News You Can Bruise for 2009 March 10

Permalink [Comments] (3) Tue Mar 10 2009 22:08 A Boy And His Buildings:

There's a remake in the works of A Boy and His Blob, the game that should be one of my all-time favorites. Its awesome mechanic takes the kind of operations you get by typing or clicking in a text or graphical adventure, and makes them digetic. But it was ruined by terrible game design. Exactly the scenario where a remake makes sense.

As is well-known the original game takes place in Hoboken, New Jersey. The remake starts off with the same lovely view of a skyline across the water, but it's been Standards-and-Practiced and it's not the New York skyline anymore. In fact I don't think it looks like a real city skyline at all; the city would have to have two or three downtowns. Way to ruin the realism, game about a shapeshifting blob!

(If there is a real city with a skyline like that, I'd consider that a more interesting fact than you'd think, so let me know. I guess I could see the New York skyline looking like that if you rotated Central Park 90 degrees.)

games

Comments:

Posted by Susie at Wed Mar 11 2009 11:01

Orange County has several downtowns near each other, but looks nothing like in that picture.

Posted by kirkjerk at Thu Mar 12 2009 08:57

Boston has a bit of a bifurcated "downtown", IMO:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:5872-boston-skyline-legend.jpgsome of the taller buildings are not in the main financial district area.

Other photos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Boston -- it's funny how googling "tall buildings boston" got much better results than "boston skyline"

Posted by kirkjerk at Thu Mar 12 2009 09:21

Also... the original Boy and His Blob. I think I *wanted* to like it because it was by David "Pitfall!" Crane. The game had a lot of problems though, and I guess the core gimmick hasn't aged all that well... if you view the Blob as just kind of a goofy inventory, it's cool that you have all those (limited use!) inventory items that physically interact with the 2D environment, but in some ways it's just a variant on the lock-and-key puzzlage of, say, a later Zelda game. (Except in BahB, you get the full array, and have to figure out what solves what w/o wasting too many beans, and in a Zelda, its about gradual acquistion.)

http://www.ugo.com/games/lonely-games-lonely-gamers/ - the way too bleak landscape of the Boy and his Blob might qualify it as a "Lonely Game", even though it's also a bit about the comradery.

Finally:I'm kind of glad I never saw and therefore have no nostalgia for this series

Leave a comment