Wizball I originally played a LONG time ago. I had the Floppy Diskette for the Amiga 500, and grew up on similar games of this genre.
The game was based around a simple scrolling environment, of which you control a simple "ball" that was a wizard who had cast himself into it via a spell.
The job was to circumnavigate a maze of poles, holes, tubes and other dangerous environments to get to the castle at the end. I could never remember if we ever got that far, but I remember it was a fun play.
Along with many other early ports from the C64 to the Commodore Amiga, it was somewhat simple in design, along with its interface and controls. You simply slipped the Floppy disk in, booted up the Amiga from workbench and started up the Executable.
The controls were used with a joystick, using the directions to control the "wiz-ball's" inertia. You could also fire small droplets of water that would destroy enemies.
The design of the game was based around simple monolithic structures, and had a somewhat strange appearance to the design of modern games.
In all honesty the game looked and seemed somewhat macabre! And had a weird feeling about it.
My dad was a big fan of the game as it needed a lot of control to steer the wizball around
the circuit.
I remember the game was often seen as a time-gap filler for the family, along with Pinball, Sensible Soccer, and Speedball. Our family would play the game for hours, racking up the best score.
The advantage of booting up from workbench meant that a scores file could be saved if you knew how to use an Amiga properly.
Some Amigas had small hard drives that could be used to store log files and savegames, while earlier games like wizball would need a special command line based shell to save high scores.
Wizball in itself was an arcade based game that brings many memories back to me, so let’s round up the basic game in 5 areas, out of 5.
Gameplay: 4 - The game was incredibly addictive and simple, and could be used by almost anyone
Graphics: 3 - Considering when the game was made, the flat graphics still had a lot of detail, and the background looked pleasing for a game of its age.
Sound: 3 - An early game, it lacked music and ambience, however its spicy sound affects were highly amusing!
Controls: 4 - Easy to learn but hard to master, the game could cater to a wide range of players.
Overall: 3 - An early Amiga Port, the game showed what the superior sound and graphics of the Amiga could achieve.
