YMMV / Blast Corps

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Your team will always chime in to comment on how well you are doing or how you need to hurry when the truck is close to crashing into something. There's no option to shut them up.
• Awesome Music: Practically the whole soundtrack, although Simian Acres takes the gold. Composer Graeme Norgate has the entire soundtrack available for download for free on his website.
  • The Replay music is surprisingly great.
• Best Level Ever: The Moon. It takes some doing to get there, but it's a great reward after everything you've had to go through.
• Better as a Let's Play: If not the game as a whole, then definitely the Backlash levels. Most players find the vehicle difficult and frustrating to use, but experienced players like this one turn its levels into virtual monster truck rallies that are incredibly satisfying to watch.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The side levels are irrelevant to the main plot and have some unusual objectives, but a few stand out in particular:
  • The side level Orion Plaza. The stage is some sort of giant billiards table in space, with TNT crates in place of the 15 object balls, the Ramdozer in place of the cue ball, and a cue stick in each pocket that needs to be destroyed with said TNT. All to some jazzy music used exclusively for this level. It Makes Just As Much Sense In Context; even the moon and planet stages at least get SOME sort of significance.
  • The three J-Bomb secret missions: Lizard Island, Saline Watch, and Magma Peak. Why are you destroying a bunch of weird rafts, spheres, and beacons in, respectively, some island surrounded by weird-looking water, some sort of enclosed box full of water, and an active volcano crater with a bunch of clearly artificial structures? Well you'll never know, because none of this is referenced anywhere else.
• Cheese Strategy: The original version of the game contains a bug that allows players to knock down buildings by trying to exit one's vehicle while beside them. Because this works on any destructible structure, it can trivialize any Escort Mission outside of puzzle-solving segments. While this leads to faster times in speedruns, it also makes them less exciting to see, as players don't actually demonstrate their skill with the game using this strategy.
• Critical Annoyance: WARNING! COLLISION IMMINENT! WARNING! COLLISION IMMINENT! Even more annoying is the fact that, if the building it's about to collide with has already been mostly destroyed with only one small section of it standing at the very end of the path (which is common in levels like Diamond Sands that use obnoxiously long buildings), it still will sound the warning based on the whole of the building, meaning you'll be hearing the buzz of an imminent collision as it slowly goes through the torn down sections.
• Cult Classic: Somewhat forgotten since its release, but also one of the most popular early games released on the 64. It's still an utterly unique game with nothing else quite like it, and is still fondly-regarded among people who played it. It frequently appears on "hidden gem" lists for N64 games for that reason.
• Difficulty Spike: The Easy levels are a good entry point, and the Medium levels ramp up the challenge appropriately. The Hard levels crank up the difficulty significantly with frustrating level design that requires you to master the infamous Backlash and operate within a tight timeframe lest the Carrier explode. Oyster Harbor sits at the top of the Difficulty Spike, being a brutal level that needs a lot of outside of the box puzzle solving to complete.
• Discredited Trope: In the Games Done Quick developer's commentary, Martin Wakeley attributes the infamy of the Backlash - a "character" deliberately designed to be difficult to use, yet required to complete the game - to how game design philosophy has changed since Blast Corps' release:
  "Games generally were much, much harder [back then]... looking at the Backlash now, I liked the fact it was hard to use, good, that was it. But now, you'd never make a game with something that difficult as one of the main characters because people wouldn't be bothered to play, they'd immediately turn off the game."
• Fridge Horror: The civilians picked up by the helicopter are referred to as "survivors" (rather than evacuees). They also emerge from buildings after they are destroyed. You are destroying buildings with people still inside them, likely resulting in hundreds or thousands of deaths.
• Good Bad Bugs: With the Z-Button Glitch, you can become the ultimate supervillain, and destroy ANY building the game by simply getting out of your vehicle. Specifically, you have to line your vehicle up next to a destructible structure in such a way that you cant get out of it (you'll hear the "doh!" cry) and hold Z (exit). Sadly, this was patched out of the Version 1.1 build of the game. The trick also isn't possible in the Rare Replay version, as it uses Version 1.1. Better get used to doing Oyster Harbor legit.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The dump truck is named "Backlash". It ended up being a Scrappy Mechanic.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The Backlash, if both this and the main page are an indication, is Troperiffic in how bad (or at least unwieldy) it is to most players. The drifting mechanism the vehicle uses to destroy buildings is extremely precise, and most players frequently end up missing their targets altogether, oftentimes resorting to nudging the buildings as a Desperation Attack. While the Backlash's levels are supplemented with mounds to launch off to destroy buildings instantly, this would be only known to players that have bothered to watch the vehicle's tutorial video until the very end (or consulted a walkthrough), and comes off as a Noob Bridge for everyone else. Even the players that have mastered it will admit that anything the Backlash can do, the Ramdozer does more efficiently. If there are complaints about this game, the Backlash will almost always be mentioned.
  • Speedrunners hate the Cyclone Suit, due to how its somersault attack causes frame-rate issues which slow down their run. They skip over it whenever they can, including the one hidden in Ember Hamlet, and treat the one level where it's mandatory as a Luck-Based Mission. Whereas the Backlash could at least be mastered, there's no means of getting around the faults of the Cyclone Suit.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • "Hey you're just lucky", mostly for its association with getting an obstacle destroyed just in time (after "collision imminent" is displayed).
  • For the 1.0 version: "D'oh! D'oh! D'oh! D'oh!" *Building deleted*. Bonus points for being using the Z-Button Glitch on the very last building to break and getting "Nice Work!" from Wesley.
  • The triumphant jingle that plays when you destroy all buildings, free all survivors, and activate all RDUs.
  • Anytime you get a promotion.
