A Boy and His Blob (NES) Playthrough
295A playthrough of Absolute's 1989 puzzle-platformer for the NES, David Crane's A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia.
A Boy and His Blob was the first NES game from Imagineering, the development arm of Absolute Entertainment, and it was the brainchild of David Crane. As you might already be aware, Crane came to be regarded as the father of the platformer genre with the 1982 release of Pitfall on the Atari 2600.
This is not a platformer in the traditional sense, though, and the title implies as much. You play as a nameless boy who befriends an alien creature that has come to Earth in search of help.
Blobert - Blob, for short - comes from Blobolonia, a planet ruled by an evil emperor who has outlawed any food that's not made of chocolate or marshmallow. This cruel despot has one critical weakness, though: he's allergic to wholesome foods and health supplements.
The goal of the game, then, is to help Blob secure a better and brighter future for the people of Blobolonia. The boy and [his] blob need to collect treasures hidden in the city sewers and trade them in at the local drug store for a large cache of multivitamins. Once fully armed, the pair will head to Blob's homeworld to challenge the emperor's rule.
Luckily, Blob isn't content to watch from the sidelines as his new friend does his dirty work. Blob loves jellybeans, and whenever he eats them, he can transform into a variety of tools that will prove useful over the course of the adventure. The form he takes depends on the flavor of the jellybean he is fed. A licorice jellybean turns Blob into a ladder, for example, while a cola flavored one turns Blob into a giant bubble that'll allow the boy to breathe underwater. There are fourteen flavors in total, and the majority of the game revolves around navigating the environments with these tools.
The game is a prime example of the sort of creativity and eccentricity that lurks in the out-of-the-way corners of the NES's library. It's a bizarre but charming platformer that incorporates puzzle elements that feel inspired by old-school graphic adventures. The gameplay is simple - in many ways it feels like a next-gen update to Crane's 2600 games - and though the controls feel a bit slippery and it can be awkward to move Blob into position, it's a lot of fun to explore the small but open-ended world while experimenting with the different flavors.
The graphics are sharp and clean, and some of the backgrounds do impress. Just check out that slick cityscape at the beginning! There isn't much music, but what is there is catchy and fun and it all carries Imagineering's distinct sound signature.
I spent many afternoons at a friend's house playing this one when I was elementary school. We never got to the end, but we always had a good time with it, especially once we'd managed to come up with a handwritten list of what each of the jellybeans did.
And you know what? It's still a lot of fun to pop this cart in from time-to-time nowadays. If you're looking for something a bit different from the typical NES action cart, A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia is worth a look.
If you're a fan of this game, you might also want to check out the Game Boy sequel, The Rescue of Blobette (https://youtu.be/fFQn9N7NiIU) and the "remake" by WayForward that came out back in 2009.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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