Wizards and Warriors - Stage One
Here, we see the Golden Knight and his clone-stamped army of garden-utensil headed minions as they puzzle over who spilled the green paint.
His name is Kuros. The blue fellows are undoubtedly evil. I don’t know why he’s gold. He’s very much blunted grey in the game proper. This is made all the more puzzling by the fact the NES’s ridiculously limited colour palette (entirely lacking a shade of yellow) here renders his armour a shade of sickly mustard.
I digress.
This is possibly the worst game ever made for the NES. Well, probably. Okay, maybe not. Its sequel (which I may or may not deal with in due time) had Fabio on the cover art. Regardless, this is one of the most frustratingly stupid games ever created for any system, and for reasons of personal torture, I intend to expound on this in some length.
Welcome to the The Map. The Map is an archipelago of islands located in the Sea Of Black, and features several primary-coloured caves, an ice cream cone castle and an eighteen hole golf course. And two forests. You’ll see a lot of this map. I hate this map.
Lets get to know Kuros — or as I prefer to call him, Kevin — a little better. Here, we see him in a rare moment of rest. Resplendent in his bilious grey armour, Kevin’s headpiece resembles an acorn and his sword, well, a sword. Here, he’s standing in front of Wizards & Warriors idea of a door, a half-oval with a Nazi armband wrapped around it. This is a grey door. You can enter a grey door when it is open without needing a key. It just kinda blinks open and closed, and you’re supposed to make your way through it by jumping at it at the right time.
Actually, most of Wizards & Warriors can be summed up by “you’re supposed to do it by jumping at the right time”. Generally speaking, there’s nothing wrong with jumping puzzles. It’s a platform game. That’s rather the point.
Kevin, however, is retarded when it comes to jumping. Jump duration is controlled by the length of the initial press (fairly standard), and jump direction can be controlled mid-jump for some precision. Upon reaching a certain length of arc, however, Kevin lapses into “holy crap I’m falling” mode, and flails about. While he flails, your control of his movement is reduced to some pitiful percentage. This means you’ll spend the entire height of a tree in free-fall, inching ever so slowly closer to a branch to land on, but being able to move only a few millimetres over the entire span of the trunk. This is frustrating. And we haven’t even entered a tree yet.
Here, we see Kevin at the forest floor. You can stand on each of those little tree trunks, and you’ll make your way upward (and downward, and upward, and downward, and upward) over those. Kevin is stabbing a dayglo blue were bear, because it questioned the authenticity of his acorn. Mid-screen at the top is a Fucking Bee. Fucking Bees can move in any direction, and generally attack Kevin in pairs. They come in multiple colours, and multiple difficulty levels. They are infuriating inside the tree.
Kevin attempts to reach the blue door. The pink ball is some kind of mutant gumball that leaps about.
Inside the tree. The pink chest cannot be opened without the pink key, or the Boots of Force. The spiders aren’t too bad, generally speaking. The infuriating part of navigating any vertical space is Kevin’s inability to attack effectively while jumping. You have to sort of spear enemies with his sword, which he holds static as he leaps. Kevin is down to three pellets of energy by this point, so the game is regaling me with the most infuriatingly annoying “you’re dying - do something about it” music ever, four notes repeated ad nauseum until you either find meat (which restores approximately bugger all of your energy) or die (which does not).
Exiting the blue door tree, Kevin wanders straight into the pink key, held captive in a bird’s nest.
A few branches above the pink key nest, we find this jerk. Red Kevin guards the entrance to the Bee Tree, and won’t let you in without a hundred gems. If it were up to me, I’d tell him where he can stick his gems and his bee tree, but alas, distressed damsels await.
Below Red Kevin, Regular Kevin hath discovered cutlery. The Dagger of Throwing is basically a knife that acts like a boomerang, and if nothing else, makes leaping about in the presence of bees a bit less treacherous. It’s still a lottery as to whether you hit them or they hit you, but at least you have knives flinging about the screen.
To the left, across the top path, Kevin discovers Boots of Force in a pink chest (we have the pink key, remember). An unmatched pair in baby blue corduroy and navy blue texturelessness, these will come in handy to obtain the hundred gems to shut Red Kevin up. Down to one pellet of life, now. Save state ahoy.
In order to obtain more gems, we have to go into the grey door tree..
..to be killed by Fucking Bees. There are many of them. Here, two swarm around Kevin’s corpse.
The best strategy is to fall. You can’t steer, but you can freefall through the entire tree and hopefully reduce your odds of hitting any Fucking Bees. At the bottom, riches await.
Here, Kevin attempts to fart at a Fucking Bee.
Having stolen the treasure from the bottom of the grey door tree, one gets the hell out of that tree and returns to the forest canopy via the blue door tree, and its much less formidable array of pink spiders.
And we fall through the Bee Tree. The Bee Tree is armed with wasp nests and yellow bees, which - as you’ve come to expect from bees of new colours - are ridiculously annoying. In particular, the bottom of the tree has an indestructable hive alongside a near-impossible jump, with a constant stream of yellow bees crossing the space between. After some tedium, Kevin makes it through.
Kevin then defeats the boss by failing to screenshot it correctly. The boss was a huge blue skull that hurls tiny pellets of death at you. While jumping, Kevin’s shield deflects the pellets. While standing it does not. Clearly Kevin’s shield undergoes some kind of molecular transformation when vertical g-forces are applied to it. Jump at the skull, throw a knife at the skull, repeat. While attempting to screenshot the skull, bear in mind that NES video flicker will inevitably render you four blank screengrabs, and one final one of “5000″ hanging in mid-air. Be glad there’s anything at all, bar Kevin, a grey door, and a wall made of melted Toblerone.
Kevin debates whether to rescue the unnervingly pink damsel from the unnervingly purple cave.
Realising there’s five grand in it, he decides cutting a rope isn’t that hard a task. Lucinda crumples to a pile of indistinguishable pink pixels.
Thus endeth level one. I may or may not continue with this. I suspect I shall not be arsed.
