A neighbour in my dormitory played a whole lot of BB. There wasn’t a lot else to do sometimes, thanks to the university’s catshit internet policies. He discovered you could beat every level but one without taking damage (something I didn’t realise was possible) and that you could usually kill every enemy on a stage as well (sometimes in ways I hadn’t anticipated). He’d often try to do both.
Bastard World is built around these optional challenges, this time deliberately. It features something like thirty stages, each longer than those in the original, and three bosses. Five worlds of ten levels were planned, but only two were completed before the game was abandoned for a couple of years. On a school break in 2006 I dusted it off and finished the now-final third world. It’s possible to complete each stage killing every enemy without taking a hit, earning a star medal in the process. With enough of these medals you unlock a bunch of pointless upgrades and the levels of the original Ball Bastard as a bonus. None of this is communicated to the player in the game, making it all sort of a wasted effort.
It wound up on some magazine cover CDs (along with the first two Santasm games, Defiant Black, Kaiser Kitty and I don’t know what else). I don’t remember which because they never send copies. Additional trivia: this isn’t the original title screen. Turns out it is hard to draw circles fighting without it looking like circle sodomy.
