It isn't really hitting me yet how close to the end of the year we are. It's doubtful I'll get around to half the remaining games on my Shame pile, let alone the dozen or so new games this year that I intended to play. I guess that's the nature of the modern video game industry, where we're frequently spoiled for choice. To quote Ray Smuckles speaking German he picked up from adult movies: It is a problem I enjoy. Nevertheless, towards the end of the month in lieu of the usual Octurbo antics (an upcoming Wiki Project involves more of the PC Engine, so I'll give it its annual and probably undeserved due then), I'm considering joining a few of my GiantBombblogger contemporaries on this site in a concerted effort to alleviate my backlog, ticking off a bunch of Steam Indies at the very least. Probably won't be a daily thing, unlike May Madness/Mastery, but it wouldn't hurt to make some space for whatever I end up buying myself for my birthday at the end of this month.
Speaking of which, I've decided to postpone the purchase of a new console. Christmas seems the more likely option, given the much-anticipated releases of Just Cause 3 and Fallout 4 sitting between the end of this month and December 25th, not to mention the reduced console bundles that tend show up in the holiday season; I hear the PS4 might be getting a price drop in Europe any day now. I might just get in on Super Mario Maker while the iron's still lukewarm and save the rest of my gift card reserves for a PS4/XB1 and a few choice games to go with it.
But that's all modern-day business. Who wants to read about new video games? Here's a hot Atari ST banger from 1992:
Wizkid
Wizkid manages to betray its modus operandi as an oblique troll as early on as its cover art.
As with Kid Gloves, another game with a youthful title, Sensible Software's Wizkid meant a lot to me and my development as a video game-playing person in that it taught me that games could be utter bullshit sometimes, but in a constructive way. Unlike Kid Gloves, which taught me the importance of perseverance and memorization in games where I'd often be flying by the seat of my big boy pants, Wizkid imparted to me the importance of game design that will continue to keep people guessing.
It's a lost art in this era of online walkthroughs and the near total demise of the graphic adventure game genre after it frequently expended a player's patience with nonsense they would never think to try in a million years, but we'll still see games like Fez and this recent Destiny: Taken King reboot engendering discussions in hushed tones about the myriad secrets folk are still uncovering. I've seen a lot of reviews of Undertale that basically boil down to "I don't want to say too much about anything that happens because it might spoil the surprise, but you should probably play this". This is generally how I felt about Wizkid at the time, though I was not party to any big community conversation about its bizarre non-sequitur gameplay: I had to figure that shit out from trial and error.
Wizkid is the sequel to Wizball, which pretty much pushed it to the top of my wishlist before learning anything else about it. It's entirely dissimilar, however, beyond the fact that you spend most of the game controlling a floating green head through a series of stages with peculiar backdrops. Rather than being a dual-directional horizontal shoot 'em up in the style of Defender, Wizkid is a little more like an inverse Breakout: there is no paddle, you are the ball and the blocks are there to be dislodged and thrown at enemies. Eliminating every wave of enemy without exhausting all the available blocks allows you to move onto the next screen. I've fully capped the tutorial below, so it'll make more sense then. What won't make sense is the rest of the game, but I'll hopefully be able to convey the twisted genius of Wizkid in a handful of screenshots. Nothing is ever as it seems, and that's probably why it's one of my favorite games for the system.
Welcome to Wizkid: The Story of Wizball II! They cheaped out on this title screen, I tell you what. Like I don't see gradient fills on every other one of these I do.The first time you play involves a mandatory tutorial section. It actually goes by really fast if you know what you're doing, but I guess the game's odd enough that it felt this was all necessary. So here are the rules: Float into blocks to dislodge them and send them flying. Physics are important here: depending on the angle of your approach and your momentum upon point of impact, they'll fly in different directions.With the right amount of finesse, you can hit multiple enemies with a single block collision. This is the key to earning paint bubbles (not unlike those found in Wizball) that add to that row of colorful notes up there.There are also two power-ups: the clown nose allows you to juggle blocks if you stay underneath them. You have better control here so there's less concern about using up every block on the screen.The false teeth allow you to grab blocks and throw/drop them where you wish. They offer even more control than the nose, but will wear off after a while.And in order to move from one world to the next, you have to grab these black kittens when they show up. The kittens are the children of the cat/catellite of Wizball, Nifta. The goal of the game is to save them all. "All" being the operative word.Welcome to the completely normal world map of Wizkid. Its pun game is not on point, but then I'm one to talk.It's a busy screen, but the only relevant details are that the yin-yangs are blocks and the butterflies are enemies. The game does some fun stuff with its level design: there are never any obstacles besides the blocks you can dislodge. Everything below the roof can be floated through. (Remember that front door for later, though.)I feel Wizkid got this close to establishing "Deez Nuts" months before Dr Dre's The Chronic did.Completing all the screens of Arcade mode, as these floaty head stages are called, will eventually cause the kitten to appear. However, grabbing this particular kitten will warp you ahead to level 4. This is where the game likes to fuck