As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #31, December 2006.

While many Atari arcade titles ported to the NES hardware were produced and published in-house under Tengen, the company could not last forever on the NES.  Worn down by lawsuits and the massive losses from pulling their release of Tetris from the shelves before it ever really got going, Tengen stopped fighting the good fight.  The mysterious black cartridges would be produced no more but that did not mean quality ports of Atari arcade games were never to be seen again.  There was still a lot of money to be had and a huge library of titles ripe for porting onto Nintendo's wonder platform.  The solution was to have Tengen use other publishers to release their games, ones in good standing with Nintendo, that would be licensed legally.  Tengen would either do the development themselves and have the game published by a third party or license the rights for the home version of an arcade game to another developer.  The third party developer would then use a publisher of their choice or publish the game themselves.  One such arrangement is the case with RoadBlasters, published by Mindscape, which made its way onto the NES in early 1990.

RoadBlasters is yet another game that pairs two tried and true video game concepts: driving and shooting.  In a futuristic time you must navigate your high performance armored vehicle through a series of fifty rallies.  However this is more than just a speed race, along the way you'll face swarms of enemy vehicles and obstacles that will stop you dead in your tracks.  More deadly than anything else though is the threat of running out of fuel, out here when you're out of gas you're out of luck.  Fuel is replenished by crossing mid stage checkpoints as well as picking up fuel globes.  Green fuel globes drift along the roadway, Red fuel globes (orange on the NES) are revealed by shooting enemies on the road that are carrying them.  Thankfully your armored vehicle is equipped with powerful guns and can utilize even more powerful special weapons flown in by a support plane.  Consider it Pole Position with shooting as that's a fairly good way to describe the basic gameplay.

With fifty stages in the original, one would assume that the NES version would truncate things somewhat but amazingly all fifty stages are present.  Sure they may not follow the arcade layouts exactly but they're pretty darn close.  Every few stages is bundled into a different region that you drive through.  In both the arcade original and NES version you may start at one of the three first regions: Bubble City (rally 1), Forest Section (rally 4), or Desert Region (rally 11).  This starting stage select was a common practice among Atari arcade games of the time and it's a pleasant surprise to see it included in the NES port.  In fact nearly every screen is a carbon copy of the arcade original, albeit less detailed.  The starting stage select, in-game, and post rally summary screens all look very nice and some real care has gone into bringing as much of the original over as possible.  The in-game graphics aren't as colorful as they were in the arcade but there is a decent level of detail and the sensation of speed is recreated nicely.  When the support plane drops special weapons they attach to your vehicle just as they did in the arcade, again showing the attention to detail present in this port.  The fuel gauges, mine warnings, special weapon quantity readings - all the heads up display items are present and work exactly the same.

Audio is replicated as well as could be expected.  The original had quite an assortment of sound effects and speech clips and while most of the sound effects make it onto the NES, all the speech has been cut due to technical limitations.  The limited musical soundtrack is faithfully recreated for the most part although there wasn't much music in the arcade game to begin with.  The controls are well adapted to the NES control pad considering that the arcade version used Atari's well know steering yoke.  Acceleration and deceleration are controlled by up and down on the directional pad respectively.  The only way to decelerate in the arcade was to lift off the accelerator pedal but the NES method of speed control simulates analog acceleration very nicely.  Steering is controlled by left and right on the directional pad and feels tight and accurate.  While there were two triggers for the guns and two buttons for the special weapons in the arcade, they were simply mirrored on either side of the control yoke.  On the NES the A button fires the guns and the B button is used for special weapons, nothing is lost over the arcade original.

There are few NES arcade ports that have the amount of polish that RoadBlasters does.  Instead of a lackluster port or a stripped down version of the original, a solid effort was made to cram everything possible from the arcade onto the NES.  All the regions are present, all fifty rallies are here, every special weapon has been carried over and works exactly as it did in the arcade, and all the gameplay mechanics are reproduced perfectly.  Simply put, this is one of the most accurate ports of an arcade game onto the NES hardware platform ever created.  Sure it doesn't look as nice but no one should expect it to, the graphics are still very well done and are more than adequate.  Gamers didn't get shortchanged with the NES version of RoadBlasters, the port lives up to the fun and challenge of the original.  After all, that's how things should be done when a game is being recreated on an alternate platform.  Anyone that enjoyed RoadBlasters in the arcade or that thinks that the NES can't produce an accurate version of an arcade title should give this game a try.  It's a very pleasant surprise among the stack of arcade to NES conversions.
 

"InsaneDavid" also runs a slowly growing gaming site at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

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