I cannot begin to adequately express how dismal this game turned out to be. It really could have been so much more. That's not to say it doesn't have its charms, but I have to wonder where things went wrong during this game's development.

The object of the game is to help the Blob, a jellybean-eating space alien, defeat the evil king of his home planet Blobolonia, and return vitamins and healthy eating to the homeworld. Feeding the Blob flavors of jellybeans causes him to turn into a different object that can be used to overcome obstacles (making the Blob almost a precursor to the other eat-and-absorb-powers hero of the Nintendo world — Kirby). The available jellybeans and their powers include...

The graphics are unrefined, even for NES standards. Super Mario Bros.'s blocky shapes had more flash and dazzle than the graphics in this title. Colors are dark, concentrating on browns and blacks found in the underworld sewer levels, and then turn to green and blue for the Blobolonia portion of the game. The Blob is the only half-way decently animated character has be bobs along the ground and smiles as he eats a jellybean. The Boy (nameless, by the way) only has a simple walking animation as well as a death pose. One hit kills The Boy, so players end up seeing the death pose quite a lot. Furthermore, if anything happens to the Blob, The Boy dies as well.

The underworld sewer levels consist of caverns and water hazards and if The Boy takes a wrong turn he'll find himself stuck in a place where it's impossible to return to the surface world to continue the game. My advice is not to venture too deep into the caverns. It may be tantalizing to pick up all the treasures and earn a high score, but you'll never make it out of the sewers alive.

Why bother with the underworld and its treasures at all? The second part of the game takes place on the Blob's home planet of Blobolonia, and after surviving the hazards of the fields and candy factory, The Boy will come across a locked door. The door can only be opened by feeding the Blob a lime jellybean, and the lime jellybean can only be found underground back on Earth in a bag of extra jellybeans. Finding these beans also gives access to the orange jellybean which turns the Blob into a blaster, but this weapon has no particular use that I could find. Vitamins (aka ammo) could be purchased at the vitamin shop, but nothing in the game was effected by these shots. I eventually came to not even bother using it.

I had high hopes for the title. After all, David Craine and Absolute created it and when it was released in 1989 the game scene was due for another big smash hit. It was packaged in an orange box that practically demanded attention. In the end what probably began as a great idea with lots of potential wound up as this poorly implemented mess. The game spawned a sequel which suffered from many of the same problems in 1991 (The Rescue of Princess Blobette), but I can honestly see why there was no Super Boy And His Blob or A Boy And His Blob 64. Just to prove that someone out there has some good judgment, the proposed A Boy And His Blob Advance for Game Boy Advance has been canceled.


References:
I actually bought this game back in the day. Nintendo Power made it look good.