Blast Chamber

That's right boys and girls; it's a two-post Friday at Melrose Place. Awww yeahh. Not a whole lot to say about this one. Allow me to start from the beginning. Remember years and years ago how Game Informer or PlayStation Magazine or whatever periodicals were around at the time would release demo discs every month along with the magazine? I only ever bought like two or three such demo-inclusive magazines, but one of those included a brief multiplayer demo of the above game: Blast Chamber. In Blast Chamber, up to four people would compete to gather life-extending crystals in a rotatable cubic room. When you claimed a crystal you would gain an extra thirty seconds or so on a perpetually downward-counting timer. When said timer reached zero, you would explode. Last man standing wins! Or maybe it was the man who had exploded the fewest times over the course of five minutes or so. Or maybe both options existed. At any rate, it was a demo I enjoyed enough to play multiple times back when I was ten or so, even though I never had even the slightest urge to purchase it. (Wait, purchase? Back then, game acquisition was all about Christmas and birthday gifts; no wonder I never wasted a gift request on this thing.) So for whatever reason, after never having thought about this game whatsoever for at least ten years, the other month I was overcome by the sudden urge to, at the very least, look into it. I couldn't even remember what it was called. I might have stumbled upon the title purely by accident. At any rate, I gave it an Amazon search and, lo and behold, it was available, new, for dirt cheap. Sure, why not? Flash forward to earlier tonight. The fiancée is out drinking with coworkers, it's cold and rainy enough for me not to have any desire to go anywhere, and after a late Friday at the office it isn't even worth it to see if any friends feel like hanging out. That left me with basically one option: the lone wolf logging night! So after watching Teeth, I popped this old CD into the PS3 tray to give it a whirl. Less than an hour later I was done with the solo mode, which consisted of time trials rather than multiple-player deathmatches. I'd say I was underwhelmed, but honestly, I only even bought this game on a total whim based on some fun I had with a multi-player demo back in the late 1990s. I'm still holding out hope that someone will entertain me and play a round or two at my place someday. And if not? Hey, whatever. There's always more to cross off the backlog!