Big City Sliding Blaster

About the game

Big City Sliding Blaster is an overhead shooter with one unusual rule: you cannot walk. Your little craft is always gliding across the arena, bouncing off walls, and the only way to steer is a boost that launches you toward your crosshair. Getting where you want to go means planning each push and letting the walls do some of the work.

Shooting is aimed the same way, at the crosshair, so you can fire in any direction while drifting the other. Every shot costs ammo, though. Refills sit on the floor of each arena and come back a while after you grab them, and defeated enemies sometimes leave ammo, health or a burst of speed behind. Each stage asks you to take down twenty enemies, and after ten of them waits the villain who stole the city's slider station. NovaSquirrel credits the old shareware game Ballmaster as the inspiration.

A friend can join at any moment, and the menu also has a level editor and easier and harder modes.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the NES: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in jsnes, an NES emulator written in JavaScript. Click Play, press Start at the title screen and choose Normal Game, Easier Game or Harder Game.

F2 saves the current state of the game in this browser and F4 brings it back. A gamepad also works. For two players, the second player can use the numeric keypad or a second gamepad, and joins in by pressing A and B together. The original also supports the SNES mouse, which this emulator does not offer.

Controls

Player 2 uses the numeric keypad: 8, 2, 4 and 6 to move, 7 for A, 9 for B, 1 for Start and 3 for Select. When you lose, X retries the stage and Z gives up (it asks for confirmation).

A few things worth knowing

Pick a control mode. Help/Config in the main menu lets each player change the aiming with A. Cursor, the default, moves a crosshair freely. Spinning turns your aim with Left and Right, and Up or Down flips it around. Simple points the aim toward whichever direction you hold. B leaves the screen.

Use the walls. You bounce off walls instead of stopping, so a well-timed boost into a corner can send you exactly where you need to be. Each boost is a kick of speed that fades back to a steady glide.

Watch the counters. The top corner shows your ammo, your health and how many enemies are left in the stage. If you run dry, the game slips you one round every few seconds, but it is faster to slide over a refill.

Joining costs a little. When player 2 joins, player 1 hands over some health, so it only works while player 1 has enough to spare. Player 2 drops out when their health runs out.

Easier means forgiving. In Easier Game explosions no longer hurt you, you can carry far more ammo and defeated enemies leave health. Harder Game makes everything faster and every hit hurt more.

Make your own. Level Edit builds an arena from blocks of tiles: move the cursor with the arrows, A picks a block for that spot and B rotates it. Setup chooses which stage's enemies your level borrows, and Play tests it; Select returns to editing. The NES cartridge has no save memory, so use F2 to keep a level you like.

Credits and licence

Big City Sliding Blaster is by NovaSquirrel, with the sound engine, trigonometry and cursor code and some sounds by Damian Yerrick. NovaSquirrel's code is under the zlib licence and the game's art under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Damian Yerrick's sound engine is under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later, so the complete game is distributed under the GPL, and the full source code of the version served here is linked from this page. All the licence texts are in the licence file.