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Demarvelous Ironically enough, characters that have the word "Wonder" in their name are usually somewhat less than wonderful. Think of Wonder Woman, and you don’t think of a kick ass superhero; you think of an obscure butch lesbian icon. The Boy Wonder, Batman’s sidekick Robin, well, the less said about him the better. Even Champion the Wonder Horse has his obvious limitations, although he was better with knots than anyone who was never a Boy Scout. Over history, "Wonders" seem to be relegated to sidekicks or offshoots, and poor ones at best.
There is one Wonder who should have kicked the trend many moons ago, but alas, he was borne to the wrong 8-bit platform. Had he been a Nintendo prodigy of the likes of Mario or Link, we would more than likely be seeing shoehorned appearances of him today, earning his crack pipe money from guest appearances in the latest incarnation of the Smash series. Sadly, Wonderboy now treads the murky waters of gaming history. After a somewhat dodgy debut, followed by a remarkably different and far superior sequel, he keeps his head held high with his final Master System appearance being one of the absolute highlights of its age. Wonderboy III: The Dragons Trap was nothing short of a gaming masterpiece. In fact, it was the game that made me spend my hard earned birthday money on a Master System instead of saving for the heavily touted and newly released Megadrive. Not the best move in retrospect, but at the time, the Master System won hands down for me. Strangely enough, I never actually owned a copy of WBIII, due to the fact that there were a few of us in my town who had Master Systems, and there was an unwritten rule that no-one should own any of the same games as their friends did. At £30 a game, and no such thing as a trade-in, we made sure that we maximised our gaming opportunities between ourselves. We were a canny lot at the age of eleven, let me tell you! The game starts off with you as Wonderboy, charging through a castle, swishing your sword all the way. If memory serves correctly, this is the same castle in which Wonderboy II ended in – now there’s cinematic continuity for you! At the end of the castle section, the screen fades to black, and there’s a fucking huge dragon waiting for you. Luckily enough, he’s no match for you, and he’s soon defeated... but what’s going on? I’ve been cursed! Turned into a fire spitting lizard! I didn’t see that one coming!
After you escape from the castle in your entirely new form, you find yourself in a town - a freely explorable town no less. "Hang on", you think to yourself, then giggle childishly, having unexpectedly thought of the Master System’s built in game (remember them?). This is an action platform game! Surely you can’t just do what you want? Wonderboy III didn’t simply feature an obvious level structure - it offered a freeform world instead. You were actively encouraged you to explore your surroundings, were given tantalising glimpses of places that you had no idea how to get to, with RPG-esque elements becoming apparent. You could buy better weapons and armour from the shops if you could afford them, which also required the effort of stretching all the way over to the console to hit the pause button to equip them. As you explored the environment, and conquered all before you (with accidental wanderings into places where you quickly learned you shouldn’t go!), you were morphed into different characters, each with their own unique strengths, weaknesses and abilities. MouseMan was tiny, with a miniscule reach with his sword, but he could attach himself to special blocks which allowed him to climb walls and fight upside down! PiranhaMan could swim to all sorts of places, and LionMan had strength, and a mighty sweep of his sword. HawkMan was the final morph, letting you have almost free access to the whole world with the ability to fly. Between them all, you could go anywhere, to all sorts of places you never expected. The feeling of freedom was incredible. Each character also had to face a boss at the end of each section, a dragon of various sorts, with the background fading to black each time (which I now know was a memory saving device, and not for setting the atmosphere, more’s the pity). Bosses naturally got progressively harder, although the tactics to beat them could be worked out easily enough - it was all a matter of preparation before you got to them. They still managed to be suitably ominous though, and you got that feeling of dread when you realised you were about to face one!
Even after all that, there were still plenty of secrets to be found, with cheat codes that opened the game up further than before, and secret weapon/armour combinations that made you nigh on invincible. There were even additional items that all the characters could use throughout the game that helped you out of all sorts of sticky situations. They included fireballs, tornadoes, lightning, and the elusive boomerangs which would be lost if you didn’t catch them when they came back. The graphics were very impressive for its time, beating most of Nintendo’s efforts hands down. In fact, few subsequent 8-bit games even got close. The sprites were well drawn, with lots of character portrayed in all of the different playable incarnations and enemies featured. The soundtrack was also excellent, with each section having an incredibly hummable and catchy tune, an absolute essential if it’s going to be heard over and over as sections are revisited. This is the one game which should have defined the Master System as the superior console to the NES early on, but it was not to be. Thanks to Sega’s reliance on poor arcade conversions for the Master System and the arrival of the Megadrive to try and quash the Nintendo threat, the Master System was given an early grave, and with it went Wonderboy III. Wonderboy did manage to make an appearance on the Megadrive, but that was the last we ever saw of him. I suppose that Wonderboy was hardly the most enigmatic character ever created, but damn, this game was good. July 2006
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