Nerf Arena Blast is a first-person shooter

First-person shooter

First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...

 developed by the now-defunct Visionary Media Inc. in 1999, and was touted as a "family-friendly alternative to Unreal Tournament

Unreal Tournament

Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...

". The game was supported by the publisher Hasbro Interactive

Hasbro Interactive

Hasbro Interactive was an American video game production and publishing subsidiary of Hasbro, the large game and toy company.Hasbro Interactive was formed late in 1995 in order to compete in the computer and video game arena. Several Hasbro properties, such as Monopoly and Scrabble, had already...

 until Hasbro Interactive gave its rights and properties over to Infogrames

Infogrames

Infogrames Entertainment SA was an international French holding company headquartered in Paris, France. It was the owner of Atari, Inc., headquartered in New York City, U.S. and Atari Europe. It was founded in 1983 by Bruno Bonnell and Christophe Sapet using the proceeds from an introductory...

, which subsequently removed all references to the game from their website except for a small support page.

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).

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
  Unreal
  Unreal is a first-person shooter video game developed by Epic MegaGames and Digital Extremes and published by GT Interactive in May 1998...
  
   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

Unreal Tournament

Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...

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, 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.

Expandability

Due to the nature of the Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine

The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first illustrated in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although primarily developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealth, MMORPGs and RPGs...

 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

Unreal Tournament

Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...

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]