A Boy and His Blog

Mom and Dad, I have a confession to make.

Over the course of my childhood, you were incredibly generous with me. Christmas was never a time of “Look, Santa brought you a stack of magazines from the coffee table” and my birthday gift was never “Enjoy these grass clippings from out back!” Maybe you were so nice to me because you know that I would use your example as to how to be generous to my once and future children, I can’t be sure. But as I look back at all the neat stuff I got as a kid, I’m eternally grateful.

Hell, I had a Nintendo when I was 6. 6!

And over the tenure of my NES days, I must have amassed upwards of 30 different games to play. And since this was the late 80’s, the idea behind each of these titles was fairly archaic and basic; Nintendo did not intend games to become Super until the 90’s. Some were sports games that kept me occupied before anyone had even invented season mode. Take “Baseball,” for example. I just played the real Phillies schedule, and actually kept the score book on a piece of paper sitting on the table in front of the television. I would conduct an entire March Madness bracket in Double Dribble by electing to be one team in each match up, and “advancing” the winner on the bracket before me. In 10-Yard Fight, I’d play against my father and beat him with a complex playbook of run to the left, run to the right, pass to the guy.” Worked every time.

To be fair, my dad didn’t stand a chance. He was a Tetris addict.

As a simultaneous form of conquest and gratitude, I did my best to win at video games. Several of them I could hang on a wall, plaque style, as I actually beat the final bad guy to achieve what every video gaming hero wanted to achieve in 1988: watch the credits of a bunch of Japanese guys roll by. Super Mario 2? Toast. Ghosts ‘n Goblins? Finished. R.C. Pro-Am? VICTORIED!

Some games even made learning fun!

In the latter days of Original Nintendo, I got “Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?” as a Christmas present. Surely, you’re familiar with the premise of the Sandiego series. (If not, let Rock-a-pella explain.) Anyway, they ran our places for Carmen to hide (Where in Your Kitchen is Carmen Sandiego didn’t test well), so they allowed her to run from the fuzz via time travel. And as much fun as learning about the Renaissance is, the heavy almanac that came with that game served a better purpose as a trench ledge on which to steady the barrel of my Duck Hunt gun. Screw you, Laughing Dog.

But as for the aforementioned confession? It concerns not Carmen or the Dog. But rather, another video game hero and his gelatinous friend.

A Boy and His Blob.

I’m sure at some point I must have asked for this particular cartridge, because it doesn’t seem to be the type of game one of you would have seen on the shelf and been drawn to. I’d like to borrow the premise of the game from Wikipedia:

“A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia is a side-scrolling platformer in which the character and his friend Blob (full name Blobert) travel together on earth and on Blobert's home planet Blobolonia in a quest to defeat the evil emperor. Blobert can change into several different items when he is fed jelly beans. A licorice jelly bean, for instance, will change Blobert into a ladder, while a honey jelly bean will turn him into a hummingbird. Most of these transformations can be remembered mnemonically due to a correlation between the flavor of the jelly bean and the item that results.”

The truth is: I never figured out how to get past the opening screen. Seriously. For all the hours I tried to crack the blobular code, I got nowhere. I'm sure that had I figured how the game, I don't know, begins, it was probably challenging and perhaps educational. However, my gameplay was limited to winging candy at a glorified albino Hershey Kiss.

So thanks for the game, parents. But I've failed you.

I never got my passport stamped on Blobolonia.