military-style jets craft that are a lot heartier than anything in the earlier levels. On the plus side, the pieces I get have a lot more firepower. On the minus side, they seem fond of rushing kamikaze-style right at my craft.

0:57 As I use my second continue, I'm beginning to become aware that WHERE exactly you catch the falling pieces is important. Having a big gun that fires exclusively backwards is not nearly as useful as one that can fire forwards and protect my front flank.