Wizball is a really easy game to play. You just have to know how to play it…

The basic aim is to fill those on screen cauldrons with coloured liquid, and to do that you have to shoot and collect droplets which appear between attack waves on levels. Clear an attack wave on level one and red droplets will appear. Blue on level two and green on level three. You can move between levels via pipes that you jump into.

Controlling the Wizball always seems to stump newcomers. Initially the Wizball just bounces and is relatively uncontrollable. What you need to do is shoot an enemy, collect the green pearls, and activate the Thrust and Anti Grav icons as soon as you can. This is simply done by shaking the joystick left and right when the appropriate icon is flashing. Once you’ve done that, the Wizball should then be fully controllable. Then you should next acquire a Catelite (icon number three) and use it to collect the coloured droplets as you shoot them. The Catelite can be controlled by holding down the fire button. It’s an ingenious control system, but utterly confusing if you don’t understand it.

This is a wonderful conversion of Sensible Software‘s classic Commodore 64 game. Hats off to Peter Johnson for coding, graphics and sound on the Atari ST. He did a great job. This Atari ST version was published by Ocean Software in 1987.

More: Wizball on Wikipedia