It was the game that zapped away a large portion of my childhood fighting toads, snails, bees and other dastardly creatures, while waiting for my parents at the arcade. This game became a compulsive addiction for my sister and me and we competed on two player mode (one at a time, unfortunately) to see who could get furthest have the respect, and who shall suffer the torment of the other for another week. The graphics are obviously not the greatest but this was the first game I had played with ‘cutesy’ graphics that appealed to us as I was young and she was girl.
The game-play was tremendously hard it was a difficult game to progress. May times this was due to the lack of weaponry that would be required to defeat one particular level. This lack of weaponry inevitably due to some foolish over-jumping or careering around in a over-confident frenzy. The fact that you simply cannot begin to hope to defeat this game without running around in a super-fast frenzy is what makes this game so tremendously fiendish and yet so addictive to boot. The frenetic fast pace of the action, while inevitably leading to certain cataclysmic reactions, also sough to make your heart race as your tongue comes out in concentration as Wonderboy goes faster and becomes more reckless taking ever greater risks for a banana.
The
game does suffer from not being able to continue from where you shuffled off the mortal, giant-insect ridden, prehistoric coil. This can boil over to frustration, especially when the number of attempts spent at trying to get past one particularly nasty gorilla moves into double figures, and you have to start all the way back at the beginning – again. This was really a feature of arcade machines from the next generation and Wonderboy is left firmly in the first era of colourful platform side scrollers.
For all its frustration of often cruelly hard game play this game stills forms very fond memories of my childhood and is still a fun treat to play. It takes much practise to get the hang of the techniques required but this is time well spent. I just hope that the extra practise my sister is getting on this re-discovered beauty will not lose me my self respect for yet another week. But from looking at her computer screen and the thousands of points that seem to be climbing, this is a prehistoric dream for me.
