Dr Blob's Organism

Sam gets back to basics with Digital Eel's retro-styled burst of fun.

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As we grow up from kids to adults, life tends to get more complicated. And as the world of gaming has gotten older it too has increased in complexity. Where 20 years ago there was left, right and shoot and 10 years ago there was no look up/look down today there’s a hell of a lot that you have to do to try and get some fun out of your newest game. So it’s nice every once in a while to take the complexity away and enjoy something simpler. To take a step away from all the hectic complications of the grown-up world and get down to some pure fun. The equivalent of playing in the mud with a lollipop stick and a worm. Which brings me to Dr. Blob’s Organism, a good-old fashioned wedge of shooting enjoyment. Three keys, one objective.

Then again, just because something is simple that doesn’t have to mean it is easy.

The premise to Organism is as follows. Dr. Blob has been up to his old tricks again, brewing up giant protozoan in his laboratory kitchen. They are getting out of control, ready to spill over the edges of their Petri dishes. You must destroy them, wipe them out, blast them into their constituent molecules. You must play a cracking blaster, shoot, shoot, shoot until either you or they are dead.

You get five lives for each level. The playing screen is mostly filled with the Petri dish, your blaster attached to the rim. In the middle of the dish is the organism, a big pulsing green blob, in the center of which is the nucleus. You’ve got to blast away at the goo until you can get a shot at it’s centre, with each hit taking down some of its health bar. Your gun stays in the same place but the Petri dish can be rotated both clock and anti-clockwise, which can get quite dizzying and gives a good sense of mania. So you spin round and round, trying to take out the constantly advancing green slime, keeping an eye on the bits that break away under your fire, all the while trying to be careful not to let any touch the side of the dish and cost you a life. But you got to do it fast because if you dally too long the whole thing will go berserk. Which you don’t want to happen, believe you me. Took two washes of the kecks before I was willing to handle them.

There’s twenty levels of this to get through before you can say you defeated the blob. And each level throws something new into the mix. The first level it’s just your gun and the blob. The next couple of levels things get easier as your gun gets double shots, then your guns double, with one each to the left and right of the dish. But on the next level it gets harder again as the blob gets BlobSteel power, becoming invincible to your shots for short bursts of time. This continues throughout the game so it never becomes stale. There are plenty of power-ups that make welcome appearances, from extra-lives to gun upgrades, but if you take too long to pick them up they might get sucked back into the Blob, giving it a health boost. There’s something like seven to ten upgrades, from double shots to electric to purple rays. All good for killing Blobs, all very handy; especially when you’re down to two lives and need some extra firepower before you totally loose control of the level.