You are the intrepid, barbershop-quartet-suited J.J., out to save a damsel
in distress from a pursuing monster. How does a guy in a little striped
suit do this? By building a mobile, tennis-ball-launching contraption to
dispatch said dastardly monster, naturally. The catch? The pieces
of your mechanical creation are hidden somewhere among the little houses
in a maze - and those
houses that don't contain parts of your machine
contain a bomb that must be dumped into the bomb pit immediately (else
they'll explode and kill J.J.). Critters also roam the maze to catch you.
If you don't build your Rube Goldberg gizmo in time, the monster catches
the damsel...but you lose a life.
(CBS Electronics, 1983)
Sometimes arcade translations for the Atari 2600 miss the mark, and
sometimes they're right on the money. Blue Print isn't
necessarily either extreme; it's close enough for government work.
The entire playfield is there, I'll grant them that; what's really
missing from this game is the ease of control that makes the coin-op look
and feel deceptively easy (when it's anything but). When you've got a game
with a clock counting down to destruction (or, in Blue Print's
case, an evil critter who's chasing J.J.'s girlfriend and closing in with
every second), that last thing you need is a problem with the controls.
Control of this game isn't horrible, but it's not as good as it could be,
either.
Some of the coin-op's finer details, including its catchy music, doesn't
make the jump to the home cartridge (nor would one really expect it to for
the 2600 version), but enough that is recognizably Blue Print is
there - it's just a shame that it's hard to get a handle on it.
Rating:
Three quarters - worth repeat play, but with some annoying features that
might alienate less patient arcade veterans.
Reviewed by Earl Green
theLogBook.com editor/webmaster
Three quarters - worth repeat play, but with some annoying features that
might alienate less patient arcade veterans.