Blender Bros Reviews

short but sweet cute and friendly gameboy 2d action plataform game it have emphasis on exploration and be able to collect this mini bros who have different skills so it may add some replay value since the maps are ussually very short

Blender Bros. is a Game Boy Advance platform-game that was born from a collaboration between Infogrames and Hudson Soft (the latter of which was best-known for series like Adventure Island, Bomberman, and Star Soldier, before being absorbed into Konami in 2012). An early release for the system in 2002, it went pretty much unpromoted in its day, so in spite of being a platformer enthusiast, I only heard of it for the first time when I recently stumbled across Piko Interactive's emulator-wrapped Steam re-release. The story sees an "animalman" named Blender (who leads a team known as the Cosmo Keepers) seeking to prevent a malicious group (the Zooligans) from wiping out humans. Blender is a dog-person with giant ears which he uses for tasks such as hanging from ropes, as springs for performing high-jumps, and as a radar for pointing you in the general direction of items and stage-exits, and he can also collect small backup creatures dubbed "Mini Bros.", which offer further abilities. He even rides a jet-bike in some into-the-screen driving sections which are there to break up the sidescrolling gameplay occasionally. Additionally, if you enjoy going back and trying to beat your best records, the game keeps track of how fast you finished each stage, too. Blender Bros. was originally designed for a handheld console with two main face-buttons and two shoulder-buttons, so the controls are simple to pick up when mapped as you want them (which I would suggest doing with a community-made emulator, rather than the provided one - more on that below). The handling is precise, as you would expect from a game of this type made during the era it's from. Most importantly, movement feels fun, as Blender has more abilities than the simple inputs might suggest. The visuals are pre-rendered, in a fashion reminiscent of the likes of Donkey Kong Country, Klonoa -Door To Phantomile-, and Tomba!, and the character-designs are also in the same vein - they're quite charming and expressive for what they are. The music is upbeat and the sound-effects are cute and fitting, and they go perfectly with the game's look and tone. Unfortunately, the provided emulation setup is not very good - the display is cropped to 4:3 even though the Game Boy Advance used a 3:2 aspect-ratio, the default look uses a very unfitting TV-style filter, and there are no options to display the game correctly. Thankfully, one of the best things about PC gaming is the wealth of options we have - including emulating old games, which is handy in cases like this. It's easy to retrieve the ROM-file for this title (inside the install directory is a folder named "res", and in there is a file simply named "game" - copy that out, rename it, and give it a .gba extension), and then drop it into the likes of RetroArch or RetroDECK (or whatever you prefer), where you'll have many more options for how you play and view the game. Putting aside the poor emulator that it comes with, once I dropped it into RetroDECK I thoroughly enjoyed the game. The only quibble I really had with it was its dry and painfully-literal translation, which lacks personality compared to the charming graphics - though it is sometimes unintentionally amusing, with obvious examples including your base mistakenly being described as a basement instead, and a combo-animal boss being named "Shartle"! The game is short but sweet, which is a positive for me, but might be a negative for others - that being the case, I would advise waiting for a sale, especially since it sometimes drops as low as 41p on legitimate key-reseller sites like Fanatical (though even the standard price is infinitely better than you'll find the cartridge for on the secondary market!). I'm glad that Blender Bros. got a second chance on Steam after flying under the radar at the time of its original release. It's a nice, solid little game, and I would recommend it if you enjoy 2D platformers in the late 1990s/early 2000s style - just make sure that you play it through an outside emulator instead of the one that it comes with!

Really fun game, gives ya a bit of a challenge. You have to learn the boss patterns and then you can beat em. I like the driving levels, and the level design of the standard 2D platforming levels is great as well. Great hidden gem!

Blender Bros has quite the odd backstory. Originally a GBA title - this game was exclusive to North America, but the back story comic was exclusive to Japan. If you try to find a physical copy of this game nowadays, it will set you back hundreds of dollars. The game itself is a pretty average platformer, however the characters and universe as well as Blender's unique abilities made it worth my time as a first time player with no nostalgia for the title. It's nice seeing such a rare and obscure game made officially available here on Steam, but as it is a re-release of a GBA game with no major changes made and it's actually a very short game (seriously, some levels are under a minute in length!), I heavily recommend waiting for a sale if you're interested in picking it up officially.

