Lizard Wizard (Arcade)

With a name as snappy as Lizard Wizard and an arcade marquee that delightfully indulges in fantasy tropes, I’m a little surprised I had never heard of this arcade title before I went looking for some lesser known arcade games to play. Even if you temper your expectations appropriately for a game released in 1985 though, it quickly becomes clear this doesn’t hold a candle graphically or conceptually to contemporaries like Paperboy or Gauntlet, and with Super Mario Bros.’s explosive release on the NES around the same time, Lizard Wizard stood little chance to make a splash… and that’s before we even look at the issues it has.

Perhaps the first disappointment in Lizard Wizard is the utter lack of something that qualifies as a proper wizard. Sure, the character you play as has a blue hat that could pass for your stereotypical cone-shaped wizard cap, but he looks more like some space explorer pulled from sci-fi due to the presence of a jetpack that he uses to get around. Lacking a robe as well, this game’s hero might be meant to be extending a wand which he fires his projectiles from, but it too looks more like something ripped from science fiction, the weapon a long yellow line extending from his shoulder and firing more like a gun than a magic rod. In fact, this poor excuse for a Lizard Wizard is better off compared to someone like the space-faring astronaut from the ZX Spectrum game Jetpac rather than a magic user. It definitely doesn’t help that the brief plot synopsis that appears before you play mentions the game taking place on Planet Zyfus, the player needing to rescue the citizens from volcanic explosions, some “lizards” that are really just dragons, and eventually even spiders that go unmentioned in the story blurb.

The gameplay involving this supposed magician is about zipping around the air and firing repeatedly like in Jetpac as well, but it has a far worse game feel and sense of control unfortunately. What I still hesitate to call the wizard has rather rigid flight controls, the jetpack propelling you upwards depending on how much gas you give it. You can’t speed up your descent so you’re forced to rely on some strong gravity to pull you down as you will often overshoot your targets since the jetpack is too touchy for precise flight, but even as you begin to acclimate to the fact you’ll surge upward and plummet downward, your attempts to accommodate it will be foiled by your opposition. The dragons have a tendency to fly straight towards you, and while you can maneuver to the left and right easily, these dragons can also come to a stop and send out a burst of flame that can easily serve as a trap when you’re falling down. Perhaps you surge upward with your jetpack to avoid this trap, but dragons often come in twos and you might deliver yourself to the other one, and with super speedy blue dragons zipping towards you every now and then as well, it feels like the game wants you to find yourself in these scenarios more often than it wants you to find a safe escape.

Your gun/wand is your only means of repelling enemies, and while it will instantly kill whatever it shoots, it has just as many quirks as the jetpack. It’s range is about as long as two dragons standing side by side, but the screen, despite its vertical orientation, still has plenty of horizontal room, meaning dragons can slip away and, if you did try to line up your shot well, the darker colored ones have the range advantage with their flamethrower breath and can catch you before you get your shot off. The shot is surprisingly quick in a bad way too, in that it comes out for a brief flash and there’s a bit of a short delay before you can fire the next one. Coupled with jetpack movement that never allows you to linger in one spot in the air, and if you mistime your button press, then your horizontal shot with almost no vertical height will miss its target and you won’t have time to hit it properly before you’ve either moved too far up or down.

The game gives you three lives per quarter you put in the machine but it definitely aims to drain your pocket change with its restrictive design. Even if you start to adjust to the quirkiness found in the controls, there are other factors baked into the design to lead to easy losses such as the level designs. Lizard Wizard’s stages have three distinct level concepts, all of them getting repeated the deeper into the functionally endless experience you get but only really changing around the shape of the ground and platforms you can land on between repeat visits to a game type. The first stage doesn’t lead with the civilian rescue mission the opening text promises surprisingly, the player instead given the goal of destroying the rocks bursting out of the volcano at the bottom of the screen. Dragons will appear from doors on the side to attack you as you fly around zapping molten rocks, but if you don’t hit a rock in time, it will burst into a small fire that floats in the air waiting to be shot. These are all dangerous because of the finicky flight coupled with the dragon chase, but the successfully eliminated rocks will remain gone even after a death. The dragons, unfortunately, will continuously spawn in and attack until you have eliminated all of your targets.

