It’s one of those rare games that come around once in a blue moon, ahead of its time, completely unique, can only truly be understood by playing it, and yes, it is fantastic!
The story:
You are a wizard, your mission is to return colour to the world after some evil force has stolen it leaving a drab and dreary black and white world behind. Why “Wizball”? Well in order to bring colour back to the world the wizard has turned himself into a ball (wiz-ball), and why not? But don’t worry you also have your pet cat (that turns into another type of ball) to help you collect the colour.
Gameplay:
So you start off as a green bouncing ball in the middle of a horizontal landscape, by pressing left or right you begin to bounce in that direction, the more you press the more momentum in that direction. Stopping is achieved by pressing the opposite direction until you eventually have no horizontal momentum and bound up and down on the spot. Now the landscape is littered with alien like landscape objects like blocks and rings that if you hit you just bounce back off, this makes the landscape tricky to navigate and some impressive and well times bounces are needed to get you through gaps etc.
Now bouncing up and down is all very well but not much of a game, so you
will be glad to know there are plenty of alien baddies to shoot, from stationary baddies to worms made of spheres that move across the screen in a wave-like movement.
So the bouncing sounds annoying? Well don’t worry the idea is first to collect bubbles that are left behind when you kill the baddies, this moves the flashing icon on the top toolbar, when you collect enough bubbles to highlight the power-up you want to press the activate button and bang you have the power-up. The power-ups range from multifire to “no bounce”, activate no bounce and you can move up, down, left, and right by just pressing the required direction, but do remember if you die and use up one of your lives you start again with all power-ups off.
Another power up is the cat, the cat appears as a separate sphere that follows wizball about and fires with him, but his real job is far more important than that. The worm baddie mentioned above is no ordinary baddie, shooting it will not leave bubbles behind but rather a drip of colour that will fall to the ground and disappear, cat must zoom into action and collect these droplets as they fall. The worms come in the three primary colours and each drop collected will appear in a caldron on at the bottom of the screen. Once you have enough of the primary colours Wizball and cat return to their castle, return to their normal form, mix the required colour, and add it to the landscape. Each landscape requires 3 mixed colours before it is fully finished and you get another landscape to play. You are able to play three landscapes at a time which get progressively hardener, you can finish the levels in any order, as soon as you complete one the next one becomes available. You move between these landscapes through craters, pipes located somewhere in each of the levels (think super Mario bros).
Two Player:
This is where wizball really steps into another world with one player playing wizball and the other player taking the part of the cat. This is a really neat game play feature allowing you to team up with a friend and work together, it makes for great entertainment, and a good laugh. Incidentally in single player, the player takes control of cat when the fire button is pressed cat then automatically returns to Wizballs side then the button is released.
Graphics:
Well it’s a C64 game so we are not talking pixel shaders and thousand of polygons, but in its day it was revered for its outstanding graphics. To be honest it has not aged badly at all and the levels are pretty nice works of pixel art when completed.
The conclusion.
This is a one off game that needs to be played; no amount of words can do this game justice, in fact talking about this game probably only put you off it. But give it a try, the gameplay is unique and refreshing even in today’s game market. It’s fun, frustrating at times, the payoff for completing a level is worth it, and most of all it’s addictive, very addictive. It’s worth noticing that there are many people out there that remember this game above the oodles of games out there, why, because it is a true masterpiece of fun gaming. 9/10
