Blazing Lazers Mini Review

I recently revisited Blazing Lazers, a legendary TurboGrafx-16 vertical shooter originally released in 1989. Shooters of its ilk are in the midst of something of a renaissance, but the shooters released for NEC's ill-fated TurboGrafx-16 remain some of the most revered.

Blazing Lazers is often considered the best TG-16 shooter, and it only takes a few seconds of gameplay to see why. The game is an absolute technical marvel, pushing the system to its limits with blazing-fast scrolling and virtually no slowdown at all. It's the type of game that makes you sweat when you realize you might have to move your thumb for a split-second to hit the pause button. The audio complements the hectic on-screen action perfectly, with blisteringly-fast chiptune metal music accompanying your ship's manic movements as it darts about the screen.

While Blazing Lazers is a wonder to behold, its quality is dragged down by significantly unbalanced difficulty. You'll get through a majority of the game's nine stages with ease, and much of the difficulty in the first half of the game is actually derived from avoiding unwanted power-ups. Much of the time, the screen will be absolutely littered with power-ups, and you'll likely gravitate toward one or two and avoid the others unless they provide situational advantage for a certain type of enemy.

Veterans of the genre will likely sleepwalk through the first two-thirds of the game before running into a brutal difficulty wall in the last two or three stages. The shock will set in after your first death, when you realize that you start back at the checkpoint with no power-ups whatsoever. Depending on the checkpoint, you might have all of three seconds before being swarmed by a legion of enemies that are a breeze with powered-up weapons, but tough-as-nails when fought with the measly peashooter of a default weapon. It's not unusual to play through six stages without being touched only to die seven times in a row immediately after your first death.

Blazing Lazers is a great way to show off one of the most underappreciated consoles of all time, and has certainly aged better than most shooters of its era. I wish the first half of the game was more challenging and that I didn't have to spend so much energy simply avoiding unwanted power-ups, but it's easy to ignore the flaws when you focus on the game's unmatched speed and manic action.