Inside Social Games

Acid-trip inspired physics lesson or nightmarish balloon fantasy world? I can’t decide.

The Blobs Game inside Facebook is an arcade Flash game where you launch a round little ball towards other brightly colored balls before they multiply and rise to the top. You must effectively keep their populations in check without being able to ever effectively kill all the blobs. It’s like how hunters in New Jersey used to come out and thin the numbers of deer so they wouldn’t take over Jersey’s easily stormed state Senate.

The major problem is that this game never ends. Keep launching your little ball of destruction at the rising collections of balls and they’ll still multiply. Ultimately, you will lose. The blobs will win. How long this will take depends on how many drugs you’re taking/how long it takes you to become bored and stop. The answer to the latter question for me was five minutes

There’s a leaderboard and a way to invite your friends. There are also better arcade games out there with better animation and have less irritating sound tracks (think weird trance music). But if you feel like playing something weird and inescapable, give it a try.

Gameplay: 4

Development: 3

Trippiness: 9