I used to wonder what was taking THQ so long with de Blob, since the student project that they acquired the license from is over a year old. At the Nintendo Media Summit and my first play through, I found out. The game is being done right.

De Blob is a platform action game, but a simple and straightforward one that most should be able to enjoy. The evil Inkt Corporation has invaded and has sucked all the color, happiness, and emotion out of the world, and it's up to de Blob, an amorphous character with a mischievous bent, to fight the color revolution and restore color to the people, buildings, surroundings, and environment. He does this by smashing Inkt paint bots, gaining paint points that color him and anything he touches afterwards. This means that you start in a world full of white and gray. When you touch a building, it looks like a splatter of paint was just thrown onto it, but soon the entire thing bursts forth in vibrant musical color.

The use of colors in de Blob is a major feature. Smashing into red paint will make you red, but then smashing into blue paint afterwards will turn you purple. You can be any of the primary or secondary colors, or absorb all three colors to end up brown. If you run out of color by painting too much, tracked by how many paint points you have (the more you have, the larger your size) you'll go transparent and need to find more paint somewhere before you can do anything else. You'll also go transparent if you touch or swim in water to wash yourself off.

Water and water sources are important because they also wash off the black ink that enemies taint you with. When coated with that stuff your paint points slowly tick away. When they reach zero, it's game over. In addition to just collecting and painting colors, you also collect paint patterns that are used for more variety in building coloring. You also get extra points for painting entire sections of the worlds, and the more colors you used in doing so the higher your score gets.

The music in the game is even tied into this system. It's almost non-existent when the world is white and gray. Musical sounds and styles are tied into each type of color so that as you paint the world, you're also essentially painting the soundtrack with different instruments.

The controls of de Blob really felt seamless, which was a big plus. Previously THQ had said that they were going for a Nintendo quality game with de Blob, and the way that the analog stick just melted from existence while I was whipping the Blob around really impressed me. I could lock onto close targets or platforms by pressing the Z Button on the Nunchuk, and with a downward flick of the Wii Remote, ground stomp onto enemies or other objects. Just flicking the Wii Remote by itself would cause the blob to jump. When jumping he'd adhere to wall surfaces he came into contact with. This meant that after sticking to a building, I could use the analog stick to basically wall run (great for painting multiple buildings) or flick the Wii Remote again to launch myself off with a satisfying wall jump. I could control the camera with the D-Pad and call up a compass using locations circling around the Blob's head to indicate the directions of specific landmarks.

Flowing from the seamlessness of the controls, the world of de Blob is just a joy to mess around with. With simple but full control over the motion of your character, players are free to careen into buildings and smash paint bots, all the while watching buildings, grass, tress, ground, and more spring to color as they collide into them. It's a simple reward mechanism but it's irresistible and addictive. I often found myself just painting more and more of the world, jumping to higher and less accessible buildings even when I'd opened up the next section long ago.

De Blob features multiplayer modes, too. I know that Mario Kart was also at the event, but I was absorbed into de Blob's multiplayer matches unlike anything else there. One mode was a simple timed matched during which you simply try to paint more of the level than your opponent, which we played in a level called The Sewers. So you can simply paint buildings by yourself. Or you can paint over his buildings with your color. Or you can wait until he goes to the bottom of the level and then trigger a trap to get him trapped in rising levels of black ink. And all the while you have to make sure to manage your paint count by refilling with paint bots littered around the place.

Another mode was called "Blob on the Run" and this was even more fun than the last one. In this mode only one Blob had the power to paint, while the other player had to hunt him down and ground pound him. Then that guy would be painting while being hunted down. Gameplay between me and the game's caretaker, someone who'd had extensive experience testing the game, quickly devolved into a crazy cat-and-mouse game across skyscrapers city streets and bridges. This involved peaking at the other guy's screen, watching for paint trails, keeping an eye out for buildings that suddenly changed color, and lots and lots of evasive wall jumping. He beat me to a pulp a couple times, and then I think he let me win.

Unfortunately, he wasn't allowed to show us what 4-player split-screen would be like. I imagine it would be epic.

De Blob is currently slated for a September 2008 release, which bodes well for the game, since I came across a few bugs while playing it. Still, that's a minor concern compared to the vastly polished gameplay I saw on display at the media summit.