Turning up to work one day, just about to warp to some random world to perform your unusual yet still janitorial duties, you learn (over the company address system) that something big and bad is afoot. It turns out some nasty dudes have decided to steal time and sell it back to other planets - likely in direct competition to your company's efforts in that area. Worse still, (for no apparent reason) these bad guys have kidnapped a princess from this random world. Falling instantly in love, you disregard your companys orders to abandon the world in question and run headlong into the warp to that world before it can be disabled.

That's where our story begins. And ends, basically. The rest of the game is purely about killing time monsters - the story does not reappear until the end, at which point (you likely have guessed by now) you rescue said princess.

Still, lack of a decent story didn't hurt Super Mario 64 - maybe Blinx will survive and prove to be a brilliant game! Then again, maybe not...

Blinx goes to great efforts in all of its marketing material, video clips, screenshots and even the back of the case to explain that for the first time, platform games are now playable in four dimensions - the 4th being time. That's true too - an interesting twist on platform gameplay allows our hero to utilise time controls (like "pause", "fast forward", "rewind" etc) to affect the gameplay. This allows him to rewind a collapsed bridge into its pre-collapsed state so that he can cross it, slow down a particularly nasty bad guy so that you have a speed edge over him, etc. Great concept! Poorly executed great concepts, however, are about as cool as just plain crap concepts - worse, even, as they leave you thinking "what if!", with that disappointed knot in your stomach.

The main character and the assembledge of enemies certainly look like they were designed to be cute - and they are, almost... They reek of effort and storyboards and late nights, all in an attempt to come up with something cute and mascot-ish. And they almost succeed. Almost. Unfortunately, none of the characters in the game quite make it. Most of them fall well short of the mark. Whatever that illusive "x-factor" is, Blinx don't got it. There's no theme to the bad guys either - they are just an ecclectic mix of odd bouncing / swimming / hanging things. Had they followed a theme (animals, robots, hairy swinging things from mars etc), there might have been something - but as they are just odd and unique, there's nothing pulling it all together into something that might be seen to make sense.