The Top 7... Lovable blobs

Jan 14, 2008

Videogames are weird. Weird. Rules that apply to books, television and movies don't work at all here. Take blobs, for example; so far, Hollywood has produced only one major blob protagonist, and it was a pink monster that devoured everything in its wake. Conventional wisdom holds that nothing that horrible could ever be made cute or marketable, let alone heroic, and yet videogame history is filled with cute blobs who've touched the hearts of millions and become more memorable and beloved than many human characters.

This is not lovable. It is an asshole.

We know what you're thinking: has GamesRadar finally lost its shit? Of course not! The mere fact that games can make something horrid and amorphous into something lovable deserves recognition. As does the fact that, for every adorable blob protagonist, there's one that's far less interesting. Take the personality-free blob in the Mercury games, for example, or the irritating, unresponsive, backstabbing white jerk from the NES classic A Boy and His Blob. Nothing lovable there. They're not very expressive. They don't sing. And the fact that there are blobs who do both weirds us out so much, we decided they needed to be brought to light.

7. The Blob

What is it?
A green, angry-looking wad of living clay formed from the remnants of a radioactive meteorite.

Where did it come from?
ClayFighter (1993, SNES/Genesis), ClayFighter 2: Judgment Clay (1994, SNES) and ClayFighter 63 1/3 (1997, N64).

Why do we love it?
Essentially just a green lump sculpted to look like an indignant sock puppet with angry eyebrows, The Blob isn't just irresistibly goofy - he's the ultimate triumph of lazy design. He's ClayFighter's most slapdash character and its most visually interesting, able to transform into a flying saw blade, a seething morass of boxing gloves or a giant boot. He's the lump of crap that was tossed in at the last minute because they needed another character to round out the roster, and instead of fading into obscurity, he rose to become a hero. Blob's story is that of a true underdog, and who doesn't find that lovable on some level?

Forget the creepy, leering monstrosity that Blob became in later games - it's his original incarnation that fills a special, lump-shaped place in our hearts OH NO OUR HEARTS ARE FULL OF CLAY NOW ARGH COUGH DEATH.