Seibu Kaihatsu 1985
Seibu Kaihatsu 1985
Do you believe in magic? Well, after playing a round or two of this, you'll definitely wish that you didn't. In this cheesy little tale of sorcery, you play some little magician guy who vaguely resembles the black mage from Final Fantasy 1 (apart from the red cloak) who must walk around and zap all the baddies, which don't look like much more than walking clothing with eyes for the most part.The graphics in this game are at best mediocre, and when compared to some of it's contemporaries, such as Sega System16 and Atari System 1 games, the graphics to this look dated even in 1985. I think that with something like this, you could hack it to run on Scramble hardware and couldn't get it to look much worse than it does.
At your disposal are eight different magic spells, which in practice turn out only to be an easy way to get killed, as enemies have a tendency to shoot fireballs at you when you try to change to a different spell. If you can manage to pull one of these off, however, some can be useful, but most are just extraneous. The "spell" system would probably have been best left out. One slighty amusing bit is when your wizard casts a spell he doesn't have, and flowers pop out of his head.
There isn't much variety to the enemies, and even though the graphics change once in a while, the enemies don't, and you get the sense that you're basically doing the same thing over and over, ad nauseam. Most of the game involves jumping up and down between two levels of the screen in a way that falls somewhere in between the way it was done in SonSon and Shinobi. Occasionally you can also jump on top of some of the scenery (such as the trees in the first level) but this is not very consistient. Also, to make gameplay even more frustrating, occasionally the creatures shown in the screen shot, outlined in green, come out, and when they do, you die instantly, and often when these appear, you die immediately on your next life also.
The controls are simple, with a joystick to control movement in all directions and two buttons (a "fire" and "change spell" button) and do not take any sigificant amount of time to figure out. What does take some getting used to is trying to make short jumps, which are executed with a quick tap of up on the stick. There are no The sounds in Wiz are about what you'd expect from a game of this era, adequate but nothing spectacular, The music is about the same calibre, but tends to be particularly annoying after a while. All in all, Wiz is mediocre at best, and at it's worst annoying and flawed. All this combined makes Wiz a game that'sdefinitely a miss.
Rating (1-10 scale):
Gameplay: 3
Graphics: 2
Sound: 4
Controls:6
Overall: 3.75/10