• Narm: Most of your crew's dialogue, especially when you finish a level. "LOCKANDLOAD"
• Nintendo Hard: Especially levels that force you to use the... say it with us now... Backlash, though nearly everything gets this way once it's time to collect platinum medals.
• Padding: Congratulations, you cleared the path for the carrier, and saved the world. Oh wait no you didn't. You gotta gather up all the scientists for a controlled explosion.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Using the dump truck, Backlash. Though they do make up for it, more or less, with the moon.
• Special Effect Failure: The "water" in Lizard Island is lacking the usual water ripple texture, and is instead just a solid cyan. Regardless, it's just as deadly to your J-Bomb as properly-rendered water.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Compare "Circuitry" by Front Line Assembly to Tempest City.
  • Also, Eye Joe by Rednex featured on Simian Acres.
• That One Sidequest: Getting the platinum medals for the most part is one of the hardest things to do. In fact, it's been said that this is the hardest game to get entirely completed.
• That One Level:
  • Oyster Harbor. It's worlds easier if you use the Z-button trick on the appropriate buildings. If you're dealing with the patched version, get ready to harbor a lot of hate for this level, which is full of beginner's traps and finicky mechanisms on top of genuine difficulty. The only way to do this monster of a level justice is to explain each section individually:
    • Straight off the bat, we have the bike, which has a vantage point over a mess of shipping containers in the missiles' path. The intuitive thing to do is start blasting at the containers, and if you spend any time doing that, then you've lost. Instead, you need to proceed on-foot to a Ramdozer, which can clear all the containers in seconds. The only useful thing the bike can do is blow up a couple of containers to the far left to make the dash to the Ramdozer a little faster.
    • Next up is a bridge of metal blocks. There is an area nearby with a bunch of TNT and a crane. Drop a TNT on a block, and it blows up. Seems simple enough, but you'll never clear the bridge in time this way. Instead, you need to drop a TNT in between two of the metal blocks, which inexplicably makes all the metal blocks blow up, a phenomenon that doesn't appear anywhere else in the game and isn't explained in the manual.
    • Now you'll come to some pits that need to be filled with blocks. Finish this part and you'll find that one of the pits is still unaccounted for. That's because the diamond-shaped block actually needs to be taken to an out-of-the-way area where it can be used to fill a secret diamond-shaped pit, opening the way to an area with two diamond-shaped blocks. Already placed the diamond-shaped block into the pit it was originally sitting next to? Unwinnable by Design.
    • And last but by no means least, the barge and TNT section which is a gauntlet in of itself if you don't or can't use the Z-button glitch. There is a specific order you need to move the barges in so you can make a path and access the Ramdozer afterwards. Then you need to take the barge closest to the missile, run it way down to an area with a single long-fuse TNT crate, and run it back before the missile reaches the gap you left, and push the TNT to the level's final building. This is where the reality of how hard this level is sinks in. Even if you do everything in the level quickly and efficiently (there are no checkpoints in this game), the missile is sure to be close by the time you return and get the Ramdozer and TNT out of the way. There's nothing more frustrating than watching the truck slowly advance into the last obstacle over and over, while you're lagging mere seconds behind with the TNT. To add insult to injury, the barges give you a signal when they're lined up so that the carrier can get through, but the signal sometimes thinks the boat's placed okay when it's not, which means you might be on the way to deliver that last piece of TNT, or even going to the Blast Corps Semi after a "successful" mission, and all of a sudden BOOM!, as it crashes into a "well-placed" boat.
  • Diamond Sands. It requires the Backlash and you have to get rid of buildings DIRECTLY ON FUCKING TRAIN TRACKS. That wouldn't be a problem, except that you're not allowed to drive over the tracks - you have to use out-of-the-way tunnels to switch sides. Combine that with the already-frustrating spinning attack that you need to use for any sort of power with the asshole truck and the fact the buildings seem to be placed specifically to slow you down and you have this level. Thankfully there's a good strategy you can use to destroy the train track buildings, on any version of the game. Drive down the tracks with the nose of your truck angled slightly towards the tracks, and you should drive straight through them (give or take a few adjustments along the way). Much easier than trying to "backlash" them the normal way.
  • While not as infamous as Diamond Sands, Outland Farm and Angel City are two other Backlash levels players frequently struggle with, due to their grassy terrain (which prevents the Backlash from gaining enough speed to swerve into buildings) and densely-packed buildings which are difficult to knock down even for experienced players. While there are mounds which could be used to destroy buildings more easily, this still comes across as a real Noob Bridge for players that didn't bother watching the Backlash's tutorial video. The final buildings in each level could even be considered That One Boss in their own right, as they have to be struck from specific directions and take several successful hits to knock down. At least one Let's Player rage-quitted because of Outland Farm, while others that pass this level are expected to take several tries to complete Angel City.
  • J-Bomb Circle. J-Bomb's chief attack involves touching the ground. J-Bomb Circle is a set of mini-levels that asks what if you CAN'T touch the ground? N64 controllers will be broken. And just as a nice "fuck you" from the developers, the last level is the aforementioned Camera Screw Baboon Catacombs. That is your reward.
  • Jade Plateau when racing for the platinum time. You need to take a shortcut through the grass for every lap. Problem is, sometimes this grass slows you down a little, and sometimes it slows you down a lot. It all depending on exactly how you maneuver into the shortcut. There's no trick, you just have to hope you take the pixel-perfect trajectory the game is looking for every lap and nail the rest of the race to have any hope of matching the Platinum time.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: All the assets were in place to have a mission to stop a runaway train from crashing, Blast Corps must demolish obstructions on the line to allow it to come to a controlled stop. Instead the game goes into space after the missile carrier crisis is averted.