Wizard of Wor has got to be one of the best arcade ports on the 2600. Joe Hellesen and Joe Wagner have created a 4 kilobyte masterpiece. With smooth game play responsive controls and coop game play Wizard of Wor is a hard game to dislike. I've gotta be honest... I like this game, a LOT. It falls easily in my top 5 games for the system. And weirdly enough I can't really find any negatives with this game... Sure it doesn't have the Wizard of Wor taunting you from offscreen like in the arcade but the 2600 wasn't capable of voice synthesis on such a scale, even today.

Graphically the game is rather plain. all the sprites are solid colors and the walls of the maze are solid lines. There is a hefty amount of sprite flickering at the beginning of each round because of the hefty amount of enemies being displayed Oops! wait I found a negative! The player one sprite is completely flesh colored including his unfortunately placed gun. Upon seeing this game for the first time running around blasting monsters with your crotch cannon, I mistook this for a pornographic game, but later changed my mind after seeing just how high quality this game actually was.

Gameplay is where this game truely shines. You run aroud in the Wizard's maze blasting away all of his "Babies" or 'Worlings' with your crotch cannon. You start out shooting the blue Burwors. After finishing off the Burwors you move on to blasting all the Orange Garwors and red Thorwors who have a nasty trick up their sleeves... They can go invisible for a short time, but by using the excellent map at the bottom of the sreen you'll make short work of them. Then there is the Worluck, or as I call it "That damn bird totem pole!!!". The thing is fast... almost too fast and if it escapes out the side of the maze Pac-Man style you Immediately face the Wizard and can kiss your lives goodbye. The Wizard moves about as fast as the Worluck and shoots every which way while teleporting randomly, only luck will save you from this bastard. Once you clear a maze the layout changes and the difficulty ramps up, the longer you take to blast all the Worlings the faster they get, sometimes getting comically fast.

The sound capabilities of the 2600 are nothing special, the same goes for Wizard of Wor. Its your standard affair of bleeps and bloops with a rather neat "whooshing" sound in the background that speeds up with the game, It somewhat resembles the breathing of a giant dangerous monster lurking in the shadows.

Challenge. This game will break you over it's knee. The challenge is fair enough, I never felt like any of my deaths were due to faulty programming. Though It would be nice if you could fire more than one bullet at a time, but due to the limitations of the hardware I get the feeling they couldnt have done that without stuffing more RAM into the cartridge, thereby raising the price.

If you don't own this game you need to go out right now and buy it, I would classify this game as a system seller, I would buy a 2600 just to play this... What are you waiting for.. go on get out of here go buy it... or go on Ebay, it's a cheap enough game. In fact, go buy all the games by CBS their worth it.