I’m going to start off by talking about a seemingly unrelated series of games: The Crazy Castle games. They started off with a Roger Rabbit maze game in Japan (with Mickey Mouse quickly replacing him), but Bugs Bunny replacing him outside of Japan. The games have also been Woody Woodpecker, Garfield and Ghostbusters games. One of them, however, didn’t use a license outside of Japan and the throwaway mascot Kid Klown was made.

Kid Klown appeared in some of his own games, one of them being The Bombing Islands, a bomb pushing puzzle game that was a sequel to the Atari game Bombuzal. It was released in Japan in 1997 on the PS1. When it came to the N64 version, it was handed to a different developer, who completely remade the game from scratch, with a new main character. Incidentally, the Charlie’s Blast Territory did not come out in Japan, and The Bombing Islands was released on PS1 outside of Japan after Charlie’s Blast Territory on the N64.

In Charlie’s Blast Territory, you need to blow up all the explosives on each tiny island. There’s only one bomb that you can activate, so everything needs to be moved into the right position. You can also only push, and not pull. There are different kind of explosives. TNT barrels allow you to jump over them, numbered make an explosion of that size, and there are some main bombs that have their own short timer and you need to push it to reset.

I did find that it was very easy to accidentally push something when you were trying to jump over it, but thankfully the game has an undo button (which only allows to go back one step). You also have a lot of control over the camera, so you can try to look at the game from a different perspective.

With 60 puzzles and a simple but fun multiplayer mode, the game is a little bit short lived, but I did enjoy my time with it.

Fun

Charlie Blast’s Territory screams ‘unpolished’ at evert turn. The camera controls are all wrong, the world themes are helplessly derivative, the password system is needlessly irritating, and the levels themselves lack both variety and ingenuity.

Mark Green, N64 Magazine #30. Review Score: 52%

Remake or Remaster?

A re-release would be nice for this game. Perhaps with some nicer looking water.

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to play Charlie Blast’s Territory.