Producer: Wizard Developments
Retail Price: £9.95

William is a very strange looking character indeed. The bendy legs and arms with a short body but very long neck and a boggle-eyed, reptilian head would definitely make him stand out in a crowd. Except that William lives in a world where such abnormalities seem to be the norm. Pink clouds hang in a blue sky above pink and yellow trees that are dotted between craters. The whole place is riddled with cave networks ripe for exploration by William.

Hence the plot for the game. William has to wander around the cave systems trying to piece together ten clues in an attempt to solve a puzzle. William can climb, jump duck and walk to achieve this. Scattered around the caves are objects which when used properly help him to achieve his goal. Keys open up hitherto inaccessible sections, or even allow William to return to places explored earlier. Certain objects need to be carried in order to access game features such as having to find and carry a disk before you can save a game. An inventory of objects is available by pressing I. When William uses an object, it appears in his hand automatically.

Strange looking snakes, flying toad-like creatures and mysterious blobs also hinder William's progress. Touching any of these results in the end of the game. William Wobbler provides you with only one life. William also suffers from aquaphobia, if he enters water he sinks never to reappear! A useful item is some kind of ladder that allows William to reach higher levels. He's rather a large chap and can't jump that far.

William himself is made up of several sprites so his head can wobble up and down on his long neck whenever he walks or jumps. Other creatures are made up of single colour sprites. The background uses limited perspective to add depth to the view and is drawn using hatch-worked and block colours.

Very little in the way of a proper scenario is provided because Wizard have made this a competition game. The first person to collect all the clues and subsequently solve the puzzle will win a mystery prize said by Wizard development to be worth £1,000. The Commodore version of the game has been around since about October last year but according to Wizard, nobody has solved it to date.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Z/X left/right; K/M up/down or duck; ENTER to jump or pick
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: straight forward and responsive
Use of colour: lively enough but too many attribute problems
Graphics: good, inventive sprites
Sound: poor

I think someone's tried to copy Tir Na Nog and made a complete hash of it. William Wobbler is a pretty boring fellow, slow and obviously a mute as I didn't catch much sound coming out of the speaker. It's nice and colourful but this seems to have caused a lot of attribute problems. The total lack of instructions makes starting off very hard, so I'm afraid Wizard are going to have to do a little better than this to book a space in my games playing sessions.

Wizard certainly seem to have put a lot of effort into the packaging of this one. The first impression of the game is reasonable, with a very nice animated Bill (of wobbling fame). Unfortunately, the bad points of the game seem to make more of an impression as you progress. The lack of sound takes an element away: I think a continuous tune would have made it more fun to play, and the single lift makes it frustrating. You can wander for hours, and unless you save the game, can be forced to re-start again just for coming into contact with another life-form. Colour is used profoundly, but this makes for an abundance of clashes. An admirable first effort from Wizard, marred by the bad points which, although few, spoil what could have been a good game.

William Wobbler is a different kind of arcade adventure which we Spectrum owners have never experienced before, and it's not bad. The graphics are very colourful and as a result the screen is full of attribute problems but other than that the graphics are reasonable. The name itself is very playable and, if you like the approach, is reasonably addictive. If you like arcade adventures but nothing too tough then this one will probably suit you but I think that the asking price is a bit much. The problems are very devious but with some brain power it doesn't take long to get involved. Overall, quite a good game with the emphasis on arcade rather than adventure.

Wizard Computer Games
£7.95

Would I like a Willy Wobbler, Ed asked. Tell me, do I look that sort of a girl? Then he handed me the cassette and all became obvious. William Wobbler is the oversized sprite hero that bears Tony Crowther's monicker on the cover, but cites two others inside - trying to escape the blame somebody?

Well no, to be fair, William Wobbler, a sort of scrotty looking E.T. type with an irritating habit of nodding his head up and down, ain't that bad. It's just that it looks like what it is - a conversion that hasn't translated too well.

For a start there are awful attribute problems and what may have been a rather nice landscape is less enticing that watching Burnley on a wet Saturday. It's also the very devil to pick things up calling for ludicrously accurate positioning considering the size of your Willy. If you miss you bounce around because fire is also used for jump. Reactions seemed slow, especially when ducking to avoid the low flying monkeys!

In its favour though it does look different to the average arcade adventure. There are a few nice touches, such as the necessity to find a disk and take it to a terminal before you can Save the game. And if you get bored, pressing Break transports you to a minimal shoot 'em up diversion. But while arc-ad addicts may persist in the quest, I just got p*ssed off.

Publisher: Wizard
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K
Joystick: Kempston
Programmer: Tony Crowther (converted from C64)

Tony Crowther is one of those Liverpool programmers, like Eugene Evans and Matthew Smith, who they tried to make stars of in the days when people still imagined there were millions to be made out of writing games.

Alas, the dream is gone, but Tony is still with us, and his latest, William Wobbler, is a nostalgic reminder of the flickering days of attribute clash which so enchanted us when he used to perform his party tricks for Bug-Byte.

As everybody knows, these days you have to pay a tenner for nostalgia.

William Wobbler is an arcade-adventure in which the hero, a rubber-necked lizard, has to pick up objects, like eggs and bits of a teleport, in order to gain ten clues. Those clues open doors which allow you to solve the puzzle. Oh wow, arn't 'cha hooked already?

I wasn't. I was sitting next to Clare Edgeley all day. She was playing Three Weeks in Paradise and I reckon somebody fixed the draw. William Wobbler is a pain in the elastic neck.

You want to know about the graphics? The wobbling saurian is a very large figure who bounds or waddles across the screen in search of his objects. Sometimes the game is a straight visual adventure, and at others William has to pull in his neck and duck as flying frogs and swarms of bees pass overhead. If you've ever seen a flying frog, you won't need to buy William Wobbler to remind you about it. If you haven't, don't bother.

The objects all have names which get printed up on the screen when you find them, so you know what they are. Of course, the superb state-of-the-art flicker system leaves you in no doubt about the identity of these objects. The programmers - Mal Gillott and Steve Evans - who adapted Crowther's original Commode 64 game - have done an even better job on the Spectrum, according to Wizard, than the original. The mind boggles.

There is a certain amount of fun to be had from sussing out the various uses for the objects. Not that you have to use them as such - if you have the right item you progress on to the next stage, and that's about it. Trigger-skill is involved in both ducking the nasties and aligning yourself up with the object you want to pick up. When the hero is so large there's a lot of room for error, and the result is not realistic.

William Wobbler comes blessed with one of the grottiest colour ad campaigns we've seen for some time, with a really wet verse about 'caverns dark and dire' and fulfilling 'your heart's desire'.

What it all boils down to is an extremely old-fashioned looking game with a very weak theme - just straightforward keys and monsters, caverns and trapdoors - sorry, teleports - which appear to make no collective sense whatsoever.

The puzzles have some wit and ingenuity, and Crowther is obviously capable of designing a good game, but William Wobbler is most unexciting.

The real insult is charging £10 for the experience. That's the upper end of arcade game prices, and this production doesn't merit it.