B.O.B.

I used to love dossing around on this game on my SNES up in my room as a kid, this was just one of those types of games that I could play for hours on end and never get bored with. In something that the Super Nintendo excelled at, it was a very quirky and novel platformer, wherein you played as "B.O.B." "Bug-Outerspace-Bot" a rather cocky yellow alien robot who, after crashing his dad's hovering space hotrod in hostile territory, must traverse through an array of deadly alien factory complexes and hellish gross hives to make it in time to pick up his date! I wouldn't say it's an easy game at all, in fact it was pretty scarily daunting to play the farther you went into it, as after the first few easy stages the difficulty ramps up considerably, and it wasn't just a linear left-to-right type platformer, but rather all over the place, with the levels all being timed mini-labyrinths. And B.O.B.himself handled like a rickety shopping cart and had quite a very awkward jump motion, this game definitely didn't have the smoothness of Super Mario World. I could only ever make it to the second of the special different stages where B.O.B.'s racing through a maze filled with floating mines and electric fences that would explode you in no time if you collided with them enough. That part would always kill me dead, and I was really good at this game! I knew the right way to ration out and conserve the really powerful weaponry so I could beat the bosses easily, but that part would always halt my progress.. And my mother could get through it! As much as a bit of a pain as this game could be, it was still fun and had a lot of charm and colour about it too, B.O.B. had a ton of goodies in his arsenal to deal with the monstrous alien bugs and evil robots, such as a flame thrower, an awesome plasma spreader that could obliterate most enemies in a single blast, and if you ever totally ran out of ammo you could just use your huge fist! Go-go robot umbrella!!! B.O.B.had a lot of cute mannerisms in his movements, when he uses his springboard thing and you jump in the wrong place, he'll comically crash into the ceiling, when he crouches down he scuttles like a crab, when he's holding onto something he'll move along by his fingertips, if he should fall into lava and get melted down into a pool of metal he leaves a pair of blinking eyes in it, and when you stop playing he waves at you! B.O.B.'s great just the way he is, and this game deserves to be remembered as one of the more underrated platforming gems of the sweet joy that was the Super Nintendo. "I'm outta here!"