I forget how much of my Fridays are monopolized by Giant Bomb these days, between UPF and the Beastcast. Fortunately, my selected game is a shoot 'em up, and thus not a particularly complex game to get into in the short window I've irresponsibly provided for myself. I'll be showing up later with all the obtuse early CRPGs, not to worry, but for now we're going through the games that interested my younger self the most; games mostly of the action-oriented persuasion.
Wizball
Today's game is Wizball: an early 1987 hit from Sensible Software (they of the self-titled soccer game Sensible Soccer, and the multiplatform top-down shooter Cannon Fodder) that would later be released on the Atari ST and Amiga in 1988. Naturally, this is that version, though purists might argue that the original 1987 is the money melon, so to speak. Wizball would appear to be a Defender clone to anyone playing it for the first time. "Appear to be." (Once again, feel free to jam to its theme tune here. Or jam to the original C64 theme, which might be better? I'll let you decide. (Hush, buzz_clik.))
Welcome to Wizball! Look at that thing! It's like the bastard child of a Critter and the Mask of Majora moon.So the game makes an unusual decision to start you off almost completely helpless. The Wizball is the astral form of a powerful wizard, but even wizards have their limitations. For the time being, all I can do is shoot and angle my rotation.By revving up in mid-air, I can adjust the speed and distance at which I bounce. It's not ideal, but it's locomotion of a sort.This is more like it. These green spheres are essentially Gradius power-ups, earned from killing most enemy waves and certain singular enemy types, like these mostly harmless DNA helix things. The spheres fill that power-up gauge along the top, and you just waggle the joystick when it stops at the one you want. (The ST joystick only had one button, and in this game that's the fire button.)After the two necessary mobility power-ups, I now have full control over the motion of Wizball. No more jumping: I can just direct him in mid-air from here on out. The first thing you need is a Catellite.After acquiring the Catellite, you simply have to take down waves of enemy until the correct type appears.I got guac'd by these avocado looking things. Serves me right for not paying attention. Enemies spawn *somewhere* in a stage after the previous wave is dealt with, and you just have to guess which side they're coming from. It can get quite tense.These things always creeped the heck out of me as a kid, but now hey're just a bunch of goofy ocular monsters. It's all in the eye of the beholder, I suppose.This shield, by the way, is also one of the most important upgrades. The rest of the options up there are all offensive, but this one has some vital defensive properties we'll be needing.So here's the crux of Wizball: these paint snakes, as I call them, leave little paint droplets whenever they get damaged. The paint needs to be collected by the Catellite (you can actually control it by holding the fire button down and then moving) with the idea being to fill the cauldron in the bottom right. The bottom left three show you how much RGB (red, blue, green) you have.Filling the cauldron in any area brings you to this bonus stage.There's not a whole lot to this one: simply destroy as many "baddies" as possible. They'll keep throwing them at you until you eventually get hit.Prepare for Wizlab.Once at Wizlab, the Wiz can leave the ball part of his symbiotic relationship and use some magic to re-color the world with the paint he's accrued. The player also has an opportunity to permanently "learn" one of the power-ups: if I should lose a life, I'll come back with whatever power-ups I've learned.His work complete, the Wiz tosses Wizball back into astral space to go hunting for more paint. This is an odd game.As you can see, part of the background has been colored in. I'm literally collecting the correct RGB values for each layer of the background (and there's three in all per stage). As the next coat will be a slightly different hue, I'll have to leave this stage to hunt for blue/green paint.That is, as soon as I escape from these whirly CD things. (Though I guess in 1987 they'd have to be laserdiscs.)Here we are in stage 2 collecting paint. It's a little dark right now because I accidentally collected a special paint drop that turns the lights out. (The special paint drops, which can be colored anything from pink to black to white tend to have negative effects, because you usually collect them accidentally while grabbing regular paint. Occasionally they'll be extra lives and stuff too.)World 2 is a little more... orange than the first stage. It's only because the game expects you'll only have green and red to work with right now. Later stages become all sorts of colors.Aw heck, I accidentally absorbed a light blue paint droplet. This summons "the fuzz", these extremely fast-moving enemies that blare out sirens.I'll leave you all here with this intensely patriotic image as I wait for the cops to disperse. Good night everyone.
Wizball keeps on going in that fashion until you've painted all nine (I want to say nine) worlds. It can get a little hectic, but once you get the rhythm down and can avoid dying long enough, it's a manageable little game. There's a surprising amount of depth and things to surprise you, neither of which are particularly common for an Arcade-style shoot 'em up made in 1987. Especially not one created for home computers.
Like The Saboteur or de Blob, there's something very visually striking about successfully performing a task and having the world fill with color all around you in response. It's probably the reason why I've always gravitated towards games that use color this way. Wizball's also weird as hell (though not quite to the extent that its sequel is) and that really counts for a lot when you're looking back at a system's library thirty years later. Makes you wonder what people will remember about the 360 in 2036. The blades, probably.
