The short version
Blast asks one thing of you — defend a rotating pixel-art planet by tapping or clicking to fire at whatever's threatening it — and the registry note flagging this candidate had a fair question: the fire button binds `mousedown`, never `touchstart`, so does a tap actually work? Tested directly, it does: a real simulated touch on the Start button and on the game canvas both produced the correct result, starting the game and firing a shot respectively. What kills this one for the shelf isn't the input handling, it's the layout underneath it. The whole game is built inside a fixed 900-pixel-wide box with no responsive sizing at all, and on a real phone screen that box simply doesn't fit — the Start button, the score readout, and (per the desktop layout) the player's own ship all render past the edge of a 390-pixel-wide viewport, with no scrollbar and no zoom available to reach them.
Biggest strengths
- "The registry's specific concern — that binding only `mousedown` might mean touch silently doesn't work — was tested directly rather than left as a caveat: a real touch tap correctly started the game (confirmed via the start menu's own CSS class changing to its hidden state) and correctly fired a shot from the player's position toward the tapped point"
- No platform gate anywhere — the same click handler serves both mouse and the browser's native tap-to-click synthesis, with nothing checking device type
- A clean, appealing pixel-art rotating planet and minimal HUD, confirmed complete and correctly laid out on a desktop-width window
Biggest weaknesses
- "The disqualifying problem: `#c`, the container for the entire game, is styled with a fixed `width:900px`, and nothing in the page scales that down for a narrower screen. Measured directly, the page's own layout viewport reports roughly 910 pixels wide on a 390-pixel-wide phone profile — not scaled or zoomed, genuinely that wide — with no horizontal scrollbar to reach the overflow. The Start button and the score display both render entirely outside the visible screen area on a real phone"
- A missing viewport meta tag in the shipped page made this worse before this review added one; even after that fix, the fixed-pixel layout underneath is untouched by the correction
- As a fairly simple 2014 arcade shooter, the ceiling here was never going to be high even with a working layout — a functional but unremarkable "defend the point" loop
Who it's for: Play this one at a desk; the phone build can't be reached at all right now
Our recommendation: Don't install — the confirmed-working touch input can't save a layout a real phone user cannot physically get to
5 / 10
Blast is a small, focused 2014 js13k entry: a planet sits in the middle of the screen, threats close in on it, and your only job is to tap or click toward them before they arrive. It's a clean enough idea for a 13-kilobyte budget, and the presentation backs it up — a nicely shaded rotating sphere, a simple dotted starfield, and a HUD that gets out of the way. The open question worth answering before anything else, flagged directly in this game's discovery notes, was whether that tap-to-fire mechanic actually works on a touchscreen, since the code only listens for mousedown.
The input question, answered
It does work. Rather than trust that a browser's tap-to-mouse-event synthesis would cover the gap, this was tested with a real simulated touch through the same input pipeline a finger would use: a touch on the Start button correctly triggered the game's own start logic (confirmed by watching the start menu's CSS class change to the value the code uses to hide it), and a follow-up touch on the game canvas correctly registered as a fired shot, visible in the resulting screenshot as a small projectile heading toward the tapped point. Whatever the discovery note's caution was worth, the actual input handling holds up fine on touch.
The layout doesn't
What doesn't hold up is getting to any of that in the first place. The entire game lives inside a container hard-coded to 900 pixels wide, and nothing about the page adapts that for a narrower screen — checked directly, the browser's own layout viewport on a 390-pixel-wide phone profile reported roughly 910 pixels, meaning the page genuinely believes it has that much room and lays everything out accordingly, with no horizontal scrollbar to reach the parts that don't fit. In practice that pushes the Start button and the score display entirely past the right edge of a real phone's screen. The shipped page didn't even have a viewport meta tag to begin with; this review added one to give the touch test a fair chance, and it made no difference to the underlying problem, because the fixed-pixel CSS doesn't care what the viewport meta tag says.
Should you play it
On a desktop or a wide tablet, sure — it's a tidy, complete little shooter that does exactly what it says. On a phone, the device this shelf is built around, there is currently no way to reach the button that starts the game at all, and no amount of confirmed-correct touch handling underneath changes that.
Pros and cons
Pros
- "The registry's specific concern — that binding only `mousedown` might mean touch silently doesn't work — was tested directly rather than left as a caveat: a real touch tap correctly started the game (confirmed via the start menu's own CSS class changing to its hidden state) and correctly fired a shot from the player's position toward the tapped point"
- No platform gate anywhere — the same click handler serves both mouse and the browser's native tap-to-click synthesis, with nothing checking device type
- A clean, appealing pixel-art rotating planet and minimal HUD, confirmed complete and correctly laid out on a desktop-width window
- Free, MIT licensed with clear attribution, and no analytics anywhere in the code
Cons
- "The disqualifying problem: `#c`, the container for the entire game, is styled with a fixed `width:900px`, and nothing in the page scales that down for a narrower screen. Measured directly, the page's own layout viewport reports roughly 910 pixels wide on a 390-pixel-wide phone profile — not scaled or zoomed, genuinely that wide — with no horizontal scrollbar to reach the overflow. The Start button and the score display both render entirely outside the visible screen area on a real phone"
- A missing viewport meta tag in the shipped page made this worse before this review added one; even after that fix, the fixed-pixel layout underneath is untouched by the correction
- As a fairly simple 2014 arcade shooter, the ceiling here was never going to be high even with a working layout — a functional but unremarkable "defend the point" loop