THQ Gamer Day 2008 - De Blob
Another quirky title available for play at the THQ Gamer Day event was de Blob. I got some hands on time with the game and was ready to paint the town pink. The premise of the game is that an evil group known as I.N.K.T. has come in and robbed the city of all of its color, leaving the citizens disheartened and bland. De Blob and his co-horts, the Revolution (not the same posse as Prince), are working to bring color back to the town one hue at a time. All the characters in the game are very cartoonish and almost have a slight Viva Pinata look to them, while also having a graffiti attitude, which seemed an odd clash, but they made it work for the characters. The variance between the drab, uncolored world and the vibrant, colorful world you can change it into is also refreshing, but some of the sound effects for doing so can get a bit repetitive.
The gameplay was fun and reminded me a bit of Katamari in that you are basically rolling a color blob around the world and trying to hit other things in its path; however, in this game the point is to color the world with the limited amount of ink you pickup from the ink containers all around the world. The game uses the waggle motion of the wii-mote to cause your blob character to jump up adding a platformer element to the game. The stages are in large part somewhat of a free range environment to go and do as you please, with points gained from coloring drab buildings, trees, and sidewalks. As you gain enough points new areas are opened up with new places to go and new venues to paint. In order to add more diversity to the open environment you can run across members of 'the Revolution' hiding in manholes that will give you missions, a la GTA without any blob prostitutes or gang members involved. Most of the missions I saw were painting certain structures particular colors or making it to a certain area before time ran out.
As far as the multiplayer goes, I was only able to see others playing it, but it seemed relatively fun to play in a group tagging the town different colors in a mad dash to score the most points. There was also a 'Sprint' mode which I didn't get to play but seemed to involve some types of minigames, if I were to venture a guess. Overall the game seemed enjoyable and a nice change of pace from you everyday, run-of-the -mill FPS, RPG, and Action games that seem to saturate the market. While the game may not have Prince to help lead The Revolution, De Blob certainly seems to know how to party like it's 1999.
PixelPoet
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 4 April 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: blue tongue, de blob, gamer day, thq, wii
Name: Dave
Well I am glad that it has added features. At E4all, I was intrigued about the game, but actual hands on showed very little that kept it interesting. Another attendee and I looked for something, anything that would deem it worthy of more play time, but after about 10 minutes we gave up.