Nerf Arena Blast

Nerf Arena Blast
Developer(s)	Visionary Media, Inc. (now-defunct)
Publisher(s)	Hasbro Interactive (now Atari, Inc.)
Designer(s)	David Walls[1]
Engine	Unreal Engine 1
Platform(s)	Windows 95 or higher
Release date(s)	October 31, 1999
Genre(s)	First-person shooter
Mode(s)	Single player Multiplayer (PointBlast)
Rating(s)	ESRB: Teen (T) and Everyone (E) (on some boxes)
Media/distribution	CD (1)
System requirements 200 MHz Pentium 32 MB RAM 120 MB HDD 2 MB DirectX 6.1 compatible video card Sound Card 4x CD-Rom Drive Internet connection (for multiplayer)

Nerf Arena Blast (or NAB, sometimes Arena Blast) is a first-person shooter developed by the now-defunct Visionary Media Inc. in 1999, and was touted as a "family-friendly alternative to Unreal Tournament".^[2] The game was supported by the publisher Hasbro Interactive until Hasbro Interactive gave its rights and properties over to Infogrames, which subsequently removed all references to the game from their website except for a small support page.^{[citation needed]}

Gameplay

Single player

The player starts on a team called the "Twisters", an amateur team competing for the "Nerf Champion of the World" title against 6 professional teams. The player must compete in each team's 3 arenas, totaling 21 playable maps (including the amateur and championship maps), plus a handful of "Bonus Round" maps. In order to compete against the next team the user has to place in the top three in each event (PointBlast, SpeedBlast, and BallBlast).^[3]

In addition to the Single player included in the Game, a full single player campaign titled "Infiltration" was released by the Community featuring, all new weapons, over 30 maps, and an original soundtrack.

Currently Infiltration 2 is in the works and is undergoing alpha testing.

Game types

• PointBlast: PointBlast is based on the Unreal Deathmatch game type; instead of gaining kills, or Frags, the player gains points by either hitting an opponent, knocking or tagging an opponent out, hitting targets in the arenas, or by picking up "Bonus Points" tokens left by "tagged out" players.

• SpeedBlast: SpeedBlast is a race between players where both have to pass through seven colored flags in sequence. Players are allowed to tag each other out of the race using their Nerf guns, with the tagged players returning to the last flag they touched.

• BallBlast: BallBlast is a Scavenger-hunt game type, where players fight for colored balls, in order to shoot them into targets. Doing this gives you a certain amount of points, depending on which ball you shoot in. Once a player gets the first six balls into the target, a seventh ball (called the "gold ball") is added to the game. The game is ended by any player shooting all balls including the golden ball into the target. The winner of the match is whoever has the most points when the game ends, rather than who shoots the gold ball into the target.

Multiplayer

Due to the similarities between Unreal Tournament and Nerf Arena Blast, it is possible to play Pointblast in team mode, because Pointblast is essentially a Deathmatch game type in most aspects, except for the scoring system. Other than that, the game types in single player mode apply to multiplayer mode. The community has released a Capture the Flag mod,^{[citation needed]} this has given rise to a large number of new maps for NAB.

News page problems

Due to the lack of support from Atari, Inc., Gamespy eventually stopped updating the news page (which NAB loads in Multiplayer mode) and later altogether removed the news page, but continued to support NAB's multiplayer abilities. As a result, trying to view the news page in NAB would result in an error message being displayed. This issue was remedied by a community created patch released in 2006.^[4]

Expandability

Due to the nature of the Unreal Engine utilized by Nerf Arena Blast, it is possible to create user-made maps and, to some extent, add-ons to the game. However, due to some parts of the engine being altered, the ability to create add-ons like in Unreal Tournament is somewhat limited. However, already hundreds of maps and modifications of Unreal maps have been published, and multiple modified weapons and game modes (such as Capture the Flag) have been created.

Reception

• http://pc.ign.com/articles/162/162982p1.html IGN review of NAB [8.8/10]
• http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/nerfarenablast/review.html Gamespot review of NAB [7.0/10]

References

1. ^ Butts, Stephen (September 30, 1999). "Nerf Arena Blast Interview". IGN. http://pc.ign.com/articles/070/070887p1.html. 
2. ^ "Gamespot Review of Nerf Arena Blast". http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/nerfarenablast/review.html. 
3. ^ Manual. 1999. 
4. ^ http://nab.d3done.com/