Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Eric Vs. 365 - Day 184 - Boom Boom Rocket

To celebrate the New Year, how about a game that's all about fireworks? Bizarre Creations' Boom Boom Rocket is a fun rhythm game where you set of fireworks in time with music. It's bright and colorful and the music is solid and it's a good time in general. Read on for more and to watch gameplay.

Bizarre Creations makes me sad and should be at the top of everyone's list of "Terrible Stuff Activision Has Done". After spending most of a decade mostly making Project Gotham Racing games exclusively for Microsoft, Bizarre Creations wanted to step out on their own and do something else so they walked away from the franchise. They made The Club with SEGA and Boom Boom Rocket with EA and then were bought by Activision in 2007. They pumped out underrated racing game Blur and then 007 BloodStone, but neither one met Activision's ridiculous expectations (everything had to sell in Calladoody numbers to be worthwhile) so they shuttered Bizarre shortly after. Screw you, Activision.

I want to say that a lot of the Bizarre staff ended up at Playground Games or Codemasters or somewhere else that would appreciate their racing game talents, but I can't find any confirmation. 

Anyway, Boom Boom Rocket was a fun little XBLA game. It launched right in the midst of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band craze, so I think it got dinged a bit unfairly in reviews for not being a "real" music game, or something, but it's fun. The music is all original remixes of public domain tracks, so it all sounds good (and doesn't get Content ID'd on YouTube ... so far). It also looks really quite nice with bright flashy fireworks and an awesome city scape in the background. 


Surprisingly, it's actually still available for purchase. I say surprisingly because usually games like this lose their licenses after a while, but since this was all public domain music that EA remixed I guess they own it all. That's good, because it means you can still buy it. It's $10 and backward compatible on Xbox One so give it a try.