A fairly obscure title this time from U.S. Gold. Arcade Wizzard is a pinball game which was briefly mentioned in one or two magazines before disappearing off the face of the earth.
Zzap! 64 was on magazine to feature the game, and included some screenshots in their 1988 Christmas preview section. One thing they described about the game was that it was quite garish. This is what else they had to say…
“Also from US Gold comes a pinball simulation entitled Arcade Wizzard. The action takes place across a series of tables (pinball tables that is), each of which can only be played when a certain qualifying score has been reached.
Play starts on table 1, and if 10,000 is reached, then you can play table two, then table three and so on. In the version that we’ve seen, there are a few strange quirks, such as an old piece of music and an… er… ‘unusual’ control method. (Well, Maff thinks it’s unusual).
Some of the graphics on the preview version are rather hard on the eyes, but we’ll have to wait for the finished product until we know for sure what the game is going to be like – so keep your eyes peeled (Don’t you think that sounds rather disgusting? Well I do. In fact I’ve always thought it was bit odd, right from… (Shut up, Maff!) Oh, alright).”
So from the sounds of things, the game was not shaping up nicely at all. So did U.S. Gold feel this as well?… Looking at the table, it seems even more simplistic than pinball games on the C64 from 1984.
We don’t know just yet why this game was cancelled, though we hope to very soon. First of all we need to gain credits for the game and then we can start tracking it down some more. Recently we found some far better quality screenshots in Zzap Italia, and have added these to replace the poor quality UK printed shots.
More research needed for this one.. but it doesn’t look like we are missing too much at the moment.
