Blasto

Hi I'm Troy McClure Captain Blasto, you might remember me from such wiki pages as 'Battle for Uranus - The Asteroids Return' and "Bosc and Buddies Blasto Blowout." Voiced by Phil Hartman, guide Blasto around various Uranian locales to defeat Bosc and his band of brothers to send them back to the fifth dimension.

Unused Images


EndScreen1-4.tim in Blasto.dat combine to make this 'coming soon' screen. The screen mentions the wrong season for release due to the game being originally slated for an October 1997 debut. The assets for the screen don't exist in the demo of the game included on the US PlayStation Underground and Interactive Sampler discs, presumably because all of those discs were produced in 1998.



Two placeholder images for the 'A Sony Interactive Studios America production...' and the copyright notice screens respectively.



There are two 'map unavailable' screens in the assets, however the game is hardcoded to use one featuring two aliens in lieu of this one. It was removed for the EU release.



The EU release contains a '... presents' screen for all three Sony regions, but as the game was never released in Japan, the SCEI one goes unseen.



Placeholder FMV subtitle lines can be found on the EU disc.



While rescuing babes is a side goal of Blasto's, the reward for being so chivalrous is a main menu option to view all the various (clothed) babe models. It doesn't include a showing of this picture, named as map2.tim, leaving it unused.

A handwritten dedication to the game's producer and devisor, David Poe exists in the resources as legal1.tim. A tribute did make it into the game as the first slide of the credits, though it lacks the personality of the placeholder.

Unused Executable
Also on the game CD is init2.exe, a compiled version of the 'dongle' example present in the Psy-Q PlayStation SDK. The exe allows creation and deletion of hidden, albeit useless, memory card files (hidden such that the memory card management in the BIOS cannot see them). It also contains a rudimentary hex-viewer for memory card files.

Regional Changes
The EU version was translated into and had additional voice work for German, French, Italian and Spanish languages. The map for level 4, Uranian Dunes was also changed. It had the E-pod crash site and the waterfall at the start of the level scrubbed out.

Oddities
After beating the game, you can enter D-Pad codes to enable cheats. There are 10 cheats in total. Acitivating one prints a letter of "BoscRules!" on the title screen and has Blasto say a related phrase. Unfortunately, the key combination of Up, Right, Right, Left, Down is assigned to both 'R' (Maximum Health) and '!', leaving the latter cheat completely inaccessible.

The Gameshark code (US):

D00793B1 0040 300793B1 0010

turns the latter key combination into URRLU. Its effect is transparency. All solid objects become see through, including Blasto and enemies. For Blasto the effect is not the same as the invisibility pill, enemies can see him and damage can still be taken. The cheat was fixed for the EU version, with the code becoming URRLLD. The Alternate Costumes cheat listed on some sites is bogus and does not exist.

Another curio on the US release is a bug in the system.cnf setup file:

BOOT=cdrom:\SCUS_944.12;1 TCB=4 EVENT=10 TACK=801fff00

The STACK parameter is missing the initial S. Luckily the value given for the parameter is also the default value, so the game works despite that line being ignored. The EU release again fixes the oversight.