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About Blast Driver
If you’re a fan of late-’90s console oddities, Blast Driver on the Nintendo 64 is one of those games that sticks in your memory. Instead of racing cars or platforming your way through bright worlds, you hop into a futuristic tank and blast through missions filled with enemy turrets, drones, and armored vehicles. The game drops you into a story of global conflict where you’re part of an elite squadron trying to stop a rogue military faction—so there’s enough narrative framing to keep things interesting without slowing down the action.
Controls take a minute to get used to: you steer with the analog stick, your turret follows the camera, and you’ve got a handful of weapons you can switch between on the fly. There’s a bit of strategy in choosing the right missile or cannon for each situation, and some levels even have environmental hazards that force you to think twice before charging in headlong. It’s not just a mindless shooter; you’ll find yourself plotting the best approach to protect nearby convoys or take out a high-value target before reinforcements arrive.
While the story isn’t exactly Shakespeare, it does give you enough motivation to keep going through the game’s roughly dozen missions. You’ll get little cutscenes between stages that show the war escalating, and you start feeling for the characters you fight alongside. It’s easy to overlook, but there’s actually some charm in watching your squadmates talk trash over the radio while you dodge heavy artillery fire.
Blast Driver never won any awards for its graphics or sound design—it looks and sounds plenty dated by today’s standards—but there’s a scrappy appeal to it. If you manage to dig out a cartridge or a digital re-release, you’ll find that its quirky premise and solid mission structure still make for a fun, underappreciated trip down memory lane. It’s the kind of game you might pop in just to see what kind of trouble you can get into next behind the throttle of that heavy armored beast.