Probably the worst kept secret from THQ's pre-E3 event was upcoming Wii title De Blob. A game that started its life as a student project that was entered into the Independent Games Festival last year..

In the game you play as a colorless blob that can take on the colors of the critters it crushes. Once your blob has absorbed a color it can slap into a building to paint it. From what I saw of the game, it looks like it features both elements of free-roaming and missions. The missions typically include getting you to paint buildings different colors or racing around sections of the monochromatic city before a timer runs out.

While I love the look of the game and like the fact that there seems to be a deeper meaning lurking just below the game's mechanics, the thing that really sells this game to me is the fact that it's designed for the Wii and relies heavily on the console's motion controls.

To roll around the city you use the nunchuck's thumbstick, but if you want to crush an enemy, and absorb its color, you need to lift up and then swing down the remote as if swinging a hammer. To jump into the side of a building to color it you flick your remote in the correct direction.

I played around with the multiplayer for a bit and found the controls fairly intuitive and certainly something that added to the fun of the game. It was a bit tricky to get your blob to make bigger, rather than smaller jumps, but not so difficult as to be off-putting.

The one thing I didn't enjoy about the game was the seemingly endless and sorta pointless multiplayer. In the version we played, we roamed aimlessly around a city coloring the buildings in an attempt to get the high score. But the lack of a time limit and the fact that someone could follow behind you changing your buildings to their colors made the game a bit of a bore. While I wasn't told this, I suspect that the multiplayer was very, very much incomplete, so I'm not too worried.

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