Review: Da Blob

So, I was all set to deliver a review of The Call of Cthulhu, but I had an unexpectedly awesome game dropped in my lap from the Wii, Da Blob.

Now, for some game enthusiasts, myself included unfortunately, the Wii has been a little lack-luster for me as a relatively hardcore gamer. Most, if not all, of my free hours are spent playing games by myself as I tend to enjoy them as entertainment. That leaves the Wii as particularly unexciting for me as the vast majority of games for it are either exercise based (which, all things being equal I should play just for my health if nothing else) or party based (and I don't through a lot of parties). So when I was told about how fun Da Blob was I was rather skeptical.

All my suspicions were quickly laid to rest as one of the first fun game since Twilight Princess landed in my hands. Here is a quick rundown on the narrative: the world is a happy place and full of color and music, and everything is going quite swell until an enemy army called INKT move in and use their advanced technology to drain the world of color and the happiness that derives from it. That is to say, they turn this wonderfully happy place into a monotone of gray and enslave all the Raydians and turn them into Graydians. You, the hero named Blob, are charged by the small underground of resistance fighters to help repaint the world into a colorful place, and thus remove the INKT army from your world.

To do all that, you control the main character using the nunchuck attachment to the Wii to move around, and with a simply up-and-down motion of the Wii-mote to make Blob jump. The controls are so easy to learn, you that you can devote all of your attention to the myriad of ways you can run around the now grey-colored cities and recolor them back into a wonderful place. To do this, all you have to do is roll around and collect the paint canisters that have sucked the city of color, and then bounce into the surfaces you want to paint that color.

Simple, easy, and with a delicate touch of sound, surprisingly fun to play. The player is provided with three primary colors that it can use to build a total four additional colors. The primaries are Red, Yellow, and Blue and the secondaries are Purple, Green, Orange, and Brown. The interesting thing about the color of Blob is this, depending on the color you are, the different style of musical instrument you play. Depending on Blob's 'mood' (the style of music you pick at the beginning of each level) the colors will play different music as well.

In the first level I could rock out to electric guitar with Blue and hop a red (to turn purple) to switch out to a stylized and re-synthed guitar and base guitar. And it doesn't stop there, blast out with the brass of Green, or the electric organ of Orange, or the base bump of red or flute of yellow. Switch as you see fit, bounce around, and paint the town to the sound of music you make as you bounce from building to building, street to sleep, and rescue all of the Graydains from the evil INKT army.

This is perhaps the first game I've run into in a long time where the sound of play is more than enough to convince me to pursue wandering around and accomplish nothing other than enjoy the sound of me painting the town red (so to speak).

Now there are a couple of other mechanics that make a strong showing in the game and both are vital to the game's narrative gameplay. First, is the ink that is all over the planet as it was brought to replace all the color in the world with grey and black. The second is water which not only gets rid of color, but ink as well. Ink can kill Blob while water saves him from ink, but washes him of the ability to paint color back to the world.

Now each level starts the players with a certain amount of time, and that time can be expanded upon by completing challenges and freeing Graydians by turning them back into Raydians. You will face entire armies of INKYs who, with varying pieces of equipment, will try to stop you from recoloring the world back into a fun and music filled place.

In addition, there are ten different levels in which the player can explore, can color, and play music in, but there is also 2 different mini-levels that contain specific challenges for the player giving them a total of 30 different places and spaces for the player to roam around and paint. On top of all of that, Da Blob also contains two play modes in addition to the story mode. Free paint, which allows you to go through all unlocked areas and paint them to your heart's content and Multipaint which allows several people to play together to paint the town.

The multiplayer paint mode, one that allows the players to mix and match different music colors and styles to create a symphony of color that is just as compelling as the main single player paint mode. With all of this wrapped into a deceptively childish looking package, I was pleasantly surprised at how entertaining the game really was. It made me pick up the Wii again, and I hope I'll find another game such as this to encourage me to keep faith in the Wii.