There's nothing particularly remarkable about this game but it's so straightforward, with a good pace, a couple of well placed level gimmicks to add variety and some cool Mini Bros abilities that it's something quite welcoming to play, even if it doesn't leave much of a mark. It's cool innocent fun, and with the cartoony pre-rendered models with black outlines aesthetic and the happy upbeat tunes... it makes me feel like I'm playing someone else's childhood. About the Steam version... it's fine, it's basically a ROM file working with an emulator. It works fairly well, I've had some input issues (tho I'm not sure if it's the emulator or Steam's overlay fault) but the rest works as it should. 9 euros is way too much for something like this, so play it at minimum 50% discount, as the game is nothing spectacular and neither is the porting process.

Wow this was really cool. Upon some (very brief) research, it turns out this is a PC "port" of a GBA game by the same name. That's why the graphics, sound, and everything felt so... oddly familiar to me. I had not played the original, mind you. I LOVE the artstyle of the characters. Graphics were great, music was awesome, characters were all super adorable and nothing in the game ever felt too frustrating (except some bosses). [h1]In depth review:[/h1] Your moveset: Besides moving left and right and having a basic jump, you can duck and press an attack button. There's some intricacies here though that are quite interesting. For example, if you hold "down" in the air, you'll flip upside down and bounce on your ears to reach greater heights. You can then attack while in this state to do a sort of drill move (I honestly forgot you could to this during boss fights and thus never used it. Mainly because hit detection is too generous for the enemies to hit you so you can never get too close to them.) You can also keep pressing the attack button to widen its range around you, as well as pressing the button repeatedly in the air to spin and glide. Pressing and holding the attack will charge up an attack with super far range (I just spammed this on most bosses as they were too hard to get close to, like I said.) It was super fun pairing the ear bounce with air spins, I felt surprisingly maneuverable. Oh you can also grab a flight "power up" and climb pipes. What are "Mini Bros."? Think of them like pokemon but as a passive/active ability. You'll find them in levels (only about 3/4 levels have them). You can "evolve" them by letting them listen to music(?) by purchasing music discs from the shop. The genres are rock, reggae, and classical. Think of giving the mini bros. music as feeding them. Once they listen to the right genre (it's trial and error), they'll change forms. The discs are the only thing to spend your money on, so just constantly buy them and give them to your mini bros. Some mini bros do things like giving you a shield to block one hit, give you another hit point back, attack in front of you, act as a platform for you to stand on, give you invulnerability, or light up dark areas. However, a few of these mini bros. are mandetory to get, though they are extremely easy to find. You can find them (and the objective) by using your radar ears, so you'll never get lost (the levels are small anyway). Positives: + I liked the idea of switching Mini Bros to use different abilities. Gives it almost a pokemon-like vibe. (Some much more overpowered than others.) + Levels were easy and short (normally ~2 minutes each), and few of them reward exploration with max health upgrades and mini bros. to make levels or bosses easier. Negatives: - The bosses, man. You're agile, but not sonic or mario agile, quite. It's very difficult to fight bosses when half of them move faster than you and your vision is limited due to the small screen of the GBA. Some of them ramp up to having 20 health while you only have 5 (with two max health upgrades, even. You normally would only have 3.) - I thought it was kind of annoying that once you "fed" a mini bro a certain disc they would change and REMOVE the previous mini bro evolution. Sometimes they changed abilities entirely (one mini bro just made health regen better and better with each evolution, however others replaced abilities entirely like invulnerability changing into "freezing enemies"???). This meant that once you evolved a mini bro and weren't happy with their new ability, you had to go back to a previous level to grab the first evolution again. Not that big of a hassle since you can exit the level via the menu as soon as you grab them, but was still annoying to have to backtrack because we didn't know what new ability they'd gain. The in-between: ~ The game has a weird obsession with time-based levels. There's at least 5-7 levels that are on a time limit. I only failed once, and that was on the first "cosmorider" level they set you on where you have to drive by and pick up remotes. They don't explain where they are, so I missed the first one and failed. But other than that, the time limits are extremely generous. (There's a 10 minute level that you should end with about 4 to 5 minutes remaining.) I honestly NEED to see more of these characters. I want more games with them in it. This was such a treat. They're so adorable and the moveset is so strange yet fun and new to me (I'm not an expert platformer and have only played few platformer games (some mario, a good amount of kirby and sonic and that's kinda it.)

