Blaster Master

Worlds of Power #1

by F.X. Nine (Creator), A.L. Singer (Pseudonym), Peter Lerangis

Jason Frudnick follows his pet to a swamp where a submerged chest leads to an underground cavern populated by a gang of radioactive mutants

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Video Games, Young Adult

119 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1990

About the author

F.X. Nine is a pseudonym used by Seth Godin for the Worlds of Power series. He was the creator of the series and wrote outlines for each book. Authors were hired to write the novelizations based on Godin's vision and outline.

Reviews

[Richard Knight · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember reading this book on the bus ride to school. Memories. The best story ever about a boy and his frog.

[Keith Good · Rating 2 out of 5]

Blaster Master is exactly what you’d expect from a video game adaptation aimed at 1990’s Book Fair kids. It’s often silly, with some admirable attempts at suspense and horror. A fun read for anyone chasing classic NES nostalgia.

[Brandon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very silly and light hearted. Aiming a little too hard for that pre-teen/10ish year old "boy" market to be something I would really recommend.

6/10

[Michael B Tager · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a book intended to get video gaming kids to read, it's pretty great, to be honest. It's weird (not surprising) and kind of wholesome, while still adhering to mutants and robots and sophisticated space car beneath the earth. It also reads exactly like you'd imagine it would, like an adult who was skeptical of video games played this game in order to write a book.

[Charles Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun. I bought my copy when it came out in 90, and to this day I don't know why they started the series with Blaster Master, which was never really a hit, or even a good game.
Granted this is written for a grade school level, but the sparse storyline of the game is fleshed out a bit. Was probably terribly exciting to my 12 year old self.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why does it rate so high...it was a cool game, and probably one of my first sci fi reads in school. Sentimental I know, but it was fun then and not too bad when I re read it lately.

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a neat 30 year old find. It takes the nonexistent storyline from the old Blaster Master Nintendo game and gives it a story. It was a quick fast read. I loved the story. It was fast and fun. It added two extra characters. One is the owner of the tank named Eve and the other was a friend of the main character. I laughed a few times when reading Eve's dialogue. The recent Blaster Master Zero 2017 video game added the character of Eve from the book.

It is not very often I find a book based on an old video game. But I enjoyed this story immensely.

The book is short at only 119 pages and it was made for grammar school kids. I wish I found it when I was a kid. I would have loved it back then too.

[Kristopher Latter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been my favorite of the series so far on this 30 year later reread. While it doesn't convey the nice messages of morality and self-empowerment that Castlevania had, this story is just a pure fun adventure. The videogame roots of this story pull things a little too silly sometimes, but it strikes a balance that probably works perfectly for kids.

I've also read online that this book itself later became cannon in the videogame series. It's a nice touch that at least one of these books has given back to the games it borrowed from. This one stands as a testament to the full potential of what this book series should have continued to be.

[Scot Eaton · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is actually a lot like the game that it was based on. There was no reason for it to be as good as it was. This 70-page junior novel adaptation of a video game could have just gone on autopilot, and it would have sold. But instead, the author created lore, characters, and an actual story. I thought this would just be a nostalgic 80's read, but I actually enjoyed it. It's not a masterpiece, by any means. There is video game lingo shoehorned into the story. For an adaptation of the NES game Blaster Master though, you couldn't get much better.

[James Kirby · Rating 3 out of 5]

For what it is, this really isn't that bad. Sure, the dialogue is all cringy as heck and the "jokes" are absolutely terrible, but the storyline actually follows the game pretty accurately. Shoehorning in gratuitous characters to make sense out of some of the game's bosses is silly (what kind of kid has a pet lobster??), but all in all this would've been a great read back in elementary school.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun read. Would have loved it more as a child. To keep it at the rather short 90ish pages it has a lot of off scene adventures. "Well I'm glad we killed those 9 level bosses."

[Amy Prosser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book as a kid. It would probably be terrible if I re-read it now, but as an elementary school student, it was awesome.

[Nate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Awful.
Loved it.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit of a fun little book. But kinda representative and strange. Can see everything coming from about 5 chapters before. Mercifully brief, clocked it in about 2/3 hours!

[Derrick McDonald · Rating 1 out of 5]

Um...I didn't want to play the game after reading this. What boat load of crap.

Okay that is my whole review.

[Willow Redd · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of my major issues with the World of Power books is that the writer takes a bit too much creative license with the original story. For example, in Blaster Master, Jason is not aided by anyone, yet in the book he's got a young girl from an alien world and a human boy who failed the same mission he is now on. Personally, I think this book would have been better if it had just been Jason against the Plutonium Boss (and really, American Sunsoft employees, that's the best you can do?).

As with the other Worlds of Power books, the writing is very amateurish. While I understand that the book is intended for a young audience, that doesn't mean it should be written by one. Seriously, this book reads like an eleven year old wrote it. That doesn't really work for me, nor would it have worked for me when I was eleven (which I was when this book came out).

The most depth in the entire book comes when Jason defeats the final Underboss, only because he thinks he has killed his pet frog, Fred. Fred is also the reason Jason has found himself in this situation (which is the one detail the writer sticks to, fortunately). Of course, since writer's like this don't think kids can handle death (like all those Disney movies we grew up on didn't prepare us), things work out and everyone (and every thing) is okay as long as it isn't a bad guy.

Eve, a character invented by the writer to control the tank and explain everything to Jason (which, if I had written it, would have simply been the AI of the tank) is annoying right from the start. She speaks perfect English during her backstory, but every time she drops slang or an English idiom (the writer doesn't make a distinction and calls it all slang), she misspeaks, making her a perfect cliche of any non-English speaking character of the 80s and 90s and a bit of comic relief.

The brevity of this and the other Worlds of Power books causes a lot of potentially good story to fall through the cracks (well, that and the fact that the writer is just awful).

[Harry Collier IV · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not classic literature. It will not reveal the truth of the universe or the deeper meanings of existence. It will not even reveal the shallow meanings.
What this book is is fun! I first read this nearly 20 years ago when I was a big fan of the game and though I haven't played Blaster Master since then this book served to bring back a lot of good memories.
It is a page turner and can be finished in about an hour so the time investment is definitely worth it.
On a negative note, the author did take a lot of creative licence by adding characters and plot elements that weren't in the game. To fit these in he skips over most of the levels in the game. I think it could have been a much stronger book if he had stuck to the game.
Also, though as I mentioned the book is purely about having fun and good memories, I think it was a little bit of a wasted opportunity not to put a life lesson or two in. These books were created for kids who didn't normally read and by making it a little more profound more children might have been inspired to pick up another book when it was through.
Overall, a decent and entertaining afternoon read.

[Modi123 · Rating 2 out of 5]

A powerful coming of age tale of a young boy, Jason, and his overly active frog. Through a confluence of age and being at wrong place at the wrong time Jason's frog becomes slathered in radioactive goo, grows in girth, and promptly disappears down a giant hole. The only explanation of this sudden phenomenon would be aliens snatching up young men's small and benign pets to make them engorged giants out of the control of their owners. I do believe the nefarious aliens were beat back with the help of a female humanoid alien - all the pets were released back to their normal size and control of their young owners. The end.