The Closeout Warrior

I really don’t know why, but I was a huge fan of the American Gladiators television show. I religiously watched the show every week, I went to the show when they came to my town, and I even wrote American Gladiatiors fan fiction (and, no, not the creepy kind). The fan fiction script has long been lost to humanity (thankfully), but what hasn’t been lost is the NES adaptation of the show. Unfortunately, they’re both on about the same level.

The video game of the show has you taking your contender on a series of events that are only kind of like the events in the show. Like Joust. In the show you have one gladiator and one contender each on a platform holding a giant Q-Tip. They had to pummel each other until one fell. But in the NES version you have a series of several platforms, some moving up and down and four gladiators to fight in succession.

Or the Wall. Show: race to the top of an about 50 foot tall climbing wall with gladiators chasing after you to pull you down. Game: Climb up and around obstacles while several gladiators home in you from all directions. The wall has also somehow managed to grow to be about 400 feet tall.

There are some games that I rented one time and then kind of wish I’d have been able to purchase later, but they went out of print before I was able to. This is not one of those games. If I never play this game again I don’t think my feelings are going to be too hurt.

I was a really big fan of the Duck Tales television show during its original run on television. And since I was also a big fan of video games, it was only natural that when the two interests crossed I had to check it out.

Scrooge was away from his businesses so often that I wondered how he kept anything running with any degree of efficiency. The game plays on this fact and has you taking Scrooge through five exotic locations in a search for exotic and wildly valuable treasures.

What’s weird, though, is how you dispatch enemies. Scrooge isn’t a spring chicken, and walks around with his trusty cane. He can use it to knock rocks around at enemies, kind of like a golf-club. Kind of lame. But he can also somehow use it as a pogo stick. Bouncing on enemies’ heads, jumping higher, and crossing impassable terrain. Much better.

I wanted this game so bad that I told my mom about it for something like three months before my birthday. And finally, on my birthday that year, I got it.

And then I finished it in about two hours.

I was a little crestfallen. I mean, I had pumped myself up for this game so much and had been looking forward to it for so long that I guess I thought it would be a little more challenging. I played through it a couple more times that weekend, but then took it to the local used video game store and traded it for a copy of Mega Man II.

Some games have weird storylines, but A Boy and His Blob definitely makes the shortlist. It stars a boy with a backpack full of jelly beans and a blob from another planet as his buddy. The blob’s planet has been taken over by an evil emperor and you have to save it.

How? Well, good thing you asked me! The emperor is deathly allergic to vitamins, and there’s a vitamin store right down the street. But you don’t have any money. Fortunately for you, underneath your house is a subway system, and under that is a treasure-filled labyrinth, fraught with perils. Even more fortunate it that your blob has the amazing ability to turn into a variety of helpful objects to help collect the treasures, which is determined by the jelly bean you feed it. So you go to the caverns, collect the treasures, buy vitamins, and then go to Blobolonia to take care of the emperor. Could it be more straightforward?

The game is kind of interesting. It’s really fun to try and figure out what jelly beans are appropriate for each situation. But the big problem that I had was that your little human guy apparently has shoes made out of softened Crisco. Every time you let off the arrow key he slides forward a good ten feet. This is really inconvenient for dodging the weird snake-things that bounce around all over the place.

I would play this game a lot trying to figure out the giant underground maze. I never made it out of there alive, though. I’d always get a good amount of treasure and then get killed because I slid off the side of a four mile high precipice, or slid into one of those weird enemy things, or I’d fall into the water without the protection of a giant bubble of protoplasm and drown.

You can actually go to Blobolonia and try and knock off the emperor right at the very beginning, but there are all kinds of bizarro dangers there. Killer cherries, killer chocolate kisses, and killer bouncing marshmallows. And not to mention the crazy-fat blob emperor that you won’t actually be able to get to.

But, hey, get beyond all that and it’s a pretty good game.