Play n Trade

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

Posted by Play N Trade staff writer, 10th Mar 2009

In honor of March being Retro Month here at Play N Trade, I thought I’d talk about one of my favorite games from ages past.  When I was but a lad, my mother took me and my sisters to a video game store one day.   I had a stack of games with me to trade, and I was hoping to get something new.  I was interested in The Adventures of Bayou Billy for the NES, but after I tried it in the store it was less of a Pitfall!-like adventure game like I had hoped and more of a shoot-and-beat-up-all-the-bad-guys-over-and-over-again game.  (Curse you, Captain N and your misleading cartoon show!)  I was never really interested in those, so I started looking around.  By chance, I happened across another NES game I had never heard of called A Boy and His Blob.  The guy at the store told me about this adventure of a boy who befriends a blob from outer space as they went on a quest to save the blob’s home planet.  I was intrigued by this, especially after he told me that it was mostly one large puzzle to solve.  You progress through the game by feeding different flavors of jelly beans to the blob to make him transform into various objects:  Licorice turned him into a ladder, Cinnamon made him a blowtorch, Tangerine was for a trampoline, etc.  It was one of my favorite games.  It was also insanely difficult.  You had to memorize what the flavors did because the game didn’t tell you on the screen.  Fortunately, the game used flavors that could easily be related to what they did through mnemonic devices.  (e.g. Vanilla = Umbrella is easy to remember because they end with “lla”.) You also had a limited supply of each flavor of jelly bean.  If you used the wrong one too many times, you wouldn’t have enough to finish the game.   You would find more as you progressed, but you could still prevent yourself from being able to finish.  Despite the difficulty, I thought it was a lot of fun.  Imagine my surprise when this month’s Nintendo Power has an article on a Wii version in development.  It looks good, and I’ll be keeping an eye on its progress.  Years after I had finished helping Blobert save Blobonia, I found out that the original game was created by the same guy who made Pitfall!, one of my other all-time favorite games.   So I salute you, David Crane, for helping make my childhood one that had adventure and fun.

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