The second level type adds civilian rescue to the action. While the volcanoes will still spit out fireballs, you now only need to rescue all the humans to beat a level. Strangely enough, the humans burst out of the volcano as well in protective bubbles, the character picking them up provided he makes spot on contact with whatever part of the person’s body the game checks collision for. Once you have a civilian attached to your person, you must then fly down to some striped platforms that appear on the ground to successfully drop them off. Dragons can actually snatch up humans too, but it doesn’t really impact things immensely and you are likely to shoot down the kind of troublesome dragon who would be so close to a human anyway. These stages pretty much have the same issues as the level with just the volcano with the added objective making things a little rougher, but the final stage type is the one most likely to rob you of lives and quarters.

Spiders, or as the game calls them Spydors, get a level to themselves, where they start to drop down from the ceiling on long strands you can’t shoot through or fly through. There is a set amount of Spydors that will spawn in during these stages, but the way they do so is devious. They come in a surge where the time it takes to shoot down even one will allow three more to enter, and then their silk ends up forming walls that you can’t easily get around as they descend incredibly quickly towards the ground. If a single Spydor touches the dirt, that’s a life lost, and the game enjoys putting two problem Spydors on different sides of the screen so that an attempt to eliminate one will allow the next one to easily reach the crater’s floor. Even as the numbers begin to thin, when you respawn with a new life, the game will try to make this tactic happen even if it’s only got three or so Spydors left to work with. To top this all off, the Spydors are small and only take small breaks in movements for unpredictable amounts of time, so lining up your jetpack flight properly to hit them with your thin beam doesn’t always work properly, and you can be fiddling with trying to actually peg one with your shot as it continues to drop down to the ground with ease. Like most things in Lizard Wizard, beating the level feels mostly like a result of dogged persistence and an acceptance that you’ll need to feed some more quarters in the machine to even have a chance of continuing, but at least the Spydor levels are the only point in the game that feels outright malicious rather than bad as a result of poorly conceived design ideas, and the game does whip out the Spydor levels least of its three stage types as well.

THE VERDICT: While learning the limitations of your movement and attack method in Lizard Wizard can lead to stretches of gameplay that aren’t the worst, most of your time with this arcade title will be feeling the unfortunate impact of its stiff controls and their incongruity with enemy design. Your weapon’s shots are too thin and slow to fire while the jetpack movement is routinely punished by enemies who can exploit its flaws too easily, the Spydor levels the worst because the enemies are actively behaving in a way you aren’t built to handle. Staving off dragons and saving civilians is rather bland when it’s not actively frustrating, so even when you aren’t being irritated by how ill-fitting the protagonist is for the action, you aren’t going to squeeze much enjoyment out of this forgotten game by Techstar.

And so, I give Lizard Wizard from the arcade…

A TERRIBLE rating. Despite the problems with the movement and the laser, there are briefly palatable moments in the volcanic stages where you can actually devote yourself to the mission without feeling like you’re doomed to fail. Usually this means playing in a rather unexciting way like lingering to a side and waiting for fireballs to float in place as you shoot down dragons, but the fact you can find a way to sidestep some of the game’s big problems without too much investment helps to declaw some of its issues. Shooting things is never satisfying because your weapon is a bad fit for the action demanded of it though, and when you get to the Spydor stages the gloves come off and the game feels deliberately cruel in setting up situations you have little hope of escaping without losing lives and quarters. Giving a bit more power to your weapon would go a long way even if the rigid flight was still retained, but controlling more like the oddly similar Jetpac would do a lot for clearing away some of its issues and actually could necessitate making the game a bit more dangerous to compensate. As it is though, Lizard Wizard’s protagonist doesn’t feel like he’s meant to be the hero of this adventure, the enemy designs feeling like they’re meant to challenge someone more capable than this jetpack-wearing wizard and his dinky little beam blast.

Lizard Wizard disappoints in more ways than just failing to capture its title and marquee art in its gameplay.  You can go for a high score, but since it is maintained between quarters its more a test of how much cash you’re willing to spend than your skill, and you can rope in a second player for co-op to alleviate some of the tedium, but struggling with controls together isn’t your best choice for a way to spend time together with a friend. In addition, if one player dies, they need to wait for the other to die or beat the level to join back in. Lizard Wizard definitely has the feel of a game you put a quarter in to see what the game is about, quickly get turned off by its myriad issues, and move along, forgetting you even touched it. Funnily enough, that actually works in the game’s favor since then you can’t warn others to stay away from this game that hides terrible gameplay behind a silly title.