David Crane's A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia

The Good
I have always enjoyed A Boy and His Blob if only because it falls squarely into the "highly unique" category. It's a puzzle game where the puzzles are derived from feeding your faithful blob different flavors of jellybeans which cause him to assume various objects and tools (licorice = ladder, apple = jack, for example). I had never heard of anything quite like that before this game and I have never seen anything quite like it since.

It's worth noting, and appreciating, that the background graphics in this game are quite detailed in NES terms.

The Bad
While the background graphics feature a fairly exquisite level of detail, the primary characters-- that is, the boy and his blob-- are sorely lacking in the same area. They appear to have been transplanted from a game that was a console generation behind the background graphics.

The music was decent but also highly repetitive. The proper title of the game is "David Crane's A Boy and his Blob" which makes me wonder if a single person was responsible for the entire game, graphics, music, puzzles, and all.

The Bottom Line
Put on your thinking cap and dig into your bag of jellybeans. The blob is hungry and you have a mission to complete.

The Good
I love the unique plot and gameplay of this title. Who the heck thinks up this stuff? A boy....and his....Blob? You feed him jellybeans to make him turn into stuff? What a concept! I mean, seriously, even if your taste runs in other directions, who doesn't want to see where this one leads you?
The game itself is fairly simple, side-scroll your way through, using your pal Blog and jellybeans to figure out puzzles. And the puzzles are fun, you have to know what to turn Blob into in order to advance.
I have to agree with a previous reviewer, NES really did a nice job on the detail and artwork too. It looks very detailed and sharp for an NES game. Most NES games are a kind of blocky bitmap art, and they made this one fuller with more depth. Shadows in the trees/leafs, signs, etc. Lots of colour. It makes it fun to play. Surprisingly hard and took me lots of hours to finish!

The Bad
Not too much. Some area's were VERY difficult, made harder by running out of some of the jellybeans.
The side-scrolling nature of the game made it difficult as you sometimes advanced or retreated from the screen you were in by merely going to far. This was irritating because it usually reset the bad guy's you ALMOST just beat and now have to do all over again. But this was rare.
No real help, so some of the uses of jellybeans were not very apparent and as I said above, if you used them in the wrong place, you could run out, and have to go way back to get more! Not too much replay value though. Once you finish, there is no surprise or twist to be able to play over.

The Bottom Line
It is a refreshing change of pace to the usual fare. A highly unusual and unique game with decent graphics for the day. Lots of fun for everyone, say 10 and up. No gore at all, clean decent graphics make it good to the eye. Many hours of silly fun!