At a Glance: When I first fired up this game, I heard a completely irritating and random series of beeps, buzzes, and whistles. Assuming my emulator had gone awry, I closed it and restarted, only to find out that it was working fine and this nausea-inducing, not-quite-techno garbage was the actual in-game music. Right there I should have gone with my gut instinct and deleted the ROM off my hard drive immediately, but I kept playing, and I’ve regretted it ever since. Why? Because David Crane’s A Boy and His Blob is the most painful experience I’ve ever been through.

Platform: NES (Download Emulator here - 192k)

Download: Download ROM here - 109k


Wow, a blow torch! I wish I gave a rats ass.Game Plot: This game is, in fact, about a boy and his blob. I’m just clearing that up so you don’t mistake the title for a clever metaphor and play this game thinking you’ll receive something more entertaining than watching your wounds scab up. You control your "blob" via two means: whistling and jelly beans (I would once again like to remind you that this should in fact, be taken literally, and that I am not fabricating any part of this plot summary). You start off in some desolate unnamed city with no real purpose. You then run around with your blob and… well... I’m not sure what they intended for your to do. Once I managed to get some gold, but it just made my score 1000 instead of zero. A disappointment to say the least, as I could find no other object or person in the entire level. However, after playing the game for a while, I began to slowly realize that the object of the game is to get frustrated to the point that you smash your controller and write a personal letter to Mr. David Crane, telling him what an enormous piece of monkey shit he is for making this game.

Weapons: I don’t know if you can really call them weapons, but you can feed different jellybeans to your blob and he’ll turn into different objects based on the flavor. Every jellybean has it’s own effect, except for ketchup which the blob refused to eat (evidently, shape shifting, gelatinous pieces of slime have very discerning taste). At some points you will have to turn your blob into a ladder. To do this, you first feed him every type of jellybean you have until you find the one that made him turn into a ladder. Next, you run around until your blob is in exactly the right spot, feed him the jellybean, and climb up your blob. Sounds simple enough, but it’s made nearly impossible due to the fact that the cretin you control seems to have some sort of blob slime on the bottom of his shoes which causes him to slide away from the spot you are trying to make him stand. This added an exciting twist to the game as I ran around like a jackass for twenty minutes trying to stand in a certain magical spot.

Look a Pokemon! Too bad I can't stay alive to catch it.Enemies: None… actually, I did see a caterpillar type thing, but I only managed to catch a glimpse of it as I plummeted to my death.

Number of Levels: For the first two eternity's I spent playing the game I thought there was only one point five levels, the city streets and the subway below it. However, after I discovered I could make my blob into a hole, I fell through the bottom of the subway and into some cavernous underworld. Unfortunately there’s no way to survive this fall, so I’m not sure if I can really count it as a level.

Number of Bosses: Since there’s no other life forms in this game, much less bosses, I’d like to tell you about some research I did. I discovered that David Crane was also responsible for the smash hit Pitfall!. After I scratched the surface, I discovered something truly horrifying: A Boy and His Blob won the 1990 Parents Choice Award for portraying “Positive Human Values”! This bothered me for a long time. I walked around swearing loudly and making deep cuts on my arm until I realized the obvious truth: David Crane sold his soul to the devil. Now I can at least take some small comfort in knowing that when he dies he’ll have a one way, first class ticket to hell.

Defining Moment: After my hundredth time of running back and forth across the level trying to find something to interact with, I began to feel a burning feeling in my stomach, which rose into my chest, and then I lost consciousness. I awoke the next day in a hospital bed. Later that day, the doctors informed me of just what had happened. As I was playing A Boy and His Blob, my stomach began to produce an excess amount of acidic bile. Then, through a remarkable feat of many muscles working together, my body forced the bile up, through my esophagus, past my throat, and into my sinus cavities. I overheard a doctor say to a nurse “It was as though he tried to dissolve his own brain.” That man will never know how right he was.

Graphics-8
Gameplay-7
Story-8
Sound-8
Fun-10
Overall-41

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

– Nefarious (@TwitterHasBannedAllMyAccountsEver)

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About This Column

The Rom Pit is dedicated to reviewing the most bizarre and screwed up classic console games from the 1980's, the ones that made you wonder what kind of illegal substances the programmers were smoking when they worked on them. Strangely enough, the same illegal substances are often necessary to enjoy or make sense of most of these titles. No horrible Nintendo game is safe from the justice of the ROM Pit.

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