If you’ve never experienced A Boy and his Blob, you don’t know hate. The NES game was pretty innovative for its time- you controlled a boy who was trying to get his pet/friend blob back to his homeworld of Blobolonia. To get through environmental puzzles you had to interact with the blob by feeding it various flavors of jelly beans which changed him into useful objects like ladders and umbrellas. It sounds simple enough but man, is that game frustrating.
It was ridiculously easy to prevent yourself from getting farther into the game if you didn’t have the right jelly beans, and even chucking the beans in the blob’s mouth was tricky. If you missed it would hit the ground and disappear forever. Nevermind that you didn’t even know what the hell each bean did before the blob ate it once.
Add all that with really crappy controls and you have a game that was never beaten, ever, by no one. At least not by anyone who didn’t give up significant portions of their life. But if there’s one thing the game had in spades, it was charm.
Nintendo Power just released scans of its latest issue and it has a look at the remake that’s on its way to the Wii. it’s pretty fantastic looking. Compare this-
to this-
Hardly fair, I know, but DAMN. That looks gorgeous.
WayForward (Contra 4) are behind it, so you know at least we’ve got people who know what they’re doing behind the helm. Hopefully they can fix those busted controls and not go too crazy with the Wii remote stuff. Now the jelly beans can be used for offensive purposes- something the original never did- allowing you to turn the blob into an anvil to drop on enemies or a hole in the ground that they can fall through.
Check Nintendo’s scan from the issue for the first part of the article, and be excited that there’s another Wii game to pick up this Fall.
