It’s features like this that keep Blast Off feeling consistent with Bosconian despite being a very different game. Their appearance also tends to coincide with the appearance of the spy ship from Bosconian, also when this shows up on screen, you must destroy it before it escapes, lest you suffer a temporary “Condition Red” status, which supplements the enemy attack patterns with mines that explode into missiles that fire in eight directions when you shoot them. Here, they are much tougher to destroy, requiring multiple shots to their core, so it’s often easier to simply avoid them as you pass by. The enemy formations are fixed each time you play, so it’s possible to learn them different types of enemies also behave in specific ways, so it’s important to learn how to anticipate the way different incoming enemy formations will behave according to your actions.Īs you fly through this initial space stage, you’ll likely come into contact with the hexagon-shaped bases seen in the original Bosconian. The first substage of each stage tends to involve flying through space, fending off enemy formations of various kinds. In Blast Off, each major stage is split into several smaller substages - and these vary quite a bit as you progress through the game, with different backgrounds providing a real sense of proceeding on a journey to assault several different Bosconian bases. Red shots fire in pairs straight forwards in a spiral pattern yellow fires three shots in different directions blue fires two shots in front and behind, similar to the original Bosconian’s Blaster ship and green fires a different configuration of three shots in multiple directions. There are no collectible power-ups in Blast Off, but a tap of the arcade machine’s second button instead allows you to change the Blaster FR’s firing pattern between four different styles and colours.

Most notable of these is the Blaster FR’s ability to switch between multiple weapon configurations. While there are aesthetic and conceptual similarities between the two games, they are actually quite different from one another while Bosconian was a free-flying multidirectional shooter, Blast Off is a more conventional vertically scrolling shoot ’em up, albeit with a few interesting twists along the way.

And, since previous similar operations had gone so well with a lone pilot in charge of defending the entirety of humanity, the UGSF once again only sent one of them into the fray in order to raise some hell.īlast Off, as both the title and the narrative setup suggests, is a follow-up to 1981’s Bosconian, released in Japan in 1989. The Blaster FR’s mission this time around was to fend off the incoming Bosconian invasion forces, penetrate the defences of their powerful space platforms, and destroy them from within.

Bosconian condition red