Blue Print
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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Your girlfriend Daisy is in trouble! Ollie Org is chasing her across the top of the screen, and you need to come to the rescue. To stop Ollie before time runs out, you need to construct a machine. The blue print for the machine is at the bottom of the screen, so all you need to do is locate the parts which are hidden in the numerous houses in a maze like town. When you locate a part, drag it back and place it on the blue print. When all parts have been located, press the start button and the machine is ready to go! To make your task more difficult, there are several obstacles that get in the way.

If you enter a house which doesn't contain a part, you will instead be stuck with a bomb. You will need to hurry and diffuse any bombs in the bomb pit before they explode! From time to time, a flower pot will fall from above and then hop off the screen. Get hit by a flower pot, and you lose a life. You also need to be careful of Fuzzy Wuzzy, who wanders around the neighborhood randomly. An encounter with Fuzzy Wuzzy will also be deadly! Hiding in the bomb pit is Sneaky Pete; while he isn't deadly, he will occasionally appear and press the start button before your machine is complete. If this happens, you will need to drag Pete back to the bomb pit and reassemble all of the machine parts.

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Review

I do so love videogames from the eighties. Back then, it didn't really matter how ludicrous a concept was. If you wanted to make a game where you controlled a tiny character running around brushing and flossing a gigantic set of teeth, then by God, you made that game. If you wanted to make a game about a penguin crushing vaguely blob-shaped enemies to death with ice cubes, there was nobody around to tell you that this is obviously a bad idea that wouldn't sell, and that you should get back to your chair and help the rest of the team code the next blockbuster chapter in the long-running Call of Duty saga, you horrible anti-capitalist person, you. 

Now, I don't really mean that as a slight against long-running series of games that a lot of people seem to like, but I'm going to say this: thank God there are still indie game developers around. Where else would I be able to play games that can only have been invented from the haze coming out of the programmer's bong? (Or programmers' bongs if there was more than one person working on said game. It's a veritable den of programmer debauchery. Weird, weird debauchery.) 

And Blue Print is definitely one of those games. In it, you are tasked with saving your girl (presumably) from a huge eggplant ogre who keeps chasing her and will eventually catch up with her if you don't get that machine assembled by dragging each of the pieces out of the houses scattered across the playing area and placed on the titular blueprint. But don't think for a second that this will be an easy task. Because if the hedge maze won't do its part to impede you, then there are a good number of other dangers to contend with. There are monsters falling from the top of the playing area that are lethal to the touch, and needless to say, you'll need to avoid those. Some of the houses also have bombs that you'll be needing to drop into the bomb/monster chute before they go off. (Why your main character couldn't just leave the bomb where he found it is anybody's guess.) And once you finish the first level, you may also come across the hedge path wandering furball that will also kill you on touch. 

A more non-lethal variant is found in the small, furry being that drops by from one of the sides and messes up the already assembled parts. That one can be safely picked up, however, and dropped in the monster/bomb chute. (Which begs the question: if I drop a monster down that chute first, and then a bomb... do I paint the insides of that chute red?) 

As you can probably tell, Blue Print is certainly not lacking in silly. The whole concept seems to be borne out of some kind of bizarre WB ACME weapon-in-a-box kit, except more like a "build your own death-dealing contraption of things found in your home". Or, as seems to be the case here; things pilfered in other people's homes. If you've ever played any RPG games, Japanese ones in particular, and wondered why the creators didn't see a problem in having your hero walking around in other people's homes and stealing all their stuff, now you know where it all started. 

The original arcade game was placed on a horizontally aligned monitor, so the Commodore conversion look a little stretched by comparison. But even if it weren't, the graphics in this game is as far removed from good as you could possibly go without going into ASCII graphics territory. It's fairly colorful, though. I'll give it that, though a little hung up on the colder colors of the color spectrum. 

I... honestly can't remember much about the sounds in this game. Did it have any music? I'm pretty sure there were some "BOING" effects, at least, as well as the noise-mode explosion sound of the bomb, but that's about it. Which is kind of lazy, seeing as lots of games made even in the early eighties had some pretty memorable tracks to their names. 

Despite all this silliness, I wish I could say that Blue Print is a good game. It's not terrible, but the whole setup feels a little poorly thought out. And by that, I mean the hedge maze and the way you can't really tell where the bombs are set up, AND the notoriously short time you have to drop it down the hole. When you take that, and combine it with the fact that anything you carry, whether that be bombs, items you need for your machine or the monster at the bottom, is drug behind your character as if it was a Gradius option powerup, which is why it can get a little frustrating placing that damn thing where it's supposed to go. And the Commodore 64 conversion is even pickier with the placement than the arcade original, which does not mix well with the far slower pace of the character in said conversion. 

That in mind, the controls aren't terrible, and I'm sure it's quite possible to get used to placing machine pieces on the blueprint and bombs and monsters in the chute. Doesn't change the fact that this game isn't really all that interesting, though, mostly because you're basically doing the same thing over and over again. The labyrinth layout changes around from stage to stage, which adds some longevity for this game, I'll give it that. It's just... so average. Manageable. Kinda-sorta OK. 

So, interesting as the concept is, Blue Print is nevertheless a bit of a flawed game. It's fun as a short distraction every now and then, but even taking it for a test run for the sake of this review hasn't really made me want to play it for any particular length of time. It's probably worth experiencing this game at least once -- you know... alongside that teeth-flossing game -- but those looking for an outlet for their creative sides would be far better served picking up Minecraft.


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