Beaten: A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette (Game Boy)

The David Crane classic A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette has been in my backlog since March of 1992, surviving the Purge with my entire Nintendo Game Boy collection, and occasionally played via the Gamecube's essential Game Boy Player attachment over the years. Admittedly, my earlier efforts were short sessions at best, but I recognized some of that David Crane (Pitfall) design magic and vowed to return to that title.

The player controls Boy, who is accompanied by Blob, a fiesty AI companion that will just murder you at times for not paying attention to the game design, dammit. No, serously, when you enter a new room, Blob will follow, and if you're stopped at the edge of a cliff or some "what's it even for" stamping machine, he will push you ahead to your death.

And that's what the real puzzle of this game is - figuring out the mechanics and rules so you can navigate to the intended puzzles. Boy goes from zero to a hundred with just more than the slightest urging of the D-pad, and making short steps to be in just the right place involves micro-tapping the direction and hoping you don't start sprinting - which by the way ends in sliding, to add distance to your already-overshot attempt to put yourself on just the right pixel.

The brilliance of the game design really shines when you figure out what jellybean to feed Blob at what spot. Different flavors get different results, and learning how to use them to overcome obstacles is a blast. There's not a plethora of these moments in the game, but they are a treat.  Most of the gameplay will be figuring out how to trampoline up to ledges and high places in caverns to collect treasures and other items.

Admittedly, I beat the game but did not play for a perfect run, where I also collect all of the treasures. If I ever decide to try that, though, I know where they all are thanks to this map I made:

Earlier this year I had my "Play games from every era of gaming going forward, you're getting old" epiphany, so I went waaaay back to William Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure, the first text adventure. While playing, I mapped it out in the very primitive MS Paint, but in spite of the frustration and limitations of that program, I had as much fun mapping the game as I did playing it.

I've always been a map nerd, and in the early days of gaming players were on their own with that one. There was little to no room back then for the program itself to map it all for you, so it was graph paper, pages of notes, and meticulous exploration of complex and devious dungeons. I still have a vast set of file folders with maps and notes from that era, and recently broke out my folder for The Bard's Tale: Tales of the Unknown to test it against the remaster released on the XBox One. The maps still held up!

So, when I decided to take on A Boy and His Blob: The Rescue of Princess Blobette, I broke out a much better program than MS Paint known as AutoCAD. The same program I use at work to create shop drawings for clients turned out to be a great videogame mapping program.

Again, I enjoyed that nerdy mapping buzz as much as the game itself. While I won't do it or even need to do it with every game I play, once in awhile I can scratch that old itch, as much a part of my personal videogame history as the games themselves.