Wizball : Amiga
I first played Wizball at least twenty years ago. It was one of ten games which came bundled with my Amiga when I got it, and I remember playing this and listening to Pink Floyd’s Momentary Lapse of Reason in my bedroom at home. Good times. Wizball was by far the best of the games bundle I got, but in my early days of gaming it was just that bit too hard for me and I never managed to complete it. It didn’t help that it came with no instructions and it’s not intuitive as to what you have to do, so the first few games were frustrating indeed! Twenty years on, I booted up my Amiga emulator on my Mac, plugged in my PS3 joystick and thought I’d run through some old games. At about 10pm, I found myself playing Wizball, and each time I died I thought ‘I can do this, I can do this’. At 1:40 in the morning I completed Wizball for the first time, twenty odd years after I started it.
It’s a brilliant game, which has stood the test of time in a very unique way. In fact, graphics aside, if this was out as a download game for a current generation console, you wouldn’t be unimpressed today. The idea of the game is that the world is all drab and grey, and you, a wizard, turn yourself and your little cat into a ball so that you can go around the world and shoot the bad guys to get them out of the way (and receive power-ups) and use your cat to collect paint drops in order to make the world all colourdy again. It’s de Blob many years before de Blob.
The game has a most unusual, and dare I say it, unique control mechanism and alongside it a unique difficulty curve in that it is hardest when it starts and easiest at the end. When you start, controlling your wizball is hard - you bounce up and down and the sideways movement is ‘loose’ at least, however this doesn’t last long as soon as you get a power up or two and the first things you select to keep are the control upgrades. This done, you can move about with total control. Of course, if you die, you are back to bad controls, but you can make your upgrades permanent as the game goes on. It is this very strange control system which first stand Wizball out, and it’s the ‘paint the world’ concept which keeps it standing out.
You get access to three levels at first, one each for red, green and blue paint, and in my naivety last night, as I approached the end of colouring those levels I thought ‘Oooh, I’m going to complete the game’. Imagine my surprise (and a slight groan) when it opened levels four through six. That’s when a memory from twenty years back said ‘not that simple’. Thankfully, my permanent upgrades were strong enough to mean losing a life didn’t mean much and I was able to finish the game with one little life left. Hurrah! Of course, stupid me didn’t take any screenshots while the game was further on, so you’ll have to make do with this very early one!
Wizball is an amazingly fun game. It’s hard to say ‘I’d recommend this’ as its age preclude it from being something you can go and play easily, but if you are in the mood to install and set up an Amiga emulator and then download a game to play, start with Wizball, as I did twenty years ago.