with you the most: in order to beat the game, you need to progress through every level in the right order by rescuing the "correct" kitten on each stage. All that skipping ahead does is get you an early bad ending.Instead, the goal here is to complete the song at the top of the screen by scoring combos and collecting the paint bubbles that appear. Not only does this generate a lot of cash (the manual refers to it as a golden shower, because of course it does), but it also unlocks...The shop and Wizkid's body. These items all have a purpose - some not quite as useful as others - and there's the option to either leave as a head and continue earning cash playing the Arcade mode, or to leave attached to your body for the game's slightly more inexplicable Adventure mode. (By the way, the stars are health. You start with five and lose them when you bump into enemies. They're fairly cheap here, but will fluctuate in price as the game goes on. You'll also have the chance to buy extra lives later on, which the game chooses to represent as random flags from across the world. I believe right now my extra lives are the flags of Iraq and Australia.)Adventure mode turns the game into a side-scrolling "Dizzy" style game, in which you roam around the landscape using items you've bought or found. The game tells you whenever you pass an area you can interact with by displaying a "clue!" prompt at the top right. Otherwise, that top right area contains the items you've acquired.Turning the crank tosses out a few more paint bubbles from the well. It's possible to complete another song doing this, which means even more cash.Though eventually you'll cause a bucket to appear. Jumping into this bucket leads to......These underground bathrooms.The women's bathrooms have this can of Pepsi you can steal (and a working mirror!). Sitting on any of these lavatories causes the volcano to go off. You might be starting to understand why a ten year old version of me was into this game.The men's bathroom has this sweet bubblegum vending machine.One token later and off we go! (Really, don't think too hard about any of this.)That leads to a maze that I can't be bothered figuring out right now, so instead we'll return to the surface and ring the bell. It summons the front door of that house we saw, with a rowdy dog behind it. We bought ourselves a solution to this problem, however: dogs love newspapers.See? Now he has something to read on the crapper. (I swear the game lightens up on the toilet stuff after a while.)The doorway leads to this mysterious room. By standing on this spot, you can reveal a weight and the way out. We can place a 1kg weight we found earlier here to grab the 9kg weight below.That naturally combines into a 10kg weight. But there's more: by heading to the top right, you can bash through the ceiling and reveal a button that summons...The sombrero donkey! And with the carrot-and-stick combo we purchased...We can ride the donkey through the abyss!To the seaside! Where we summon the REAL kitten of this stage by eating some oxygen-rich bubblegum (it requires another token, of course).And that's the totally rational way to defeat the first stage of the game. Welcome to Wizkid! Again! (Did I mention in the pre-amble that the game was complete bullshit? I'm sure I did.)All right, so it's completely insane that anyone would figure all of that out on their own, but the game's all about surprises. By poking around each level, buying every item and testing them out (the game will tell you straight up if an item you have will work, so there's no "trying everything on everything" process to waste your time) the game will continue to find ways to throw its goofy little jokes at you. There can be anywhere between one to four or five kittens on a given stage, and the silly experimentation required to discover the correct one is half the game's charm.Future stages present problems of their own. While there'll be more abstruse puzzles to solve here in Stage 2, some later stages won't even have an Adventure section. Those stages just require passing through a series of difficult Arcade screens like this one, where the penguins sprint across the screen as soon as they appear and you have to quickly dig a place for them to go before getting hit, similar to the sand-digging areas of Super Mario Bros 2.For whatever reason, every cutesy enemy in this game explodes in gore whenever they get hit. It's gratuitously grisly. I think what continues to impress about Wizkid years later is that it pre-empted almost all the subversive meta jokes of modern Indie games.Collecting every coin in a golden shower gives you this huge "Wiztastic" bonus. For all its occasionally-frustrating trial-and-error nonsense, the game has a keen sense of fun that it endeavors to keep alive with frequent boons like this. If you happen to fail the Arcade mode too many times, it'll give you a quick crossword puzzle to complete for an even bigger cash bonus.So it's here that I'm going to have to end this edition of ST-urday. The chief puzzle for this stage has something to do with wearing the right pair of colored spectacles to change the screen's RGB values, thereby causing the matching colored shields in the background to disappear. It's been too long and I've forgotten most of what follows, though.
While I love its colorful shell and evil core to pieces, Wizkid is definitely the sort of game that wouldn't fly in this day and age. It relies too much on the moon logic and randumb humor that the Indie market is already starting to drive into the ground with over-saturation. Yet, the game has the same essence of player-fuckery that I've observed (and enjoyed) with the rivalries caused by Super Mario Maker levels and their frequently and deliberately unfair traps, trials and tribulations. Dan Ryckert (with a little help from the GB community) and Patrick Klepek especially seem to be locked into this mutual downward spiral into madness, and I couldn't be more entertained by the results. The spirit of Wizkid's interactive whimsical vexations will live on for as long as there are jerkwads in the world with enough motivation to create their own.
