B.O.B.

About

B.O.B. is a side-scrolling shooter-platformer that mixes fast-paced combat with tricky level design. You play as a spacebound underdog who crashes his dad’s car on an alien asteroid and must fight through three distinct worlds to escape. Each level blends shooting hordes of enemies with precise platforming, plus occasional cart-race segments that test your speed. Power-ups let you customize your approach, but you’ll need quick reflexes to survive bosses that are either massive, fast, or both. The game’s 1993 release on SNES and Genesis gave it colorful visuals for the era, though the controls can feel a bit floaty by modern standards. What sticks is the game’s offbeat charm. The story follows B.O.B.’s increasingly chaotic quest to meet his date, featuring absurd twists like a robotic love interest with a giant mouth and a rival who rides a space surfboard. The levels shift from neon-lit alien cities to lava-filled dungeons, keeping the visuals fresh across its short runtime. While it never topped charts, retro fans praise its creativity and the delightfully dumb ending where B.O.B. chooses a new companion over his original plan. Available on modern ports, it’s a quirky relic of early ’90s action games.

Storyline

When B.O.B. crashes his dad's space car on the way to pick up his date, he finds himself stranded on a hostile asteroid filled with enemies. By collecting power ups and using fast reflexes, B.O.B. tries to find his way off the asteroid and to his date. B.O.B. fights his way through three strange worlds in total, encountering several particularly enormous or swift enemies (bosses) along the way, and participating in several cart-race levels. There were several different types of setting for each level, including domed space colony cities, large alien hive-type areas, strange biomechanical facilities, ancient (and apparently haunted) temples and cavernous magma chambers. Some of these settings only appeared on certain worlds. At the end of each world, B.O.B manages to discover a new space-car to allow him to continue on his journey. The first two both fail him under comical circumstances, resulting in him becoming trapped on an entirely new alien world. With the final car, B.O.B. is at last able to meet up with his date, who is revealed to be a large, blue female robot with a huge mouth, who harshly berates B.O.B. for his tardiness. As she is yelling at him, a slender red female robot flies past them on a space surfboard. B.O.B., frustrated with his obnoxious date, declares "That's the girl for me!" and drives off in pursuit of the red female. The game ends with a shot of B.O.B. and his new date sitting on a small asteroid together, staring out at the beauty of the cosmos in silence. Behind them, B.O.B.'s car (in the backseat of which his date had stashed her surfboard) stalls and drifts off into space, presumably leaving them stranded together but neither of the lovers seem to notice.