WOG is a fantastic game - I love the music and the hand-drawn cartoony look. The animation is wonderful, and the puzzles inventive, varied, and most of all, very fun.

However, the control interface causes me some major hair-pulling moments. This is the one facet of the game that could really use some polish, either through a patch to WOG, or as an improvement in any sequels.

#1: Ability to make the mouse prefer different types of goo.
Whenever there are a lot of goo balls of varying kinds concentrated in a small space, it can be difficult (even fatal to your poor goo!) to quickly pick up the appropriate type of goo ball. The balloons are especially succeptible to this flaw. Also, there are times where I want to remove a goo ball from a structure, but there are so many goo balls scurrying about that I simply cannot grab it. Sure, there's the whistle, but that takes time.

Add some sort of shift function to keys on the keyboard that cause the cursor to have an affinity to a particular type of goo. E.g.:
1) black goo
2) green goo
3) balloon
4) goo that is part of a structure and removable*
5) matchstick goo
6) special goo balls for the stage, such as skulls or spineys

Or maybe even something simpler: r-click = goo in structures always, mouse wheel cycles an indicator icon in the corner of the screen, which sets the current "favorite" between the available goo types. Click always picks up anything, but if there are multiple goos near the click, then the preferred type should be there. I still think balloon should have a shift-key on the keyboard because that one is so critical.


Suggestion #2:
The ability to quickly move large amounts of goo balls between two places that you can already move them one at a time.

Any time you have some detatched piece of goo, such as a triangle dangling from the exit pipe, but miles away from 50 goo balls back at the start, it's totally maddening to have to move all 50 of them to the exit one at a time.
Perhaps another shift-key on the keyboard that lets you pick up multiple goo balls? Once you have at least 2 goo balls (maybe now it's a wad of goo??) then the only thing you should be allowed to do with it is put it down somewhere - if you can make a valid 1-goo-ball-move like that, then it should be equally valid to move 500 that way.

Requiring 1 at a time only makes the game get tedious, and I don't immediately see any advantage that this ability would give to solving the puzzles themselves. Again - if you can move one goo ball from A to B by hand, then you should be able to move any arbitrary number from A to B at the same time.

1 key was specifically by design.  a) to make it easily multiplatform & b) (I'm assuming) to add more of a challenge to the game.  Like in super mario bros you slide or in doom 3 you can't have a flashlight+weapon at the same time.

I can see how you might make the case that getting the right goo out of a pile of diverse gooballs is a design thing, and that it's just "part of the game," especially having to do with grabbing a goo that's part of a structure underneath a whole gaggle of active gooballs. Okay. . . I still think the "mouse wheel" suggestion would be easily portable to all systems - for Wii, just use the up/down on the Wiimote, and B button as the r-click equivalent, and there's the same functionality for "affinity" grabbing. All other platforms have enough buttons to do the same thing as well.

However, as for the suggestion of a way to transport lots of goo balls from A to B manually at once in stead of one at a time, this is my #1 "want" from my two suggestions.

They say a picture's worth a thousand words. Is a video worth a thousand pictures? Watch this OCD solution to horizontal transportation innovation committee.... From 3:45 until 6:30 he's doing nothing but move 42 goo balls from A to B which is not challenging - only very, very tedious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tGvvmEU0gg