Pro Tip of the Day - a boy and his blob

Pro tip: some silliness in A Boy and His Blob

Will — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:22:12 +0000

One of the things that annoyed me about A Boy and His Blob is that when the Boy is running and you let off the control pad, he slides a good eight or nine feet, usually right into Instadeath(tm). It's almost as if his shoes are made out of Crisco and the ground is slightly warmed.

But if you ever get to one of the ledges in the game (and there are lots of ledges in the Deadly Caverns portion of the game), and let got of the Cross Pad he'll slide right off the side of the ledge and be suspended in midair.

Which looks like a glitch at first until you wait a few seconds and the Boy looks over

Then looks down

Realizes he's not on solid ground any more, covers his eyes, and falls down

Or you could use that precious few seconds to try and run back over to the ledge. But this only works if you slid off the ledge. If you run off, the Boy will just fall as normal.

Sure it's a little Wile E. Coyote, but who doesn't like watching that guy fall down, too?

Pro tip: alternate uses for a Cola Jellybean

Will — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:31:10 +0000

Pretty early in A Boy And His Blob you come across a couple of screens where Death in the form of these brown things rain down from the top of the screen. Most guides will tell you to use the Vanilla jellybean and use the Umbrella to protect yourself. But the Boy slips and slides around so much when you let off the cross-pad that I usually end up getting hit anyway.

So what I like to do is to use the Cola Jellybean instead to turn the Blob into a bubble.

That way it's impossible for me to get hit, since I'm protected on all sides.

And, yeah, you move a little slower, but I'd say that's a fair trade.

Pro tip: Don't believe everything you read: Syd Lexia edition

Will — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:30:00 +0000

A while back, I stumbled across a site with a review, of sorts, of A Boy and his Blob. (warning, some NSFW language).

In it, he talks about one of the two flavors of jellybeans that a lot of people don't really know much about, Lime.

You get the Lime jellybeans (along with the Orange beans) in a bag that you find after escaping the deadly caverns

You get exactly two Lime jellybeans, which Syd says are exactly how many you need to finish the game: one to open the final boss room

And one to open the Vitamin Store, where you spend your Treasures to get vitamins, vitamins to shoot out of your Vitablaster (the Vitablaster is the gun that the Blob turns into if you feed him the other jellybeans in the bag, Orange). And, if you use one just to see what it does, you've screwed yourself out of the ability to finish the game.

But wait!

It turns out that while the Vitamin store is indeed locked when you start the game, once you get out of the sewers, it's totally unlocked. Check it out:

There I am, in the store, with both Lime jellybeans.

Not only that, but you don't even have to go into the Vitamin, sorry, Health Foods store to finish the game. The shots from the Vitablaster can't even be used against the final boss (and they're not even that useful against the enemies of Blobolonia, either.

Sorry, Syd.

Pro tip: Planet Blobolonia is a pushover

Will — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:30:19 +0000

A Boy and His Blob consists of two parts: wandering around caves collecting treasure, and wandering around an alien planet trying to avoid killer candy and treats. You can go to the planet pretty well any time you want to, but if you haven't gotten the bonus bag of jellybeans from the cave network you don't have the necessary items to finish the game. Tricky.

The problem with the Blob's home planet, though, is that everything's super-deadly and real tough to avoid, mainly because of the boy's particularly loose controls.

But he has a secret weapon.

On the first screen when you land on Blobolonia, start chucking jellybeans toward the left side of the screen.

It's kind of hard to get the timing right, but you kind of want to throw the bean right when you touch the edge of the screen. If you do it right, you'll briefly catch a glimpse off the last boss room. Once that happens, all of the enemies on the entire planet (except for the boss himself) will vanish.

Which makes that part pretty much as easy as it can be.

Pro tip: Alternate uses for a ketchup jellybean

Will — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 08:00:00 +0000

In A Boy and his Blob you take control of a guy with a pet blob.

Obviously.

He has to use the blob to do pretty much anything, and he does that by giving the blob (Blobert) jellybeans. Each flavor jellybean will make the blob turn into something different and occasionally useful. Except the ketchup flavor. I'm not even sure where you'd get ketchup flavor jellybeans, Jelly Belly doesn't make them. Though I can't imagine they'd be any worse than those Buttered Popcorn beans.

But, I've gone off on a secant.

Anyway, the ketchup bean is used if you lose your blob somehow and he can't get back to you. Throw the bean and he'll 'catch up' to where you are.

Very clever.

But, if you throw a honey flavor bean at your blob and before he finishes transforming throw a ketchup bean at him, he'll turn into a brick wall.

What does the wall do? Does it block enemy projectile chocolate kisses? Does it hold up a slowly closing door while you race to the other side to hit some control switch? Does it just look cool?

Unfortunately, the answer to all those questions is 'no'. The wall doesn't do anything other than waste a couple of jellybeans. But the masonry looks kind of nice, so it's got that going for it.