Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hey guys, welcome to Cool Bits where we point out our favorite small moments from popular
and maybe not so popular games
These Cool Bits might be a secret, an easter egg, or just a small detail that really resonated
with us.
This time we'll be taking a look at a a few surprising details in Blast Corps for the
Nintendo 64
Now I probably don't need to tell you that video games aren't typically known for their
scientific accuracy, and Blast Corpse is no exception.
After all, it's a game based entirely around destroying things in order to clear a path
for a truck stuck on auto-pilot that's carrying a pair of nuclear missiles, which apparently
are so unstable, they'll detonate if you so much as brush up against then.
And it gets even sillier.
Now if you've played the game before, then you've probably noticed various celestial
bodies orbiting the sun in the background of the map screen .
But they're not just for show, because if you stick with the game to the end, you'll
be able to catch a ride on a space shuttle and actually visit them, which includes the
Moon, and the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Neptune.
Pretty wild, right?
And they're fun to play around in due to the varying amounts of gravity, even if the gravity
levels aren't entirely accurate
Take Neptune, for example, which should actually feature the highest amount of gravity in the
bunch instead of the lowest
There really shouldn't be any solid surfaces anywhere
And wait a second...how are we even driving on Neptune? The entire planet's made of gas.
But at least the developers got the planet's Blue color right.
So clearly Blast Corpse does not give a *** about scientific accuracy...or does it?
To find out, let's try taking a look at the map screen again from the perspective of Earth
If we keep an eye on the sun, we can see that it takes the Earth exactly one minute to fully
orbit around it, which of course represents a full year in real-life.
Now speaking of real-life, in that same time-span, the moon would have orbited the Earth about
13 times.
And if we fast-forward the footage here, we can see that the moon in fact orbits the Earth
that exact amount of times during that one-minute cycle!
That's pretty nifty. So far, the Earth and Moon appear to be orbiting the sun just as
they would in real-life--only much faster
But does that principle also apply to the planets in the background? Let's fine out.
To Mercury and Beyond!
So In real-life, it should take Mercury 88 Earth-days to orbit the sun.
But since we're dealing with the fast-paced Blast Corp Universe, it should only take 14
seconds or so, using the Earth's 1-minute orbit as reference.
Which means we should be seeing it again in 3,2,1
Oh, there it is, right on time!
Same goes for Venus. In real-life, it should take 225 Earth days to complete its orbit,
which comes out to 37-seconds in Blast Corpse time. And we timed it-- that's exactly how
long it ends up taking.
Yup, that goes for Mars too. In real-life it's orbit would take 687 Earth-Days, but
in Blast Corps time it should only take 1:53--which, again, is precisely what happens here.
Wow, so far so good.
But let's take a look at the final planet, Neptune.
As you might have noticed yourself, there doesn't appear to be anything going on in
the background besides the stars. There are no planets and no sun.
But if you can hang on for about an hour, you'll finally see the sun and the other planets
slowly swing into view.
And that's because Neptune has an incredibly long orbit compared to the other planets.
It takes 165 Earth-years for it to go around the sun just once.
Again, that's 165 YEARS
Which means that, even in Blast Corpse time, that's a really long time.
2 hours and 45 minutes to be precise, which, as you probably guessed, is exactly how long
it will take if you want to watch the entire orbit from this point.
Pretty crazy, huh?
In fact, the planets orbits are so accurate that it even recreates a real-life phenomenon
called Apparent retrograde motion.
Okay, I can already hear some of you asking "what?"
Have you ever noticed that some of the planets in the background here appear to occasionally
move backwards?
Well,t he same thing happens in real-life too.
Obviously, they're not actually going switching direction since orbits are a one-way street.
But it can look that way when the planet you're on--Earth in this case-- overtakes another
planet farther out with a longer orbit, causing it to appear as if it's moving in reverse
And of course, Blast Corpse actually makes this nifty illusion far easier to see than
it would be in real-life
Pretty cool, huh?
Who would have thought that a game where you use a giant acrobatic robot to destroy buildings
would pay so much attention to astronomically small details that pretty
much only geeks would catch
You could almost use the game to teach an astronomy lesson--admittedly a short one,
but still, that's pretty damn impressive for an action game.
And that wraps up this episode of Cool Bits for Blast Corps
Let us know if you have any Cool Bits of your own and we may feature it in a future episode.
Thanks for watching and make sure to stay tuned to GameXplain.com for more Cool Bits
and other things gaming too.