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Wednesday, July 05, 2006 

Classic Gaming Wednesday

Every Wednesday, the folks at PSTP will honor our video gaming yesteryear by selecting a certifiable classic that we should all take the time to sit back and enjoy for at least an hour.

Back in 1989, when the NES ruled the video game world, the people behind the now-defunct Absolute Entertainment smoked some incredible illegal substances and came up with the incredibly strange and quirky NES classic, "A Boy and His Blob." Apparently, some kid became cool with an interstellar blob with an intense liking for jellybeans from the planet of "Blobolonia." If that wasn't strange enough, the blob asks the kid for help in defeating the evil emperor of Blobolonia, who has overwhelmed the planet with, get this, junk food! The only way that the unlikely duo can stop this almighty emperor is by collecting vitamins on Earth and feeding them to him. (Man, I KNEW those Flintstones vitamins were powerful!)

Cheesy story aside, what makes the game cool is the way that you, as the boy in the game, can feed the blob different jellybeans to make it change into different objects and overcome various obstacles blocking your path. For example, you can feed the blob licorice beans to make the blob turn into a ladder, or apple ones to turn the blob into a jack to lift objects (get it, Apple Jacks?). There were 14 different jellybeans you could collect in the game, and each one did something to the blob. I still can't figure out why the hell the vanilla beans turned the blob into an umbrella, though...

Now of course, the graphics are incredibly dated by today's standards, but it's certainly not unplayable by any means. (I mean, we ARE talking about the NES here, and not the Atari 2600 or something like that.) You might find yourself impressed with some of the city backgrounds you run into as your progress through the game, as they push the NES to its absolute limits in some cases.

Look at those graphics!


One thing that I found really annoying back when I first played the game years ago was the fact that the blob was rather, well... stupid. Like, you'd run or whatever to go from one objective to the other, but you had to wait for the blob to catch up to you. It was so retarded. Like, "hurry up, you bastard!!!" The only way you could speed up the friggin thing was to either give it a honey jellybean to turn it into a Hummingbird, or toss a ketchup one to make him "catch up." I remember screaming at the television screen, "You fat bastard! You don't need anymore to eat!" And then, to make things worse, the kid threw like sissy. Seriously, I could spit farther than he could throw. He'd throw a jellybean, and the shit would land a foot in front of him. And of course, being the fat bastard that it was, the blob wouldn't even bother to make an effort to catch the beans. So, if you weren't careful, you'd wind up throwing beans onto the ground, rendering them useless. (The blob was too good, apparently, to eat things off the ground. Like, c'mon, bastard, 5-second rule!) This was especially annoying when you had a limited number of beans in your arsenal.

He hates junk food, but takes "cola" jellybeans? Huh?


Lazy blob stuff aside, the whole jellybean aspect is what makes this game so innovative for its time and makes it a classic. So, check out "A Boy and His Blob" and get your fix of some classic gaming action for like, 2 bucks, at any good NES-game reseller.

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Modern Day Sequels?
After the Game Boy release of "The Rescue of Princess Blobette" in 1990, no one heard anything about this franchise until last year's E3, when Majesco announced that a sequel was in the works for the Nintendo DS. However, it's been more than a year since that announcement, and we haven't heard anything since. Considering that Majesco is undergoing some financial problems, it doesn't look like we'll be seeing this sequel anytime soon.

FUN FACT: David Crane, the creator of the uber-gaming arcade classic, "Pitfall," created this game.

Gotta love Dueling Analogs