Nintendo Entertainment System Boy and His Blob, A Trouble on Blobolonia USA
2Gameplay
The vanilla jelly bean transforms Blobert into a protective umbrella. The HUD shows the player's score, remaining treasures, and extra lives.A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia is a platform-puzzle game. The plot involves a young boy and his alien blob friend (named Blobert) on a quest to save the latter's home planet of Blobolonia, which has been taken over by an evil emperor who only allows his subjects a diet of sweets.[3][6][7] The boy and Blobert must traverse the subways and caves beneath the Earth and gain the necessary items before traveling to Blobolonia and defeating the emperor. They must evade dangerous obstacles like falling rocks, stalactites, and stalagmites, as well as deadly, snake enemies.[6][7] A Boy and His Blob is not a side-scrolling game, but rather presents the player with a series of single, interconnected screens.[8] Despite being a platform game, the player-controlled boy is limited to simply running left or right. The player cannot jump or swim, and if the boy falls too long of a distance, he will die on impact.[8]
Though the player directly controls the boy, Blobert is controlled by the computer AI. The player must rely on the shapeshifting blob to cross gaps, reach higher platforms, and overcome the obstacles and enemies.[3][6][7] Blobert can change into several different tools when the player feeds him flavored jelly beans. A licorice jelly bean, for instance, will change Blobert into a ladder, while an apple jelly bean will turn him into a jack.[3][7] Whistling at Blobert causes him to change back to his original shape and continue following the boy.[6] The player is encouraged to experiment with the jelly beans and their effects to navigate the puzzling game world.[3][6] Scattered throughout Earth's caverns are various treasures and diamonds that increase the player's score and can be used to purchase vitamins at a drugstore located within the game world.[3][6] Vitamins can be used in conjunction with a special "VitaBlaster" gun, which is in turn used on Blobolonia to complete certain tasks.[7] Also found on the map are extra jelly beans and peppermints, which increase the player's lives.[6]
Development
David Crane was the chief programmer and designer of A Boy and His Blob.A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia was developed by Imagineering, the in-house developer of Absolute Entertainment. The game was chiefly designed and programmed David Crane with help from his former Activision colleague Garry Kitchen.[9][10] Kitchen was the president of the Activision spin-off company Absolute, which began self-publishing in 1988; Crane joined Kitchen at Absolute around the same time.[11] Crane described the concept of a boy accompanied by a shapeshifting blob as "an off-the-wall idea".[12][13] Crane stated that Blobert's design was heavily influenced by the characters Gloop and Gleep from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Herculoids.[12] In terms of gameplay, Crane's goal was to advance the adventure genre as he had done with the Atari 2600 game Pitfall!. Since the release of the sequel Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, adventure games on the market had grown to include useful tools for players to collect and utilize in their environments. However, Crane found displayed tool inventories "not very elegant" and decided to implement tools in a different way.[1] After coming up with the game's premise, a wishlist of the blob's object transformations was written and brainstormed with artists, who then converted them to computer graphics.[1] Transformations were chosen based on how they would appear on screen due to the NES's graphical resolution. According to Crane, objects such as the bridge and ladder were "a must", but many ideas were scrapped because their nature would not be immediately obvious to the player. Puzzles that could be solved using the objects were created after the various shapes were finalized.[1]
A total of 14 jellybean flavors were implemented in the game. To ease the game's difficulty level, the flavors were named specifically as either puns or alliteration to help the player remember them.[12] For instance, the punch-flavored jelly bean transforms Blobert into a hole, a play on the term "hole punch".[14] A grape-flavored bean listed in the game's manual was only present in the version submitted to Nintendo. This flavor transformed the blob into a wall ("grape wall", a pun of Great Wall of China) which would repel enemies. A Boy and His Blob proved to be "one of the most played games at Nintendo" once it was submitted to the company.[1][15] In this earlier version, the player character could potentially become separated from the blob, thus making it impossible to proceed. A senior management member of Nintendo viewed this as a bug, so Crane substituted the grape bean for a ketchup-flavored bean that would instead summon the blob to the boy's location.[1]