Amidst the bright lights lights and heaving bosoms that permeated the E3 2010 show floor was a modest demo tucked away at THQ's booth for a game that likely should be getting more buzz than it is, de Blob: The Underground. The first de Blob title was a runaway success for THQ, eventually surpassing 700,000 units worldwide and becoming one of THQ's biggest hits on the Wii. As such, a sequel to the colorfully quircky platformer seemed to be hotly anticipated among Wii fans. Or was it? The demo that I played at E3 had all of the magic of the first title, but with more focus and refinement, yet I've hardly heard anyone talking about it at this point.

This is all too bad, as it seems that THQ and the awesome developers over at Blue Tongue have really learned from the first title and delivered a sequel that one-ups its predecessor in every way. De Blob: The Underground again takes place in the Prisma City, but after the events of the first game. The peaceful inhabitants of the city have returned to their colorful lives after players defeated Comrade Black at the end of the first title. In usual videogame fashion, Black has been hiding out since then nursing his wounds, and he's ready to trick the poulace into re-electing him as their leader. It's all pretty simple stuff, and it works fairly well. The dialogue-free intro is less funny and more annoying than in the first game, but that hardly counts against the game. The improvements on the core gameplay are what really distinguish The Underground from the first entry in the series.

The first thing almost everyone who played de Blob will be interested to know is that the A button is used to control your jumps this time around. This means that you'll no longer be waving the Wiimote around to try and get your blob to make a death defying leap like in the first game. Whether this was a change to accomodate the new PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game or whether Blue Tongue was just trying to listen to its fans is unclear. Nevertheless, the change is for the better, and I certainly appreciated the added accuracy in performing high-flying maneuvers.

The addition of a jump button may seem like the biggest change to the game, but it's essentially cosmetic when compared to the structural changes being applied to Blue Tongue's sequel. First of all, the ridiculously huge, pseudo-free-roaming environments of the first game have been cut down considerably. Instead of gigantic levels with daunting numbers of objectives scattered throughout them, players will be quided on a more linear, more directed mission path. Missions will only pop up sequentially as players work their way through the levels, making for a much better sense of accomplishment, even while a level is in progress. This should also help prevent some of the sprawl of the first title, where some levels would take upwards of an hour to complete with absolutely no save points.

This one structural change might have been enough to make the game feel distinct, but Blue Tongue opted to include one of the more popular mechanics in platformers currently: 2D sections. These 2D portions of the game take place in enemy strongholds and fortresses, and feature similar color-based puzzles as the rest of the game. The controls during these stretches are just as good as the rest of the game, and they serve to punctuate the game's pacing a little bit, making it slightly more interesting to play through.

It's too bad that the E3 show floor is such a terrible place to heck out game audio, as the original de Blob made some of the most inventive use of MIDI music I've ever encountered. As players restored color to the grey wasteland around them, they also filled in the game's soundtrack more and more. Each color of paint represented a MIDI track for a different instrument, and these could be layered upon each other in fun and interesting ways. I held my ear up to the television while playing, and at best was able to confirm that this effect would still be in place for de Blob: The Underground. It's hard to say how different the coundtrack will really be, but looking at the rest of the improvements to the core game, I'm inclined to believe that THQ and Blue Tongue have something cooking on this front.

After my more than 20 minutes with the Wii build of de Blob: The Underground, I have to say that I'm shocked to not hear more excitement about this title. It takes the already strong foundation laid by the first game and builds something really transcendent out of it. I can't wait to get more time with what looks to be yet another rock-solid Wii platformer.