(Review posted: October 30, 2020) This is a game that's always been dear to my heart ever since playing it as a child, back when I got the GBA version. It's so obscure though that not many people know about it, and the only playthroughs I've seen of it online are people playing it for the first time, with little to no knowledge of the game. I always wanted someone to make some sort of guide of this game (someone that knows enough about the game to talk about almost everything, anyway), but got so fed up waiting for one that I decided to use the knowledge I got playing this game for hours as a kid to make one myself. Despite this, I figured not many people would care about it because this game never got any sort of sequel or remake, and any hopes of one were shattered when the company that made it went out of business. Suffice to say that the last thing I'd expect was a Steam port of this game to ever exist someday... And to my surprise, I found out that it did! Obviously, the first thing I did when I found out about it was to play it immediately and see if there were any changes from the original version... There weren't any changes at all. Not really anyway. There are some things I'd like to talk about the game here though. Keep in mind from here on out this will be a "review" of this port of the game in particular. Also, I'm not going to bother making a "Pros and Cons" list; I'm just going to put together all my thoughts here randomly. Sorry if that bothers anyone. - Saving in this game doesn't work for some reason. You can only save progress with the "save-state" option provided by the Steam version by pressing Escape. The only downside to this really is that you have no way of playing a cleared file of the game (after beating the final boss). All this does is let you re-fight the bosses though, so whatever. - You can also press Escape to change the controls of your controller/keyboard. The default is the same as the GBA version, except the A and B buttons are switched for some reason (probably for Xbox controller users). Also, there's an option to choose what you want the Select button to be, even though that button does nothing in this game. - As much as I love this game, even I have to admit its price is a bit too high. I ended up buying it when it was on sale for about $5, and assumed that was its actual price at first without questioning it. - The audio quality at times is a bit... weird. And not in a good way. It's most noticeable during the Jackbatlar fights and in Militar/bomb race missions. - The screen when playing has this weird, "90s TV" quality to it as well, which I also don't like very much because it kind of hurts my eyes. The border surrounding it is pretty cute though, and it reminds me of the ones you see when playing in the GB Tower in Pokémon Stadium. - There was another person who reviewed this port that mentioned that you can only have a max health of 5. I've confirmed it's 10 (which means 7 health upgrades), just like the original. I have no idea what made that person think it was 5, when a lot of people don't even know you can get any health upgrades at all. By the way, I confirmed it was 10 with the golden hotdogs; I have no idea if playing mini-games can increase your health as I've not played them yet. Considering how my playthrough of this port went I'm assuming that's unchanged as well. So, those are the things about this port I wanted to talk about, assuming I didn't forget about anything. Now, would I recommend this port? I mean, considering this is pretty much the only viable way to get the game (legally) at this point, I suppose so. Considering the quality of this port and the game in general, I'd recommend waiting for it to go on sale first. I'm still really happy that this game got a Steam port though, as this'll potentially give it more love from others; love I think it deserves. (Edit: September 29, 2021) - I don't know if this was fixed, or this has always been the case and I didn't realize it, but after playing through the Steam version again there's some things I want to mention. One, the "90s TV" effect the game has can actually be turned off, so if you don't like it (like me), you don't have to worry about it. Second, you CAN actually have a cleared file of the game, despite the game not keeping regular saves; you just need to save the game (normally) after watching the end credits, select the file you just saved, then make a save-state, while not ever turning the game off during all this. Which means there technically isn't actually a downside to not keeping your regular saves and having save-states instead (except for the fact you have to remember to save with save-states I guess). So yeah, other than that, everything else should be correct.