Blaster Master (book)

File:Worlds of Power - Blaster Master - Paperback - USA - 1st Edition.jpg

First edition, US paperback.

Blaster Master is a young adult novelization of the video game Blaster Master, and the first book in the Worlds of Power series. Like all books in the series, it is attributed to "F. X. Nine," but the internal text describes the author as "A. L. Singer," which is a pen name for Peter Lerangis. It was published by Scholastic in 1990.

My mother allowed me to buy this book from a monthly school book catalog. Although I didn't know anything about the game on which it is based, I knew it was an NES game, and that was enough to enticed me. I enjoyed the book enough that it made me seek out and play the game. It was only then that I learned how little the book had to do with the game.

Review

Good

• The book is fun and properly geared toward children.
• The book has a much more interesting backstory than the one found in the game: "boy's pet frog escapes and leads him to radioactive waste where he falls into an underground cavern and steals a futuristic tank."
• The characters created for the book add important camaraderie to the main character, and allow dialogue to an otherwise dialogue-free game. The character Eve was even ret-conned into later installments of the game!

Bad

• The book uses a lot of artistic license adding to and changing a fair amount of the game.
• Some of the writing is a bit hokey, but then, it is written for elementary school students.
• The jokes surrounding Eve's inability to grasp American idioms are pretty bad.
• The book glosses over the later levels, bosses, and power-ups of the game with a single page.
• I know it was implied in the game's American introduction, but having the bosses be pets that were lured underground required a huge stretch of the imagination. How does a pet lobster escape an aquarium into the underground? And what type of animal is the mechanical laser cube of world 3 supposed to represent?

Ugly

• Nothing.

Media

• Worlds of Power - Blaster Master - Paperback - USA - 1st Edition.jpg

  1st edition, US paperback.

• Worlds of Power - Blaster Master - Paperback - USA - 2nd Edition.jpg

  2nd edition, US paperback.

• Worlds of Power - Blaster Master - Paperback - UK.jpg

  UK paperback.

Links

• goodreads.com/book/show/762662.Blaster_Master - GoodReads.
• atarihq.com/tsr/odd/scans/bm.html - Review.
• gamebooks.org/Item/3632 - Game Books.