The only wizarding Legacy I've been playing this year, and a much better use of coin than a certain transphobic, anti-Semitic dumpster fire released today.
1980 saw an observable increase in Dungeons & Dragon's influence on arcade game design, mainly among U.S. developers. Berzerk is the best-known example of this for anyone who's dabbled in the Golden Age classics, but I think Wizard of Wor qualifies too. It helped popularize the maze chase genre alongside Pac-Man, but also adds fantasy stylings and a very Gygax-ian bestiary to shoot down. With limited lives + an AI rival to finish off, each round's got lots of action and chances to whiff or vanquish the opposition.
Of course, you've also got an early co-op multiplayer mode, which lets you and a buddy gun down the monsters in tandem. It's cute how your extra lives are represented as reserve troops, lining up like pinball, er, balls waiting to get launched into the fray. There's not much complexity to the game loop as my description would imply, but it's enough to keep me invested for multiple waves of claustrophobic shootouts. Later levels add the usual harder, faster, baddies with more ways to screw yourself over, all while a speech-synthesized emcee taunts you from the peanut gallery.
While Berzerk has the more obvious emphasis on clearing or skipping through successive randomized mazes for its dungeon crawling feel, Wizard of Wor has a more compelling distillation of early DRPG battling for arcades. The tighter spaces and seconds-till-confrontation aspect makes for better pacing, and the presentation's quite a bit nicer thanks to added speech and visual flourishes. It's one of those easily overlooked, maybe less influential/notable but arguably more entertaining turn-of-the-'80s arcade romps. Nutting one-upped the competition simply by making this a co-op experience, but every little detail beyond that adds up. And the titular Wizard counts as one of the first bosses in video games, right alongside the fortress from Phoenix that same year.
Give this a go if you haven't yet already! I'd stick to the arcade original found in various Midway collections, but the PC ports look decent as well. Whichever one you go with, it's gotta be better and more replayable than Unspoken TERF Game this season.
1980 saw an observable increase in Dungeons & Dragon's influence on arcade game design, mainly among U.S. developers. Berzerk is the best-known example of this for anyone who's dabbled in the Golden Age classics, but I think Wizard of Wor qualifies too. It helped popularize the maze chase genre alongside Pac-Man, but also adds fantasy stylings and a very Gygax-ian bestiary to shoot down. With limited lives + an AI rival to finish off, each round's got lots of action and chances to whiff or vanquish the opposition.
Of course, you've also got an early co-op multiplayer mode, which lets you and a buddy gun down the monsters in tandem. It's cute how your extra lives are represented as reserve troops, lining up like pinball, er, balls waiting to get launched into the fray. There's not much complexity to the game loop as my description would imply, but it's enough to keep me invested for multiple waves of claustrophobic shootouts. Later levels add the usual harder, faster, baddies with more ways to screw yourself over, all while a speech-synthesized emcee taunts you from the peanut gallery.
While Berzerk has the more obvious emphasis on clearing or skipping through successive randomized mazes for its dungeon crawling feel, Wizard of Wor has a more compelling distillation of early DRPG battling for arcades. The tighter spaces and seconds-till-confrontation aspect makes for better pacing, and the presentation's quite a bit nicer thanks to added speech and visual flourishes. It's one of those easily overlooked, maybe less influential/notable but arguably more entertaining turn-of-the-'80s arcade romps. Nutting one-upped the competition simply by making this a co-op experience, but every little detail beyond that adds up. And the titular Wizard counts as one of the first bosses in video games, right alongside the fortress from Phoenix that same year.
Give this a go if you haven't yet already! I'd stick to the arcade original found in various Midway collections, but the PC ports look decent as well. Whichever one you go with, it's gotta be better and more replayable than Unspoken TERF Game this season.