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Welcome to Wizball, reckoned by many to
be one of the finest games ever produced for any platform, which
debuted on the Commodore 64 back in 1987.
Look, Ma! No colour clash! (No
fucking colour TO clash).
Look at it for a
minute. We are constantly told, us Spectrum owners, that the C64
doesn’t have the colour limitations of the Speccy. (As an
aside - what do Commodore 64 owners call their machines in moments
of intimacy? Commie?). It can display four-thousand odd colours,
apparently. So why is it then, that the majority of this game
– and it’s not alone in this – is grey on a
black background? I know that the machine was originally conceived
as a business computer, but that’s taking the piss.
But, that’s
the point! shout the Commodore faithful. It’s all in the
gameplay. Uhuh. So, let’s see what happens when you pick
up the joystick and start to play…
Commodore 64 owners never had
the joy of trying to get one of these fuckers to
work properly.
Because, of course,
Commodore 64 owners didn’t have to rely on slightly wobbly
Kempston interfaces, there are holes right there on the case just
begging for a joystick to be manfully inserted. You’ve got
an eight-way joystick and a fire button as standard. But this
is a subtle trap, and a far from obvious one, and Wizball falls
right into it. You see, any game that is more complex than Pac
Man rapidly starts to run out of buttons to push. You’re
left with one of two equally unsavoury options – use a bizarre
combination of joystick and Keyboard, or rely on ever more elaborate
joystick combinations. Almost every Commodore 64 game ever written
relies on one (or both) of these hacks. At least Wizball, thankfully,
doesn’t require you to use your nose to fire a smart bomb.
I have two, at least,
major problems with the controls of this game. The first has nothing
to do with the joystick and the second has everything to do with
it.
Would this thing be better if
it had
omni-directional jets and an anti-gravity drive?
When you first start
the game, movement is, at best, tricky. You move by changing the
rotation of the ball and bouncing around the landscape. This takes
some getting used to, but after a while you start to realise that
it’s actually a fantastically novel control method and that
it adds a hell of a lot of skill to the basic task of moving around.
And then, just as you start to appreciate the subtleties of the
movement method, some bright spark pops up and condescendingly
says: “Oh, you do realise that your first two power-ups
allow you to move around freely without all that bouncing don’t
you?” and you never revert back to the bouncy method again
apart from for about twenty seconds at the start of a new game.
It’s as if someone realised, after perfecting the control
mechanism, that it was simply too hard and too rubbish and so
they just turned it off.
Anyway, the joystick,
then… Herein lies the second control problem. Your joystick,
with four directions and a single button has to: move and fire
(easy), activate power-ups (obviously, you waggle the joystick)
and as if that wasn’t enough, you independently control
a satellite ship (by holding down the fire button and moving your
joystick). Or you can try taping two joysticks together with some
gaffer tape and control the satellite (a ‘cat’, apparently)
Robotron style. Which would work really well apart from the fact
that you then need a third hand to hit the fire button.
The number of hands required to
adequately control Wizball.
Which leads us on
to The SID chip. I’m scared that I know what it’s
called – it’s not a piece of information that I would
willingly want to retain. But still, that’s the bastard
thing responsible.
And, right now, as
you’re reading this (if you’re a Commodore 64 owner)
you are humming the theme tune. I know you are. It’s a Pavlovian
response. Mention those three letters to a Commodore 64 owner
and they’ll immediately start doing it. It’s the one
feature of the Commodore 64 that, even twenty-five years on, people
are in awe of. There are websites and everything. Special websites.
See this? It’s the reason
why your musical tastes have stuck
at ‘prepubescent’…
But, by all that is
holy, the sound in this game is terrible. There’s some kind
of cheesy soft rock guitar thing that plays over the title screen
and a succession of beeps and groans in the game itself. Nice
laser sound, but that’s not really enough, is it? I expect
Spectrum music to be awful – that’s why I don’t
listen to it – but this is a hundred times worse. It’s
aural torture masquerading as technical genius.
Just because you can emulate this
sound, it doesn’t mean that you should.
This game is so in
love with the machine it was designed for, so in awe of the graphical
and sonic superiority of the Commodore 64 that it simply does
what is expected of it and nothing else. The system gives you
built-in sprite capabilities, so that’s what it uses. The
system gives you a joystick with a single button, so that’s
what it uses. The system gives you a synth that is just good enough
to avoid turning the volume down, so that’s what it uses.
Even a blind test among a lost tribe of Amazonian pygmies who
still worshipped the great fish that brought the beads would recognise
this as a Commodore 64 game at a glance.
There is nothing here
that can’t be seen elsewhere. It’s highly polished,
yes, but where is the emotion, where is the willingness to fuck
with the form, where is the spark of genius that turns a good
idea into a great game? Where’s the SOUL?
Right here. That’s where…
AHCHAY, April
2004.
RODENT CASH RATING -
A SUCK OF JACK TRAMIEL'S COCK
"If only I wasn't a floating review-head."
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