Video games - Blinx: The Time Sweeper

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	Video games - Blinx: The Time Sweeper

Blinx: The Time Sweeper is a platform game developed by Artoon and published by Microsoft Game Studios. It was released for the Xbox on October 7, 2002. A sequel, Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space
was released for the Xbox in 2004.

Introduction

Advertised as 'The Worlds First 4D Action Game', Blinx is a third-person platform game (in 3D), in which player controls Blinx, a Time Sweeper, on his mission to prevent the end of the world. The game revolves around Blinx's (then-near-unique) Time System: Blinx is outfitted with a magical vacuum cleaner, the Time Sweeper (or TS-1000), with which he can exert limited control over Time itself; slowing, speeding up, reversing or stopping it's flow entirely.

The Time Controls of Blinx, it was claimed by Microsoft, were only possible with the capacity afforded by the Xbox hard drive. However, shortly after the release of Blinx, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
was released simultaneously for the PC, PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox, recreating some of the temporal mechanics of Blinx, with greater success.

Blinx was coldly received by critics, citing such points as the bland enemy design, Blinx's slow pace, the unresponsive in-game camera as evidence of poor execution of an interesting idea. Blinx received below-average marks from many magazines and websites. The release of Blinx only helped to further the bad reputation of the Xbox as having poor first-party games, at the same time as when the PlayStation 2 and the GameCube had a string of blockbuster games lined up for the 2002 Christmas season. Its sequel Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space was also critically panned.

Plot

In Blinx: The Time Sweeper, the player takes on the role of Blinx, a ginger cat who works at a facility known as Time Factory. The Time Factory is a facility located outside of Time, dedicated to the creation, distribution and maintenance of the flow of all Time throughout the universe. When glitches or corruptions in Time are found, the Time Factory dispatches Time Sweeper agents to locate and correct them. Left unchecked, temporal glitches can manifest themselves into malevolent Time Monsters, roaming freely among dimensions, distorting everything with which they come into contact. When a gang of evil pigs known as the Tom-Tom gang begin stealing and destroying Time in dimension B1Q64, it becomes temporally unstable to the extent that the Time Sweepers decide that it is safer for all dimensions if B1Q64 is allowed to disappear into non-existence, killing all within. When Blinx receives a message from a young princess trapped within the doomed dimension, Blinx grabs his mystical Time Sweeper and dives into dimension B1Q64 through the Sweepers' Time Portal moments before it closes.

Blinx as a character

Some suggest that Blinx was proposed as a possible mascot for the Xbox system, rivaling Nintendo's Mario or Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog, since the main character of Halo: Combat Evolved
(Master Chief) was considered too violent. Blinx has a small but respectable fanbase.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Blinx: The Time Sweeper ]

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