Wizkid: The Story of Wizball 2
| Developer: Sensible Software | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Ocean | Sound: |
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| Year: 1992 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Very bad trip 2 | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
5/10 | |
I take back everything I said about Wizball. I thought I knew what “far-out” games looked like, but this one takes the crown.
The character looks like a cross between Ike Broflovski and Kermit the Frog. The mission: to free your father (the wizard from Wizball), his cat, and eight kittens, all imprisoned by a dastardly villain.
The game unfolds in two phases. First, there’s a sort of breakout game without a paddle where you control the ball (the hero’s head), except here the goal isn’t to break bricks but to propel them at enemies. These enemies can release bubbles containing musical notes which, once collected, attach themselves to the musical staff at the top of the screen. When the staff is complete, the level pauses (rather like in Bubble Bobble with the “EXTEND” letters or Rainbow Islands with its multicoloured diamonds); then a window appears offering various bits and bobs to purchase, along with the option to recover your body. This leads to phase 2: a Dizzy-style platform-adventure game where you must use objects in the right places to collect other items or access alternative exits.
The progression between levels is bizarre, to say the least. You’ll need to use secret passages to reach the next world, whereas if you complete all the levels normally, you’ll skip two or three of them! Since you’re tasked with freeing a kitten in each zone, you’ll want to explore everything, which means solving the twisted puzzles of phase 2.
The rest of the game shares the same offbeat spirit. The silly humour and amateur style feel like a student project gone wild. One could grant it a certain originality, though. I wanted to see how far it would go and trudged through the entire adventure (with a walkthrough, without which you’d miss two-thirds of the game). By the end, I felt I’d wasted my day rather than had fun, proving that quirky ideas aren’t enough. The gameplay content is non-existent. For a commercial game that took two years to develop, it feels a bit like a rip-off.
To make the most of my afternoon spent headbutting bricks, I took some screenshots which you can view here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, tra, la, la, tee, hee!
The game takes forever to load. If you see a black screen, keep waiting.
I think I recognised sound effects from Battle Chess and Little Computer People.
Looking for a modern successor? Challenge accepted…
Undertale (2015), There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension (2020), Balan Wonderworld (2021), WarioWare: Get It Together! (2021).
“When everyone is exceptional, no one will be!”
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