Wizball

When you’re an evil wizard, career opportunities don’t come along all that often. Sure, you could probably apply to work in the banking sector if you could prove you were evil enough. To that end, Zark decided to hatch his most sinister and evil plot yet, steal all the colour from the world of Wizworld, making it as dull as a lecture in economics. Luckily, the good wizard Wiz and his feline friend Nifta have a plan to re-capture all that colour and make Wizworld beautiful again. Wizball is a remake of an old Commodore 64 game, it harks from a time when games were more abstract and creative. The remake is very faithful to the original which, unlike many games from the early days of home computing, doesn’t have a difficulty level set so high that it makes the game too frustrating to play.

Downloading and installing

The game is entirely free and can be downloaded from Retrospec’s website here. The game is downloaded as a .rar archive and doesn’t have an installer. If you’re not familiar with .rar archives, they behave much like .zip files. To play the game, you simply need to copy all the files from inside the archive to any convenient location on your PC. To do this, we recommend the free 7-zip tool. You can also find a set of tutorials on using 7-zip here.

Since the game doesn’t have an installer, you will also need to manually create any shortcuts you need. There’s a tutorial on how to manually add shortcuts to your Start menu here.

Playing the game

Wizball should run without any difficulties in Windows 7, 8 and 10. We encountered one issue with the game not responding to key-presses or stuttering that we traced back to the popular gaming utility Raptr. Even though Raptr doesn’t support this game, it tries to hook its recording/screen casting tool into the game and this appears to cause issues. This happened even when these tools were turned off in the Raptr preferences, so we recommend simply closing Raptr entirely before you play. If you need recording/screenshot functionality, Evolve works much better with this game.

Configuring controls

Wizball doesn’t natively support gamepads, but it’s easy to add gamepad functionality by using Xpadder. Below is our layout for the game which maps to the default keyboard controls.

Connect a second controller, find a friend to play as your feline companion and you can set up their Xpadder layout like the one shown below.

Remember, the C64 only had one fire button, so to select a weapon power up, move the control stick/d-pad rapidly left and right.

Hints and tips

When you first start playing Wizball, you will find that your ball of wiz bounces and spins almost uncontrollably around the level. Don’t panic! You’re not supposed to play the game like this. What you need to do is shoot one alien and collect a bubble. Then, select the first power up by moving the control pad/stick rapidly left and right. Suddenly you will find the game a lot easier to control. Repeat the process for full anti-grav controls. Once you complete a level you can make this power up permanent in the wizards house.

Screenshots

Click on any screenshot to enlarge it.